“Santa Claus never died for anybody,” reads a photo of a mock church sign making the rounds on Facebook this Christmas.
This photo along with a carton of a kid sitting on the lap of a Santa Claus saying, “Where are you in the Bible,” may be evidence that many – most specifically African-Americans – are uncomfortable with Santa Claus and the commercialization of Christmas.
However, Obery Hendricks, visiting scholar at the Institute for Research in African American Studies and Department of Religion at Columbia University, wonders if African-Americans have any kind of critique of the commercialization of Christmas.
“Absolutely, we should be concerned,” he comments via phone. “There are problems that have to do with the social pressure African Americans – particularly as children – feel to fit in with the rest of society. Children feel left out if they do not get an ‘x’ number of gifts on Christmas.”
He believes Americans, in general, are swept along by the tide of materialism with regard to Christmas in much of the same way we are swept away with materialism of everything else.
According to Adam Clark, an assistant professor of Systematic Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, everyone is concerned about the over commercialization of Christmas. African Americans are particularly concerned because of the economical disadvantage of the community.
“There is definitely a concern,” he said via phone. “Most Christian pastors, I would say, try to separate the message of Christ from what’s happening in the general culture. There is something distinctively happening in black churches.”
Jesus’ life began dire, Hendricks highlights. His birth was humbling and abject. Jesus was born in a manger, the same place where animals ate and defecated. What has happened is that the birth of Christ has been decontextualized.
Folks forget that his parents had to uproot; that King Herod wanted to kill Jesus, that priests of the east were looking for the “King of the Jews;” their King, when Rome had already declared Herod with that title.
“All of this is very political,” Hendricks said. “If we taught a small piece of that, we could counteract some of this materialism.”
Christmas today has a relative lack of spirituality in Christmas. Few people, Hendricks said, know what Christmas represents. The infancy stories and birth narratives in both Matthew and Luke – while very different – show the expectation of Jesus doing some radical things in society.
“Christianity is missing the real radicalism of Christmas,” he said. “This whole notion of ‘silent night, holy night, all is come, all is bright’ is a miss depiction.”
For early Christians the focus was not the birth of Jesus, but Jesus’ death, Clark adds. The change came when the Christian community attempted to conform to Roman culture.
“A lot of what you see is assimilation to Roman culture – as well as other European pre-Christian traditions such as winter solstice. Now the Christian message has become a message of upward mobility. The advent season used to be observed by practices of self-denial, waiting for Jesus, sacrifice; now we go from black Friday to cyber Monday. We do not mark it by advent anymore. We do not mark it by rituals of fasting like Christians did years before.”
America is only nominally Christian, said Clark. He considers the real religion in America to be consumerism and adds that Jesus is even marginalized in his own story.
“Ask most people what is the image of Christmas, they would say Santa Claus and snow men. Jesus is perfunctory.”
Dianne Diakite, associate professor of Religion & African American Studies at Emory University believes there has been an increase in commercialization.
“Everyone knows the true meaning of Christmas. Everyone knows what it is and everyone knows we are not doing it,” she said, adding that it is shocking and appalling that African Americans have not realized the increase.
She refers to an incident maybe three years ago as a clear indicator of the problem.
“There was some popular doll – I think it was a doll – on the market which everyone wanted that year. People lined up – I think at a WalMart in New York – to have the first chance at purchasing the doll before supplies were depleted.”
She remembers as the doors were opened on this day – maybe a Black Friday the night after Thanksgiving that year a man working there, of Ethiopian or Somalian identity, was stampeded and crushed to death.
“It epitomized the grotesque, unethical and capitalistic underpinnings of the Christmas season in the 21st century. It was appalling to me and I believe a lot of those people among the crowd of consumers responsible for that young man’s death were black people given what I remember about the case as it was reported and covered on the news back then.”
Devastated by the situation, she personally decided to not give any gifts that Christmas.
Consumerism is an addiction, or that is at least how Diakite sees it, paralleling the issue of African-American consumerism to the exchange of human bodies for manufactured items during the transatlantic slave trade.
She asks how we have become so commodity driven especially since our ancestors’ bodies were bought and sold on the market as commodities for so many centuries.
“The pressures of Christmas seduce people into making purchases they do not want or need. Even beyond the Christmas season, too many African Americans fall prey to a culture of ‘therapeutic’ or ‘escapist’ shopping—they feel bad about themselves, and they have to go buy stuff.”
There needs to be a critique of consumer culture. And for Clark, it is important to differentiate between the kind of consumerism that benefits the economic health of our country and obsessive, hyper-consumerism.
“All forms of gift giving are not necessarily dangerous. What is happening now is the triumphalism over the Christmas story by consumerism. The story has been hijacked,” he said. “If you look at the history of Christmas, the early Christian community did not celebrate Christmas.
Hendricks calls the church to task. He believes the fight starts with the church materialism in general.
“It is an education in re-orientation about the meaning of Christmas. It has to be like a movement and crusade with long-term perspective to raise the consciousness in the church. And at the same time, fight against the consumer mentality.”
However, Hendricks is not completely confident in this reality. He believes the vehicles to make such a transformation possible are not available. He states that most Christians become Christians because they are born into it. Nothing in particular has to be done. And those that join churches do so either for entertainment or to feel better; not to change the world.
“So, I do not see the church as a solution to the problem. Christianity is too invested in the baby Jesus, away in the manger, silent night, holy night, all is come, all is bright. They are really invested in that understanding of Jesus. So it is much easier for them. They are not looking to change that.”
Follow Mashaun D. Simon on Twitter at @memadosi