Christmas Hijacked

Has Christmas been hijacked by Santa Claus and his snow cap? And also by plastic? This is a concern raised by a friend who is also a Catholic priest. Watching the Christmas celebrations around me in the last few days in various places – religious as well as secular – I know my friend’s concern is genuine.

Christmas has been “Caesarianized,” he says. The spiritual preparation during the Advent season has given way to Santa Claus and his jingle bells. To discount sales in shopping malls. What’s worse, various Christian organisations send out carol teams on floridly decorated open vehicles equipped with high decibel loudspeakers that shatter all the peace while blaring out carols on ‘Peace to people with goodwill.’

It is a Christmas without Jesus. Santa Clauses tower far above the diminutive figure of infant Jesus, if the latter is there at all in the carol teams and other celebrations. Look at any commercial brought out during the season and you will think that Christmas is all about Santa Claus and his red and white colours. And merrymaking. Light and sound. Sound and fury.

It is Christmas without the Christ!

Without love, hope, and redemption.

Just below my friend’s WhatsApp message of concern was the link to a hate speech by a Hindu ascetic. I mean, the man looked like an ascetic in his saffron robes which resembled Yogi Adityanath’s costume. I wanted to bring the link here, though the speech was in Malayalam, because it was an ideal example of the kind of toxicity that religion has become in India today. But the video has been removed from YouTube. Probably a lot of complaints were made by sensible people.

The speech followed the attack on the Christmas celebrations in a school in Kerala by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The speaker argues that India being a Hindu Rashtra, it doesn’t require Christmas and carols. There should only be Krishna Jayanti and Hindu festivals. Of course, people who make such arguments may be a minority population of the country, but such fringe elements are gathering more and more followers. Though I wrote recently in a WhatsApp group of some old classmates that the turn of Christians to be oppressed would come as soon as they (you know who they are) finish with the Muslims, I hadn’t thought it would start in Kerala so quickly.

Kerala has a good secular culture. The people of the state are open to any kind of diversity. They are the people who democratically elected a communist party government, first such in the world, in 1957. Their ancestors were the people who embraced Christianity and later Islam because of many valid reasons. Today, a sizeable chunk of the state’s population lives happily in other countries because of their readiness to accept new realities, cultures, traditions, etc with an open mind, though the openness may have more to do with ruthless pragmatism than intellectual depth.

My personal hope with ample reasons was that Kerala would remain untouched for a long while yet by the kind of hate being spewed in the name of the majority religion in other states. But now I can see too many people of the majority religion going out of their way to justify the oppressions of the minorities. [Nearly half of Kerala’s population are Muslims and Christians.]

So, should the minorities start shouting louder? As they seem to be doing now with the increasing decibels of Christmas carols and the preponderance of Santa Clauses.

No, I have argued in many places that the answer to religious oppression is not more religion but more sanity. I am not naïve to say that the Christians of India should let themselves be persecuted abiding by the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount literally. The Sermon on the Mount is good poetry and better theology. But it won’t work today except in the walled communities of monasteries.

Religious oppression, especially state-sanctioned varieties, need to be dealt with diplomatically. Engaging with the legal systems of the country is one way. The judiciary has also been saffronised in India and it is difficult to get justice from it. Difficulties can be faced with resilience if you are on a spiritual journey. Use the power of education (as Kerala has been doing eminently), build coalitions, empower the community using whatever resources at hand, develop economic self-reliance, organise nonviolent and meaningful resistance movements, use symbols, art, cultural expressions, etc, engage with the government in dialogue and negotiation… Well, I guess there are ways and ways of solving problems other than doing what your oppressor is doing.

When Santa Claus overrides the infant Jesus, it is very spirit of Christmas that gets trampled over. Perhaps, it is high time for the churches in Kerala (and elsewhere as well) to take a deep look within.