Dear Friends,
Maybe you heard the latest rumor that members of the Supreme Court had a big shouting match over whether to take that Texas case regarding the “stolen” election. It sounded totally legit because that Chief Justice Roberts sure seems like a hothead who would scream profanity at his colleagues. Okay. Um, yeah. Not so much. More problematic to the story is the fact that there is literally nobody at the Supreme Court. Justices haven’t had a closed-door face-to-face meeting in months, so “overhearing” one would be impossible.
Listening to folks peddling the never-ending conspiracy sewage is corrosive to your soul, and if that is you, or even a temptation for you, I urge you to stop. The 9th Commandment, last I checked, remains in effect. The guy who peddled that story, Lin Wood, also Tweeted that since the name “John Roberts” shows up on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane logs, the Chief Justice owes the American people an explanation! Wow. Accusing the Chief of cavorting with a notorious pedophile is quite bold for an attorney who made his name suing people for defamation. And it’s also the sign of an attorney who has no actual plans to have a case, election related or not, appear before the high court in his entire remaining life. But I’m pretty sure he’s willing take your generous and patriotic donations to whatever cause you think he’s pursuing.
Go outside. Get some sunshine. Put on some Christmas music. Drink some eggnog. Take a break. Absent some kind of war or catastrophe, I think the upcoming four years of a Biden Administration are going to be pretty uneventful from long-term cultural and policy standpoints, and at most we will be rehashing the very same debates we’ve been having for the past four years. You deserve a vacation from politics.
If you are invested in the election and its rather disgraceful aftermath, Here are a few things I think you should consume:
Dan McLaughlin does the painstaking work of explaining why the election wasn’t stolen.
David Bahnsen’s final “Off The Cufflink” podcast explains why Donald Trump lost.
And today, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have some very strong and true things to say about the President’s exit.
If you want to know more about the pathologies of conspiracy theories of all stripes, Jonathan Kay wrote an (overall) excellent book about it. It’d make a good, if awkward, Christmas gift for the 9/11 Truther, Flat Earther, or Moon Landing Hoaxer in your life.
If those things don’t answer a lot of questions for you, I can’t help you further. And hopefully that’s the last thing I’ll have to say about that.
Joy To The World
For some reason there are people who spend the Christmas season in a constant state of lament. It’s very weird. They walk around like Ebenezer Scrooge, looking down their noses at all the “commercialism” and “consumerism.” It is true, of course, that many people celebrate Christmas without the Christ part meaning anything. They focus on material goods or some amorphous thing called “The Christmas Spirit.” I really cannot get very upset about this.
Jesus brought—literally brought—joy to the world. People are joyfully buying and giving presents and spending time with their loved ones and reconnecting with old friends with Christmas cards and baking cookies and gingerbread houses and hanging lights and going caroling and drinking cocoa and a million other things because of Jesus Christ. Their own psychological state of mind is not relevant to the objective fact that it is Jesus Christ who inaugurated all this joy.
Don’t minimize or look down on all that joy. Jesus showers grace upon grace even to the ungrateful. And the ungrateful will answer for that someday; but this is not that day. These are the times of refreshing and God’s long-suffering patience that will bring many to repentance. The wheat and the tares get separated at the final harvest. Don’t think for a minute that somehow Jesus is getting cheated of glory by all the commercialism—which, by the way, is a word used to describe people’s desire to purchase and acquire wonderful things to give to other people. I cannot for the life of me figure out what I am supposed to be upset about.
Anyway, the celebration of Christmas can’t possibly leave Jesus out. Oh, people do try. There is a rare occasion when a big time music star does a Christmas album that contains no sacred songs, but that is extremely hard to do. There’s only so much “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Jingle Bells,” and “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” you can do. And even then, there isn’t a lot of interesting things left to do with those songs.
You cannot go anywhere without hearing his name. The other night I was enjoying an adult beverage at a brewery and the musical playlist was almost entirely sacred music. Two-thousand years has produced a tsunami of Christmas music that just cannot be ignored; at least not if you want to have a halfway decent playlist. Over and over, I heard that combination of words: Jesus, Christ, and my favorite, King. Just pause for a moment and reflect on that from an historical perspective. Jesus’ first public words announced that now that he was on the scene, God’s kingdom had arrived. Two thousand years later, pretty much the entire globe pauses to note his incarnation and to sing “Glory to the newborn king.” Earth really does receive her king.
Too often we forget that God’s common grace—his favor and blessing on all people, righteous and unrighteous alike, even though it falls short of salvation—is actual grace. He means it. It is real benevolence. He doesn’t lavish his gifts begrudgingly. So let’s say a person doesn’t believe in God, and is therefore not properly thankful to him, and is caught up with worldly goods and something called the “spirit of Christmas,” but is nevertheless filled with deep love for family and an overwhelming sense of joy. The living God is the ultimate source of that joy. And if God pours out joy with liberality instead of miserliness, we should be the last people to look upon such liberality like disapproving Scrooges.
Sure, we shouldn’t be satisfied with that; we should pray for our lost neighbors and find ways to encourage them to see the gifts for what they really are: gifts from the King. But somehow we Christians tend to operate on a working theory that goes like this: if something doesn’t have ultimate, saving value, it has no value at all. So we can look at this spectacle: even in a remarkably post-Christian, increasingly pagan society, pretty much everyone participates in one way or another in a celebration commemorating the birth of King Jesus; they love and honor one another with gifts; they even sing praises to him with their mouths—they can’t help it!—and we respond with … cynicism? Wow. Take another look: the phenomenon is amazing.
The King has come, and he brought joy—yes, really—to the world. He is pouring out gifts from an infinite storehouse—that’s what’s happening when we encounter goodness of any kind in the world. But I think it is especially evident when everyone, wheat and tare, sheep and goat, is filled with joy and happiness, compassion for the lonely and less fortunate, generosity of both spirit and material means, and with one accord join their voices to sing Gloria! In excelsis Deo!
Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, and Christmas foreshadows that day every year.
Miscellany
Speaking of Ebenezer Scrooge, do you know what Charles Dickens actually meant when he wrote A Christmas Carol? Scrooge is often thought of as the greedy corporate capitalist fat cat, lording it over the poor. That gets the story exactly backward, and Jerry Bowyer’s absolute classic 2012 essay in Forbes is something I read every year. You should too!
I know we Americans get a lot of grief for not going with the global consensus regarding things like our measuring systems. It’s always a fun argument, but I have to say that this ends the discussion when it comes to temperature:
From time to time I’ve been reading H.L. Mencken’s classic work, The American Language. It is every bit as witty and entertaining as I thought it would be, and is full of hilarious gems involving British snobbery toward their backward cousins. The crisis point for the English language appears to have come when Hollywood “talkies” started making the trek across the Atlantic. Here’s a note from the 1932 annual report of the Chief Constable of Wallasey (a suburb of Liverpool):
I cannot refrain from commenting adversely on the pernicious and growing habit of…youths to use Americanisms, with nasal accompaniment, in order to appear, in their own vernacular, tough guys. On one of my officers going to search him, a young housebreaker told him to ‘Lay off, cop.’ Oh-yeahs are frequent in answer to charges, and we are promise shoots up in the burg [sic] and threatened to be bumped off.
San Francisco is renaming Abraham Lincoln High School because—I promise I am not making this up—he “did not demonstrate that black lives mattered to him.” That’s a real story, and you can find it here. I trust you don’t need to be informed that Abraham Lincoln’s personal efforts to demonstrate that black lives matter both succeeded and then got him murdered.
You should read everything Yuval Levin writes, and this essay on the importance of our cultural and political institutions in restraining our society’s worst impulses is no exception.
I confess that Little Drummer Boy is probably my very least favorite Christmas carol. But a few years ago these guys might have changed my mind. Done right, it’s pretty amazing. Enjoy!