Every year at this time, as visions of nondenominational sugar plums dance in our heads, Christians and heretics alike decry the commercialization of Christmas. But, really, isn’t it the candy-cane bagels, the reggae versions of “Silent Night,” the Kwanzaa stockings hung by the chimney with care that give the holiday its great spiritual power? When gift exchange confers grace and delicious turkey dinners are the gateway to piety, it’s not only easy to believe, it’s also fun, and most everyone wants in on the action.
Everyone but Richard Dawkins, patron saint of faithlessness, that is. According to an article that ran in the New York Times last December, the author of The God Delusion celebrates Christmas for “family reasons” but apparently has even less reverence for Cindy Lou Who than he does for Baby Jesus. “I detest ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too,” he told the Times, and is there any more concise explanation for why most Americans would sooner send a gay Hindu divorcee to the White House than a nonbeliever? It’s one thing to reject the Lord God Almighty, but Secret Santa, too? Even in the bluest blue state, that qualifies as blasphemy.
Atheists, of course, have been enjoying a revival over the last few years. Along with Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have hit the best-seller lists with Bible-trumping tomes. All around the country, in an effort to counter the political and cultural clout of those who believe that every stem cell is God’s own child and brontosaurs roamed the Bible, nonbelievers are ramping up their advocacy and recruitment efforts.
The New York City Atheists produce three weekly public-access TV shows. The Rational Response Squad encourages atheists to make their nonbelief public by posting “blasphemous” videos on YouTube. In six locations in the U.S. and Canada, Camp Quest provides a setting where kids from nonreligious families can roast marshmallows in a rational, freethinking manner. And even old Ebenezer Dawkins is selling buttons, T-shirts and lapel pins emblazoned with an edgy scarlet “A” on his official website.
So why not just take the next seeker-friendly step and fully embrace the celebration of inclusive humanism and the purchase-driven life that Christmas has become? Currently, alas, it’s much harder to shop for the devout nonbelievers on your Christmas list than it is to shop for the devout. No doubt many Christians will dispute this claim. The reason they started manufacturing faith-based breath mints and holy teddy bears is because they were drowning in a secular sea of Bratz dolls, morally corrosive video games and pagan golf balls.
There’s a difference between pop culture with no overt religious component and atheist pop culture, however, and the difference is actually quite striking. Christian organizations like the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America believe gangsta rap is almost as much of a threat to society as gay marriage—but when was the last time you heard 50 Cent praising that popular atheist faux-deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster in one of his songs? God and Jesus, on the other hand, are hip-hop icons, praised more often than Grandmaster Flash and Hennessy cognac.
In Hollywood, it’s the same way. While anti-bias truffle pigs like Brent Bozell, William Donohue and Michael Medved insist that the entertainment industry is out to crucify faith and traditional values, it somehow manages to produce a new crop of straight-to-Hallmark-Channel holiday weepies each year, and not one of them has ever featured Dolly Parton as an unlikely evolutionary biologist who reunites an estranged family by infusing them with that old-fashioned Darwinist spirit. Such powers, it seems, are reserved solely for angels.
Similarly, if you go looking for a Madalyn Murray O’Hair action figure at Wal-Mart, you’ll have to settle for a 13-inch Samson doll from faith-based toymaker One2believe. Ironically, Christian entrepreneurs do a much better job of providing earthly rewards than the folks who believe earthly rewards are our only salvation. In fact, the Lord has called so many believers to spread the Good News via faith-based salt scrubs and Godly poker chips over the last few decades that the annual market for Christian-themed products, often dismissed as “Jesus junk,” is now $4.6 billion.
Combine all that stuff with megachurches that offer the fanfare and bustle of the mall in holiday mode and prosperity preachers who position God as Oprah Claus, and for Christians, every day of the year now exists as a kind of secularized, commercial Christmas. Last August, Church by the Glades, a spiritual Sam’s Club in Castle Springs, Florida, started offering first-time guests a $15 iTunes gift card if they came and listened to a sermon. The topic? “How to avoid living in a self-absorbed world”—without giving up your iPod, no doubt!
Of course, many Christians decry the effects such entrepreneurship is having on their faith. Jesus is more than just the hardest-working pitchman this side of Jared the Subway Guy. When Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, turns the Good Book into the Good PowerPoint Slide for his easily distracted flock, something’s lost in the transition.
But something’s gained, too—namely, millions of believers who aren’t too crazy about inconvenient concepts like sin and judgment, but are completely devoted to products like Virtuous Woman perfume, which, according to its manufacturer, is designed for women “who are interested in incorporating a passion for sharing their faith with a beauty product that makes them feel and smell really good.”
Look for atheist perfume and you’ll be looking for eternity. You won’t find the works of Bertrand Russell packaged like the latest issue of Self or Cosmo, as the publishing company Thomas Nelson does with the Bible. (“Becoming is the complete New Testament in magazine format, but it wouldn’t be a culture ’zine if it didn’t address men, beauty, fitness and food!”) Look for the atheist equivalent to Christian yo-yos and Christian neckties and you will come up as empty-handed as Mother Teresa passing the plate at Christopher Hitchens’ dinner table.
No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers—one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?
If today’s Christian entrepreneurs thought like that, of course, then atheists might not be concerned about their own current marginalization. Instead of fretting about “obscene spending bonanzas” or admitting that jelly beans are mentioned in the Bible exactly as often as homo habilis is, Christian entrepreneurs embrace pop culture. They recognize what the consumer Puritans behind efforts like “Buy Nothing Day” never quite grasp: That shopping for lipstick or collecting Star Wars figurines can provide genuine emotional fulfillment; that we use the stuff we buy to help fashion our identities, build communities and infuse our lives with purpose and meaning.
In the mid-1990s, the Christian Booksellers Association shortened its name to CBA. The largest Christian retailer, Family Bookstores, lengthened its name to Family Christian Stores. Apparently they realized that words, even if they were God’s Word, could only take them so far. At last year’s International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia, hundreds of vendors displayed a rich, vast Eden of Christian pop-culture products that were just as slickly produced, just as fashionable and entertaining as anything secular pop culture has to offer. Atheists, meanwhile, are still in the pop-culture Dark Ages—their T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing, their tchotchkes aren’t as diverse, their rock bands are not spreading their 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up the stockings of nonbelievers with atheist junk that is just as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.
Frequent Weekly contributor Greg Beato writes the Pop Culture column.