Who are the Christmas haters?

Thomas Clough:

Well, if we are to draw a conclusion from the hundreds of heartfelt and articulate commentaries currently on display on the Internet, they fall loosely into these self-identified groups: Jews, atheists, secular humanists and pagans. While many Jews, atheists, humanists and pagans make an effort to distinguish themselves from members of the other unhappy groups, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the groups. For example, the word Jew can be used to designate a devout adherent of Judaism or simply anyone who has grown comfortable with Jewish customs, sentiments, perspectives and rhythms. In short, there are religious Jews and there are ethnic Jews and the ethnic Jews might also be atheists or pantheists or Wiccans or heaven knows what.

A 1998 poll of Los Angeles Jews commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles revealed that only 41 percent of respondents were firm in their belief in any sort of willful conscious deity. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey makes clear that only half of American Jews are affiliated with any Jewish congregation. Jews are most likely to join a synagogue when they have school-age children, often because of family pressure; they see the synagogue as a place where their children can receive an education in Jewish heritage, an education the parents themselves are ill-equipped to communicate because of their own meager religious educations and because of a lifetime of holding Jewish rituals, or any organized Jewish life, at arm’s length. After their sons have had their Bar Mitzvah, most Jews dump their synagogue memberships. The odd reality is that these parents sought out a synagogue to imbue their children with religious beliefs that the parents themselves do not hold dear. The American Jewish Yearbook estimated the total number of American Jews of all descriptions to be 6,155,000 in 2001. That would mean that Jews are about 2.1% of our total population. To put that in perspective, there are more fundamentalist Christians living in the southern states commonly called the Bible Belt than there are Jews of any description on the entire planet.

In her handbook God-Optional Judaism author Judith Seid quotes a rabbi who says of his congregation, “Probably more than half of them are atheists or agnostics.” These Jews are, it seems, unbelievers in search of a culturally defined comfort zone; they are the children and grandchildren of the great wave of Jewish immigration that broke on our shores in the early Twentieth Century; their numbers swell the great mass of unaffiliated, unreligious Jews. These Jews maintain an emotional attachment to the mood and rhythms of Jewish life, but also cling to their parents’ and grandparents’ socialist utopian fantasies, including socialism’s notorious hostility toward religion. It is these Jews who form the hardened spear tip of annual jabs at expressions of Christian spirituality at Christmas time. Now throw into the mix a bunch of enthusiastic atheist zealots and a handful of showboating Wiccans eager to share the stage with any recognized religion and you have the nucleus of a nasty seasonal tradition of trashing Christmas.

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