Christmas and Consumerism or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giving

It is pretty easy these days to mock the excesses of Christmas. The stores opening on Thanksgiving, five year-olds asking for iPhones, the Best Buy commercial where an aunt gives her nieces tablets (seriously? I am from a fairly wealthy family, but I don't recall ever getting anything from an aunt nor would I expect anything), and the way the birth of Jesus is tied into people going into debt. The critiques write themselves and are so, so boring. Yes, we get it anti-consumerists, you don't want to buy things for people. Could you please just quiet down about it? Left hand and right hand not knowing each other, Pharisees praying loudly and all that.

I used to fall into the critic crowd (though I always lustily accepted whatever my parents got for me) and then I had kids. Kids make you go bananas about giving. There is nothing better in the world than giving your kids a gift. I do it all of the time. I'll see some little knick-knack that no one alive really needs and get it for Owen because I love to give him stuff. We bought him a Strider bike for Christmas and I kept it at work so he wouldn't see it before the big day. For the past two weeks I have walked past that thing multiple times every day and broken out into a mile-wide grin. I can't wait to give it to him. This morning I was at the farm store getting some chicken feed for our girls and bought him four little animal toys because they had giraffes and he loves giraffes. And then I got him a horse, too, because he has a rocking horse upstairs that he likes to ride while I ride next to him on the rocking chair (we ride to the duck pond to feed the ducks and go fishing). His horse is named Lucky, and my rocking chair is named Lightning. He told me last night that instead of flying to Hawaii we should ride horses. "A fine, strong black horse," he told me. Who am I to disagree?

My parents get this better than anyone. They don't sit around fretting about the creeping consumerism of Christmas--they just give and give and give. If you want to break out of the secularizing impulse of our American incarnation of the holiday you don't do it by refraining  from giving. We are celebrating in this season the greatest gift of all time and all of our gifts are mere whispers, dull, petty imitations of that great gift God gave us in his Son, but we give them anyway to remind ourselves of that great gift. 

I am not trying to sanctify all giving that is done in the name of Christmas. Some is probably irresponsible. I don't advocate debt. Some is done with ulterior motives. But to me the extravagant giving is better than the self-righteous refraining that some seem to want to put in its place. Our Father has dealt with us extravagantly after all. And his generosity outstrips anything we could ever come close to matching. My answer to the consumerist conundrum, then, is to give more and give with a view to our profligately gifting God. 

Merry Christmas! Drink some eggnog.    

Nicholas and Alexandra

I just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert Massie's telling of the end of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of Bolshevism and Soviet communism in Russia. It is a fascinating story, truly compelling and multi-faceted. Massie captures the tragedy, ironies, and historical particularities of that moment so well. For a 600 page history book it read like a novel.

I will give a short rundown of the basics. Nicholas, heir to the throne, is suddenly made Tsar when his father, Alexander III, dies unexpectedly. He hastily marries Alix of the German house of Hesse who becomes Tsaritsa. Nicholas is not as strong-willed as his father, but is a competent manager and loyal Russian patriot. The Tsar and his wife have four daughters before having a son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexis who is diagnosed at a young age with hemophilia.

Nicholas is a loving father, but in over his head when it comes to leading a nation through tumultuous times. He had little training, his father thinking that there would be more time to instruct his son in the way of leadership. His wife is a religious mystic, driven mad by her son's disease. She is attended to by Gregory Rasputin, a peasant monk who has a number of uncanny visions and prophecies which wind up coming to fruition. Alexandra becomes devoted to Rasputin and when Nicholas goes to the Eastern front to lead the Russian army in World War I, Alexandra becomes the de facto leader of Russia. Rasputin, by this time firmly established in the household, pulls the strings of ministerial appointments in the government and causes great unrest among the ruling class. Nicholas, too uxorious for his own good, defaults to his wife in a number of disastrous policies. Alexandra is so focused on her hemophiliac son becoming the supreme autocrat of Russia that she refuses to allow any small reforms in the governing structure of Russia, increasing hostilities towards the royal family especially as the war drags on.

Attempting to free the Romanovs from the taint of Rasputin, a number of monarchist gentry stage the murder of Rasputin. It is bungled, but ultimately successful, but by this point the damage is done. Too many people are too upset with the Tsar who reluctantly abdicates his throne. Fearing the breakup of his family, he does not abdicate to his son, the heir, but to his younger, dissolute brother. Hoping to wait out the war in Russia and then retire to England, the royal family is imprisoned in their palace outside of St. Petersburg (Petrograd at the time). When the provisional government falls to the Bolsheviks, they are removed to Siberia. As the white army encroaches on the head city of Soviet Siberia the entire Romanov family, even the dog, is taken to the basement of their prison and executed in gruesome fashion. They are then chopped up into small pieces, burned with fire, melted with sulphuric acid and dropped into an abandoned mine shaft.

One drum that I continually beat is the difficulty of speaking monolithically about history. Reading over my short summary I am struck by how simple that rendering is for something that is anything but simple. Too often we want to impose an easy narrative on past events that makes them readily discernible to us, despite their often infinite complexity. Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, has been portrayed popularly as an impotent man who ceded power to his arrogant wife and through pusillanimity allowed the autocracy and monarchy to be wrenched away from Russia. By the revolutionaries he was bloody Nicholas, the tyrant who entered World War I in a perverse attempt to kill off Russia's revolutionary workers in bloody battle, the very symbol of proletariat suppression.

An irony of the case is that if Nicholas had been the bloodthirsty tyrant the Bolsheviks made him out to be, he would have tamped out their small flame in a number of days. As it was, he was merely an ardent patriot who abdicated in a doomed attempt to save his beloved Russia. He was feckless in a certain sense and unprepared for the wave of hostility that came upon the monarchy in his time. He deferred to his wife too often and should have been willing to make more concessions to popular government. His cousin, King George V of England, willingly saw the powers of the monarchy decrease in his nation and finished his life happily as more of a figurehead than an autocrat.

As for the Empress Alexandra, she was undoubtedly driven mad to a certain degree by the illness of her son. She was a loyal Russian though, and not the German spy of the anti-monarchical propaganda. As for her relationship with Rasputin, it is only fair to say that she had a different religious constitution than most people. A number of Rasputin's prophecies were eerily fulfilled, and though the man himself was a deviant and manipulator, he steadfastly showed to Alexandra his holy side. It is easy to see how she was duped; where some would see mere coincidence she saw miracles of God. Where some saw a lecherous opportunist, she saw the holy man who saved her son.

The first time Clara saw me reading the book she asked me why I was reading it. I told her it was because I love Russia. She said, "I think you just love reading." Which is so true. The reason I love reading is because it unsettles me. It is no secret that I love and admire John Milton, the English poet. Milton, living during the English Civil War, wrote defenses for the revolutionaries who had killed the English king, Charles I. Not in a battle, but through the charade of a show trial. Maybe the case is entirely different and Charles was the tyrant Milton and others made him out to be. Maybe his death was justified. But then again maybe not. At the very least it was more complex than it seemed in Milton's propaganda tracts. The Charles I know is Milton's Charles. How different would Nicholas seem to me if all that I read was Lenin's account of his life? Maybe I should read something a bit less biased about Charles.

As any earnest college freshman will tell you, History is written by the victors, yada yada, that is mostly true. But what is even truer is that history is written by people--people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning, about people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning and the things they do that often show very little logic and no arc of progression. Yet it is fascinating all the same, and often illuminating. Nicholas and Alexandra and the entire Romanov family are tragic figures of a tragic era, a tragedy made all the more palpable by the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism that followed their demise. Could it have been different? Sure. Was it? Nope. Historical what-ifs are a fun parlor game, but what happened in Russia happened. And while we will never fully grasp all the factors at work that brought everything to bear on that proud people, we can acknowledge that event in its complexity and humanity. Long live Holy Russia.

Some Thoughts on Revolution and Christianity, Courtesy of Jonathan Edwards

Over the week of my internment after surgery in late February I read George Marsden's justly lauded biography of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is a fascinating figure and so far removed from the caricature of the high school philosophy class excerpts of Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God. I had intended to write more about this at the time, but other concerns presented themselves. So here is the first in what may turn into a set of reflections on the great theologian and philosopher of early America. And it begs a pretty interesting historical question.

Edwards was a British citizen as well as the foremost American theologian in an era when this was not yet a contradiction. One of the more interesting historical "what ifs?" surrounding the life of Edwards is the question of what role he would have played in the American Revolution had he lived to see it come. Edwards was slightly older than Benjamin Franklin (Franklin actually published a number of Edwards' treatises from his Philadelphia printing house) so it is not inconceivable that had he been spared his unexpected death at the age of 54 he could have been called on to play a pivotal role. Princeton University, of which Edwards was president when he died, was a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the war and it is difficult to see how it would have become this way under Edwards' leadership. 

Edwards believed in a hierarchical structure as a God-ordained ordering of society. In his role as minister he saw himself as more than just the spiritual life coach of today's stripe, but as a father to his children. He believed that God had called pastors to serve as leaders in all areas of a community's life. He was a loyal subject to the crown and believed that God appointed kings to lead a people. This is not to say that he could not have been swayed by the arguments of the revolutionaries, merely that it was not the default position for a colonist to be against King George and his tyranny. 

Thinking of the speculative response of Edwards to the revolution has caused me to think a lot about the revolution myself. Just as we are taught that the Crusades were 100% the work of evil Christians, we are taught that the revolution is a purely noble event, wherein the forces of liberty banished the forces of oppression. The plucky little underdog defeated the best military in the world. 

But of course it is far more complicated than that telling. There is a joke in Richard Linklater's early 90s nostalgia-fest Dazed and Confused where a hippie teacher dismissing her students into the summer of 1976 cautions them to not get caught up in the patriotic fervor of the bicentennial: "Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes." There is enough truth in that to bring a smile to the face of even the most ardent patriot. We have a lot to be proud of from our revolutionary heritage but a lot to be ashamed of as well. 

Clara and I were talking the other night about how conservative Christians tend to view the revolution as a battle for religious freedom as much as a battle for political or social liberties. But the England of 1776 was not the England the Puritans fled in 1620. England in the early seventeenth century was a nation torn between competing loyalties, with Catholic strongholds in the north yet to be broken, and numerous splinter sects of crazy cult groups. The state church was oppressive and cruel with dissenters, and the idea of separation between church and state had yet to take root. But the Puritan revolution and the English Civil War of the 1640s did away with a lot of these tensions (unless, of course, you were Catholic; but early America was not exactly a bastion of Catholicism either). Dissenters became the leaders in Cromwell's commonwealth. Even after the Restoration Charles II was crafty enough to not punish dissent with the same severity. 1776, after all, is after the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley had made Methodism an intractable part of British Christianity. (This is a grievously incomplete picture of one of the most fascinating centuries of any country, ever, a fact of which I am well aware. Read this and this and this.) In short, the issues between the colonists and Britain were not religious, but largely political: "No taxation without representation", etc. 

And for Christians this raises interesting questions. I remember well the moment when I first started really reading the Bible for myself and read the texts about submitting to our rulers and the thought flashed through my mind in an instant: what about the Revolutionary War? How did Christians find justification for overturning the legitimate, God-ordained authority of King George? Since then I have read Augustine's theory of just war, Niebuhr's modern adaptation of the idea, Milton's impassioned defenses of liberty and distinction between king and tyrant and in general have come to accept the Revolution as a net good, but it is interesting to make note of the fact that it was far from clear at the time and is still murky today. 

The argument is entirely plausible that a nation following the dictates of the New Testament will tend toward democracy and greater liberty for the individual, but the question of whether to use force to bring this state about is far from clear. Particularly when the matters of freedom are more economic and political than religious or despotic. In any event, the Revolutionary War seems to have a far smaller degree of legitimacy than the Civil War, which some on the right are prone to argue was an egregious misuse of federal power and a denial of gospel gradualism.

I don't know. Something to think about. At the very least, thinking through these things has helped me see a more balanced view of history, one that is neither hagiography approaching idolatry about the founders of this nation, but at the same time doesn't buy into all of the sarcasm of the hippie teacher in the movie. The truth is so much more complicated and so much more interesting.