Christmas is supposed to be a religious festival. And yet millions of people around the world who aren’t Christian or religious celebrate it. The church sees it as a sign of our decadent times, while Nietzsche saw it as evidence that religion still has its grip on the secular world. They are both wrong. Tradition and ritual are more important to us than religion. In a world that changes with ever-increasing speed, we need the repetition of rituals and traditions to give us a sense of identity and stability. Instead of lamenting the loss of connection with religion, we should celebrate the survival of these traditions whose contemporary meaning is quite independent of any original religious connotations, writes Alexis Papazoglou.

Most people that will be celebrating Christmas on the 25^th of December are not practicing Christians. In the US, the percentage of the population that said it will be celebrating in some manner was 93% in 2019. Amongst those who said religion is not at all important to them, the percentage only dropped to 85%. [1]

There are those who lament the decoupling of Christmas from the observation of Christian religion, seeing it as a sign of our decadent times. The critique that what was once the sacred celebration of the birth of the son of God has been co-opted by consumerism is as old as Christmas carols, dating back to at least Oliver Cromwell. From the opposite direction, Nietzsche objected to the continuation of religious practices by those who identified as secular, seeing it as an unhealthy hangover from religion than needs getting rid of. But the human draw towards ritual, celebration, and the following of tradition transcends religion. The content and meaning of those traditions seem to matter less to us than the actual practices themselves. Instead of feeling uncomfortable about the decoupling of Christmas traditions from Christianity, or thinking that they should be abandoned altogether, along with religion, we should celebrate their survival in a world starved of ritual and seek more of them.  

The misguided lamentation of the loss of tradition

Chief Rabi Jonathan Sacks was one of the influential voices lamenting the loss of tradition: “A vision once guided us, one that we loosely call the Judaeo-Christian tradition … It did not answer all questions … But it gave us moral habits. It gave us a framework of virtue. It embodied ideals. It emphasized the value of institutions – the family, the school, the community – as vehicles through which one generation hands on its ideals to the next. In its broad outlines it was shared by rich and poor alike…That tradition has been comprehensively displaced.” [2]

But what this complaint fails to notice is that moral habits, the love of family, a reverence for institutions and community are not dependent on a Judaeo-Christian framework of thought. Those things existed long before these religions appeared and exist in many other cultures that practice other religions. Indeed, those values continue to live on in secular society, even if not with the absolute reverence that religious leaders would like.

Many of the traditions people practice during the Christmas season - bringing a tree into their home, decorating it with ornaments and placing gifts underneath it to exchange with their loved ones - have little to do with Christianity in the first place.