This time of year might seem like it’s all about shopping. Gift-giving and parties and ugly sweaters. But, it’s getting easier to forget the so-called holiday season is rooted in religious holidays, whether we’re talking Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza.
This secularization of the holiday season is happening at the same time we’re seeing a massive rise in people who are not religiously affiliated at all in this country. But, is it a bad thing?
Terry Shoemaker, professor in Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, spoke more about it with The Show.
Full conversation
TERRY SHOEMAKER: Something kind of happens mid-‘90s, where we start seeing people disaffiliating with religion. With millennials and then the generation after millennials, we’ve kind of seen an explosion of people that we call religious nones, which can be really confusing — religious N-O-N-E-S. And we call them religious nones because they select “none” on a survey, when asked what their religious identity is. So that no identity becomes their identity.
And then a huge shift in people identifying as spiritual or spiritual but not religious. And so those are the two growing trends in the U.S.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. And I understand you’re studying that idea of spirituality as opposed to religion, or as a different way of life than following a specific religion. Do the two coincide? Like are you seeing spirituality increase as we’re seeing religious affiliation decrease?
SHOEMAKER: Yeah. So that’s a great thing to ask. And unfortunately, a lot of the surveys that are conducted don’t ask that specific question. So like it’s either your’re religious or spiritual or nothing. And religion and spirituality gets lumped together, even though we have a huge segment of our population who are very clear about “I’m spiritual but not religious.”
And so from an academic perspective, those two things have always been coupled. But one of the things that I’m finding is that, especially for a younger generation, spirituality is something distinctive. At least in their minds, right? It may not be, but the way they understand it, it’s different than religion.
And sometimes that gets parsed out easily as well. Religion is institutional. Organized spirituality is DIY, do-it-yourself kind of stuff. That tends to be true, but I think there’s more complexity to it than that.
GILGER: Yeah. I want to talk about that complexity a little bit, and I’m sure we’ll get into this as I shift this conversation to talk a little bit about what this means for the holidays — as we call it, “the holidays.” But this is obviously a time of year that is rooted in religious holidays. Christianity, whether it’s Hanukkah, even Kwanzaa, right?
These are holidays that are religious, but not really so much if you watch TV or a commercial or talk about it with people in your office, right?
SHOEMAKER: Right. This is part of what we might call the secularization of these holidays. And Christmas may be the most illustrative of this, in the sense that a Pew Research study found in 2017 that over half of those polled understood Christmas as a cultural holiday and not as a religious holiday. And many when they’re polled as well will say they do the gift giving, the meals, friends, family — but the biblical story thing gets set to the side.
GILGER: We do Santa Claus, not necessarily Jesus.
SHOEMAKER: Yeah, that’s a good way to say it, right? And so this is a little bit of — I don’t want to say a displacement per se — but it’s a building up on what was but innovating with new things. So Santa Claus and Coca Cola and NBA and all of these things create a totally different look and feel to Christmas celebrations, which tends to upset some people who want it to be more traditionally religious and want to maintain those roots.
GILGER: I want to connect this with the idea of civil religion. Like the idea basically that our American identity is our religious identity, or like that’s the closest thing to religion that we believe in. Is this tied up in consumerism, capitalism as it so seems to be and is so critiqued around the holidays?
SHOEMAKER: Yeah. So civil religion’s a really interesting way to kind of frame what’s happening. And as you said, civil religion is this idea that our real loyalty in America — whether we identify traditionally religious or not — but our real religious loyalties are to the nation-state through our patriotism.
And so, in some ways, Christmas is that celebration of consumption of our capitalist desires, which starts. And it’s not just the holiday, it’s a season that starts right after Thanksgiving —
GILGER: Halloween now.
SHOEMAKER: Yeah. You’re probably right. It’s probably earlier than that. But it’s definitely a season of consumerism, of gift giving. How we share our meaning-making together is through providing gifts to each other.
GILGER: Yeah. I want to ask you about the way this is taught, because I have little kids and I always think about this this time of year because they’re coming home from school with lessons about Hanukkah, lessons about Kwanzaa, lessons about the Lunar New Year — like all of these kinds of multicultural holidays that are taking place this time of year.
And schools in America will be very careful to teach them about all of those things in very unbiased ways. How does that kind of play into what religion means in these holiday contexts in our culture?
SHOEMAKER: So the the teaching of multiple religious traditions, I think, has a definite influence on younger generations. The more you know, the more you’re influenced. Right? Peter Berger said something — he was famous sociologist of religion — said something about pluralism has to relativize.
So you might be a committed religious person of whatever tradition, but learning about all these other traditions and actually knowing people that celebrate these things and people you think are good people has an effect on how you do your rituals and your rites and your traditions.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And that is so American in a way.
SHOEMAKER: So American.
GILGER: So is there a loss here? Because as I said, there’s a lot of critique of capitalism around Christmas time and holiday gifts and how much everything costs and how that’s all we talk about when we talk about the holidays. From a religious perspective, people would say, obviously there’s a big loss here because you’re missing the point.
But I wonder from your perspective, from an academic or maybe a sociological perspective, is it all bad?
SHOEMAKER: Yeah. So let me bring in two things here, because I think you hit on nicely that from people, specifically who are Christian, often cite something’s lost. And politically this gets — if I’m being generous with my interpretation — it gets thrown out as a war against Christmas.
But if we get into that, I think in some ways the war on Christmas, of whether we say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy holidays,” is really just an angst of what’s happening, right? That it is being divorced from its religious roots.
And then I don’t think it’s all bad because humans simply adapt. We always have, right? So even Christmas, and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa have all been through adaptations culturally. The Christmas tree itself is kind of a paganistic adaptation to a Christian celebration.
And so we can see secularization, adaptations and innovations. And this may look like watching “Elf” together. Will Ferrell maybe has given us the best gift of gathering together with family members in a way that is kind of safe, right?
Or gathering together and watching sports together. These tend to be safer than intergenerational conflicts sometimes due to one person not adhering or identifying, affiliating, practicing the same way as parents, grandparents sometimes.
GILGER: That’s really interesting. I want to ask you a specific question about sports here, because I know this is what you’ve written books about in the past. Sports and religion: is that one thing in the same in America today?
SHOEMAKER: Yeah. So a lot of scholars actually make that argument. The way I say it is sports is religion 2.0. That as we secularize — and this actually gets to your question too, about are we losing something. And it’s not that we’re losing something, we’re just doing things differently.
Where do we gather together in ritualistic fashion? In arenas, right? In football arenas and basketball arenas. That’s where you find somebody who is wearing a symbol on their shirt, and for some reason, you can high-five them and hug them right in the middle of a game. That actually looks like what maybe ancient religious pilgrimages looked like. You’re on the same track as me. I know who you are, and we share this thing.
And so our rituals may just look different now. And we practice them in sporting arenas instead of cathedrals.
GILGER: That’s really interesting. So this time of year, when my husband or my dad are watching football on Christmas Day, and it really annoys me, this is not a bad thing.
SHOEMAKER: Not a bad thing. Let them flex their ritualistic needs at that moment.
