Although 27% of Americans have no religious tie to Christmas, many atheists, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are in full swing with Christmas trees, lights, gifts and more. Why Scrooge on joy?<\/p>\n
Among people with no Christian identity, they found:
\n \u2022 74% give Christmas gifts to family or friends.<\/p>\n
\u2022 72% gather for a Christmas dinner with loved ones<\/p>\n
\u2022 62% put up a Christmas tree<\/p>\n
\u2022 56% decorate their home<\/p>\n
\u2022 23% encourage belief in Santa
\nSome even get close to the Christ-centered heart of Christmas: 11% attend a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day worship service and 9% say they encourage belief in Jesus Christ as savior. This may be because about 11% of non-Christians told LifeWay they were wed to a Christian.<\/p>\n
LifeWay Research director Scott McConnell has a theory about the 8% on non-Christians who say they buy Advent calendars to count down the days to the birth of Jesus. When he looked at Advent calendars on Amazon, he found \u201conly one has a nativity on it. (There are) lots of Santa, toys, and chocolate. Who wouldn\u2019t like that?\u201d<\/p>\n
But \u201cChristmas-for-all,\u201d minus Christ, is a problem to those who take a serious stand on the theology of the holy day such as Rev. Michael Horton, professor at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, Calif., and host of The White Horse Inn, a radio talk show on evangelical theology theology.<\/p>\n
The gigantic American Christmas has trivialized the birth of a savior into cultural superficiality for all, a philosophy that is \u201cas innocuous as possible, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Jews or agnostics or atheists want to celebrate a winter event, that makes perfect sense. But if Christmas has come to mean something even atheists can celebrate, if it is so far removed from the birth of Christ that it no longer has a serious religious meaning,\u201d Horton says, \u201cthat\u2019s not respect for Christmas, that\u2019s assimilation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although 27% of Americans have no religious tie to Christmas, many atheists, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are in full swing with Christmas trees, lights, gifts and more. Why Scrooge on joy? Among people with no Christian identity, they found: \u2022 74% give Christmas gifts to family or friends. \u2022 72% gather for a Christmas dinner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[284,3919,258,1255,4354,1278],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}