You don’t have to be a believer to celebrate the Christmas revolution

We build so many barriers these days — left vs. right, secular vs. religious, modern vs. traditional — that we forget how knowledge, inspiration and achievement almost always require sharing and borrowing across our divides.

Christmas is an appropriate time to remember this, yet even a sweet holiday of joy and light has become one more occasion for bashing each other. The phrase “Christmas Wars” ought to be a contradiction of terms (what happened to peace on earth and good will toward each other?), but we seem to have them every year. Cable ratings are the new Scrooge.

So here’s a call for celebrating Christmas as a reminder of how much religious and secular people have to teach each other — and how developments across our intellectual and spiritual barricades helped humanity move forward.

The religious claim of Christmas is radical and, I’d argue, helped push humankind in more egalitarian and self-confident directions. The orthodox account holds that God sent His only Son to redeem humanity, that God became man and walked among us. He shared our joys and sorrows and was eventually killed for His efforts.