On this Christmas Day, on two separate occasions, I was reminded of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that occurred on September 15, 1963.
The first occasion came during my morning commute to work on the subway. I was searching online for some citations and I came across Marjorie Corbman’s 2016 article, “Celebrating Christmas in a Time of Fear” via Daily Theology. Corbman’s essay opens with the question: “How do you celebrate Christmas when hope feels impossible?” She then goes on to write about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the aftermath of that deadly act of domestic terrorism:
“If Christmas is only an escape from the hurt and horror at the state of the world, we cannot afford it. Nowhere has this message been delivered more urgently than by the organizers of the 1963 Christmas boycott, who called on families to refrain from buying gifts that year as a response to the white supremacist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in September of that year. In the attack, four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, had been killed. On the same day, two young black boys, Virgil Wade and Johnny Robinson, were also shot and killed in Birmingham. The original organizers of the boycott, a group of artists that included the writer James Baldwin, the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and the journalist Louis Lomax, saw the deaths of the ‘tender six’ in Birmingham to be a reflection of the unconscionable negligence of the American people.”
The second occasion came as I was scrolling through social media and I came across a post from Daana Townsend (@retrosoul__) on Threads. I follow Townsend’s accounts, across social media, which are largely devoted to sharing the writings, thoughts, and musings of James Baldwin. The post that I came across was a quote from James Baldwin that said the following:
". . . and I want you to tell your children, as of this moment and on Christmas Day, that the reason there is no Santa Claus this year is because we have lost the right—by the murder of our brothers and sisters—to be called a Christian nation. And until we regain that right, we cannot celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace."
Townsend included a longer quote and the source material on Instagram, so I then went searching for more context, which brought me to Baldwin’s “We Can Change the Country” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.
In the opening of this essay, Baldwin writes:
“Before I say anything else, I have an announcement to make. I want all of you, and your wives and your children and your brothers-in-law and everyone you know, to resolve as of this moment that you will buy no presents for Christmas. And when I say no presents, I mean not a nail file, not a toothbrush, and I want you to tell your children, as of this moment and on Christmas Day, that the reason there is no Santa Claus this year is because we have lost the right—by the murder of our brothers and sisters—to be called a Christian nation. And until we regain that right, we cannot celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. And I am very serious about this for two reasons: (a) morally, I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning; (b) one must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money. We are not—we who are on the barricades in this unprecedented revolution—in the position of someone in the Congo or someone in Cuba. That is, we cannot take over the land. The terms of this revolution are precisely these: that we will learn to live together here or all of us will abruptly stop living. And I mean that. This is not, and never has been, a white nation. I am not a pupil or a ward of Senator Eastland. I am an American.”
At that time, because of the frequency and number of bombings, Birmingham was given the infamous moniker “Bombingham.” And as Corbman writes in her essay, “The boycott was a recognition that racism is a dire threat to the heart of Christianity.” The murders of four Black girls and two Black boys by white supremacists, according to Baldwin, was cause for America to forfeit its right “to be called a Christian nation.” Repeatedly, in his work, Baldwin rightfully decries the notion that America is or was, if ever, a Christian nation. Over 60 years later, regardless of the number of people who say otherwise, America continues to prove it itself unworthy of being called a Christian nation.
At the time of this writing, the Israeli government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is responsible for wounding over 53,000 and killing over 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza—of which over 8,000 are children and over 70 percent of the deaths are women and children—and displacing over 1.8 million Palestinians. Furthermore, as the Washington Post reports:
“In a little over two months, Israeli air forces fired more than 29,000 air-to-ground munitions, 40 to 45 percent of which were unguided, according to a recent assessment from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The bombing rate has been about two and a half times as high as the peak of the U.S.-led coalition’s effort to defeat the Islamic State, which at its height fired 5,075 air-to-ground munitions across both Iraq and Syria in one month, according to data from the research and advocacy group Airwars.”
And all of this with the unwavering support of the United States government.
Baldwin writes “until we regain that right [to be called a Christian nation], we cannot celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.” And this is how many Christians feel today, on Christmas Day, both in America and around the world. Since the Israeli military campaigns began in earnest after the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel communities on October 7, Christian leaders in Bethlehem, which is located in the occupied West Bank, weeks ago in late November called for the cancellation of Christmas celebrations.
On December 23, Rev. Dr. Isaac Munther, a Palestinian Christian theologian preached a sermon, during the “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy for Lament” service Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehemin which he said, in part, the following:
“Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7, and the world was silent. Should we be surprised at their silence now? . . . If we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.”
Munther further goes on to say:
“If you fail to call this a genocide, that is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace. Some have not even called for a ceasefire—I’m talking about churches. . . . I was, by the way, in the USA last month, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, and I was amazed by the amount of Christmas decorations and lights, and all the commercial goods. And I couldn’t help but think: They send us bombs, while celebrating Christmas in their land. They sing about the Prince of Peace in their land, while playing the drum of war in our land.”
Surely this is a message that would resonate with Baldwin, for truly how can we celebrate the Prince of Peace while such astounding violence and complicity in the commission of said violence abounds?
“How do you celebrate Christmas when hope feels impossible?”
To Corbman’s own question, she offers an answer:
“Honoring the birth of Christ cannot mean escaping from the inconvenient reminders of the world’s violence and cruelty, but rather . . . it is an opportunity to lay bare our despair, our horror, our fear, and—believing that broken hearts are exactly where God takes flesh—open ourselves to joy we couldn’t summon on our own.”
And, so, in the over 60 years since the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, yet another generation holds the tension of both lament and joy as did previous generations. We seek neither to be consumed with sorrow in such a way that experiencing hope seems impossible nor to be intoxicated with hope in such a way that acknowledging sorrow seems improbable. Like the strings in a piano, we live in and with this tension. Whether in lament or joy, may the music of our lives be beautiful.
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