Christmas of course is preeminently about remembering Christ’s
birth. Some sourpusses like to grouch, understandably, about the
holiday’s commercialization. But the globalization of Christmas,
for all its kitschy faults, overall seems good for humanity. Even
in its most vulgar forms, Christmas retains at least an echo of
good cheer and generosity. The most despotic tyrannies typically do
not like Christmas. Today, unsurprisingly, North Korea and Saudi
Arabia actively suppress Christmas. But much of the rest of the
world seems to have at least secular versions of the holiday.
Although still officially communist, Chinese cities are more and
more decorated with holiday trees and lights, partly reflecting the
country’s growing economic integration with the West, partly
reflecting the growing Christian population. Much of the world’s
Christmas ornaments are now manufactured in China.
The old Soviet Union tried to displace Christmas by
highlighting New Year’s Day as the alternative Winter
holiday. (In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Christmas follows
New Year’s.) Of course, Christmas outlasted Soviet communism. East
European communism collapsed in 1989 in time for Christmas.
Romania’s brutal tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his
equally brutish wife were tried and executed by the “people” on
Christmas Day. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on
Christmas Day, providentially ending the Soviet Union.
Less than two decades later, how easy to forget that the
last century was dominated by totalitarian monster regimes like the
Soviet Union. Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and German
National Socialism together murdered more millions than all that
century’s wars combined. The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing
its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins. This Christmas, we can
celebrate, among so much else, despite the world’s current
travails, that the great totalitarian murder machines are, for the
most part, gone. It’s a sad recollection that the Western
democracies, at times, had to align with some of these tyrannies in
struggles for preservation against the others, with Stalin against
Hitler, with Mao against the Soviets. Better that the Devil’s
followers should be divided against each other, but the moral
compromises were often horrendous.
It’s also a sad recollection that many in Christ’s Church,
through naiveté or betrayal of their faith, openly praised some of
those monster regimes, despite their horrendous persecution of
Christ’s flock and countless other political undesirables, not to
mention the suppression of Christmas. One brief but scandalous
example comes from 1923 in the Soviet Union, when Lenin still
lived, and before Stalin reigned. Despite the brutal Bolshevik
police state, streams of useful dupes streamed in from the West.
Among them was American Methodist Bishop Edgar Blake, who
outrageously attended a 1923 Soviet church conference when the
Bolsheviks were tormenting the official Russian Orthodox Patriarch
and creating their own puppet “Living Church.” The Methodist bishop
gushed to his Soviet audience: “For the first time in human history
a great nation is dedicating itself to do good for the masses of
humanity and is striving to attain everything God-given for
man.”
Bishop Blake had proceeded to Moscow despite the Soviets
having recently executed a Roman Catholic archbishop. A Methodist
cohort of the bishop explained away the martyred bishop as a Polish
“spy.” Blake himself did not seem to see the big deal, later
readily admitting the Soviets had already murdered 1,200 Orthodox
bishops and priests. Blake’s outrageous comments, globally reported
in newspapers, prompted the Methodist bishops back home to panic
into damage control, recalling Blake, and disavowing this
unauthorized “personal opinion.”
Heading home, Blake stopped in Paris, unhelpfully
commenting about Bolshevik anti-church atrocities: “If the Soviet
government dealt harshly with certain ecclesiastics it justified
itself on the ground that it was fighting for its life.” He chirped
that Moscow probably had less crime than Chicago. While insisting
he opposed dictatorship, Blake still declared: “With their social
aims in so far as they seek to improve and uplift the masses who
have for centuries been exploited and oppressed for the benefit of
the few I am in accord as I believe every man who accepts the
teachings of Jesus Christ must be.”
The Washington Post editorialized
against Bishop Blake’s absurdities and against “other religious
apologists for the Soviets,” citing the Bolsheviks’ “murder and
terrorism.” Prominent Methodist minister Frederick Harris, future
pastor of Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. and future
U.S. Senate chaplain, denounced Blake, saying Methodism is “no more
in league with the seven devils who now occupy the Russian house
than it was with the devil that has been cast
out.”
Once appearing before his fellow bishops, Blake was
unapologetic: “I am not a Bolshevist and I am not a reactionary,
thank God! I am a little of both.” He urged Methodist support for
the new Soviet-created “Living Church” that supposedly would
displace traditional Orthodoxy. He told the assembled bishops,
meeting in Brooklyn, that the new communist sanctioned church, to
which he promised $50,000 from U.S. Methodism, was closer to
Methodism by discouraging relics, hierarchy, and celibate clergy.
In other words, the Soviets were simply Methodizing the
Orthodox.
“I think we ought to sacrifice our denominationalism to
save religion in Russia,” Blake implored. “Methodism holds the
destiny of Russia in its hands.” He also claimed: “I think personal
property is more secure in Moscow than in Brooklyn.” One fellow
left-wing bishop responded: “I take my stand at the side of the
brother who saw 150 million people in need and struck out in their
direction.” The whole Board of Bishops more carefully avoided
endorsing any support for the Soviet-backed church, instead
politely commending Blake for “fidelity and devotion” in carrying
out “a delicate mission.”
Blake’s travel colleague to Moscow, a prominent Methodist
editor, was even more provocative than the bishop, hailing the
attempted new Soviet puppet church as a “great religious
reformation” comparable to Martin Luther’s, “destined” to
“revolutionize Christian thought” and “extend its beneficent
influence to the uttermost parts of the earth.” In fact, the
attempted “Living Church” eventually collapsed, despite the
infusion of Western money. The Soviets contented themselves instead
to tightly control the existing Russian Orthodox Church, which
managed to persevere.
Over the next 70 years there would be many more Bishop
Blakes from many denominations in the West, identifying God’s
Kingdom among the Soviets, among the Maoists, in Castro’s Cuba, in
Sandinista Nicaragua, even in the killing fields of Southeast Asia.
Their spiritually blind utterances discredited parts of the church,
but never the faith itself, which continued to sustain persecuted
millions.
Christmas is now celebrated, however imperfectly, in most
lands where the worst tyrants tried to eradicate it and its
celebrants. May the Christmas spirit spread and grow, sweeping away
the despots and malevolent cranks who resent its good will and
promise of transcendent hope.
