A Very Herod Christmas
The Holy Family is still being hunted and persecuted among us.
Trump decided to mark this Christmas week with another massacre of the innocents.
On Monday, the U.S. military reportedly struck yet another civilian vessel in the Pacific, bringing the total number of boat strikes to 29. An estimated 105 people have now perished in these strikes. None posed any military threat to the United States, had any means to defend themselves, or received the benefit of a charge or trial before being blotted from the Earth.
The Christmas story we know from the Gospels tells of a family that has to flee their home in order to escape a corrupt ruler bent on summarily executing the innocent.
In honor of this refugee story and the human dignity of immigrant communities in the United States, Catholic clergy in Florida this week begged the Trump administration to pause deportations, at least until after the holidays. In response to this humane plea, the administration replied only: “President Trump was elected based on his promise to the American people to deport criminal illegal aliens. And he’s keeping that promise.”
Trump’s officials evidently have their own understanding of the true meaning of Christmas. Pete Hegseth, you may recall, recently posted an image of beloved children’s book character Franklin the Turtle blowing people up with a rocket launcher. “For your Christmas wish list…” he wrote.
DHS Secretary and noted dog-slayer Kristi Noem, meanwhile, posted an image of ICE agents in riot gear, surrounded by colorful Christmas lights. “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME,” she wrote.
Some houses of worship have felt moved to mark the contrast between the Gospel message we celebrate on Christmas and what we are seeing from this purportedly-Christian government. A nativity scene in Dedham, Massachusetts, for instance, is missing its figurine of the infant Jesus this year. In his place is a sign reading “ICE was here.”
“Peace on Earth?” a banner over the display reads.
Another church in Chicago shows the Virgin Mary flanked by two Roman guards and wearing a gas mask.
The mask is presumably a reference to the untold gallons of tear gas that federal agents have unloaded on protesters across the greater Chicagoland area over the past months, wherever they demonstrated against Trump’s mass deportation and detention campaign.
I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s bitter reflection on another Christmas a century ago:
‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.
Poison-gas and rocket launchers, that is…
Indeed, it can feel like this Christmas, only the Herods of the world have cause to celebrate. Meanwhile the Son of Man still has no place to lay his head.
Of course, this administration would likely say that the Christmas story has nothing to do with their policies. Just about every senior official in this government performs some version of evangelical Protestant or conservative Catholic belief. And they would probably say this is fully consistent with their policies of massacring civilians on boats and deporting people to torture-prisons abroad.
How? Because Jesus’s message was not about this world, but the world to come. “I think the president wants to get to heaven — as I hope we all do in this room as well,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently put it.
Conservatives can evidently be very literal-minded about the Bible when it suits them. But as soon as the scriptures say something like “welcome the stranger”—they assume that must have been a spiritual metaphor.
“This is the religion that Marx referred to as / ‘the opium of the people,’” the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote.
It is also, he said, the religion of the powers of the world who crucified Christ.
“But,” Dalton added, “there is a positive religion too / that flows from the heart […] in words and songs/ and that risks its life in this world, and not only after death.”
As shown by the demonstrators being tear-gassed in Chicago; the innocent men and women being wrestled to the ground and confined in inhuman dungeons because they dared to try to escape tyranny and make a better life for their children; the Protestant and Catholic clergy and churches risking the retaliation of the powers of the world to minister to people regardless of their immigration status…
All those who serve in this religion, Dalton writes, are the true “salt of the Earth.”