Take a close look at Donald Trump—the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego, even the degree of obeisance he evokes among his followers—and, despite the fervent support he receives from many evangelical Christians, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there’s something a little pagan about the man. Or consider Elon Musk. With his drive to conquer space to expand the human empire, his flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes, his 10 children with three different women, Musk embodies the wealth worship and ideological imperialism of ego that are more than a little pagan too.

Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result. They centered the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.

Although paganism is one of those catchall words applied to widely disparate views, the worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force. In the modern world, each ideological wing has claimed a piece of paganism as its own. On the left, there are the world-worshippers, who elevate nature to the summit of sanctity. On the right, you see the worship of force in the forms of wealth, political power, and tribal solidarity. In other words, the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.  

[Tim Alberta: My father, is faith, and Donald Trump]

The two may be tied together. We used to believe that human beings stood at the summit of creation. A lot has since conspired to make us feel less important: an appreciation of the vastness of the cosmos, the reality that we are motivated by evolutionary pressures we barely understand, psychology’s proof of the murkiness inside our own psyche, even the failures of Promethean technology. (Yes, we have smartphones, but we also have a climate crisis; it’s slender comfort that the bad news is now instantaneously available.) As we slide down the slope of significance, we may undertake to prove how potent we are.

Shortly before the Second World War, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee described communism and fascism each as a form of idolatry that “worships the creature instead of worshipping the creator.” If we don’t have a God to simultaneously assure us of our centrality and our smallness, we will exaggerate both. Rabbi Simcha Bunim, a Hasidic master of the 18th and 19th centuries, used to advise his disciples to carry two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. In one pocket was the phrase “For me the world was created.” In the other, “I am but dust and ashes.” In the balance between the two lies the genuine status of the human being.

* * *

The current worship of wealth is a pagan excrescence. I am spending this year at Harvard, and it is not easy to find an undergraduate who isn’t interested in “finance.” The poets want to go into finance. The history students are studying investment. For a long time in the United States, the accumulation of capital was teleological: Wealth was a means of improving society, of creating something greater than oneself. The current ideology of wealth is solipsistic: I should become wealthy because I should become wealthy. Gone is the New Testament admonition that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. On campus, a lot of students are now threading that needle.

Wealth is a cover for, or a means to, the ultimate object of worship in a pagan society, which is power. “Life simply is the will to power,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in the manner of a billionaire tech bro. That’s probably truer to Google’s corporate ethos than “Don’t be evil.” The reshaping of politics as a pure contest unconstrained by truth or mutuality, a feature of our political landscape, is both Nietzschean and pagan. The use and abuse of Nietzsche’s work by the Nazis was only to be expected.

Nietzsche criticized Judaism and Christianity for what he saw as their valorization of weakness, which he despised. The Greeks taught that the rich and powerful and beautiful were favored by the gods. Then along came Judaism, and after it, Christianity, arguing that widows and orphans and the poor were beloved of God. This was Judaism’s “spiritual revenge,” Nietzsche argued, which spread through the world on Christian wings. The Nazis, in championing blond, blue-eyed Aryan Übermenschen—a term they took from Nietzsche—were reinvigorating a pagan ideal.

[Arthur Brooks: Three paths toward the meaning of life]

This worship of the body—of beauty, which is another form of power—is a pagan inheritance. The monotheistic faiths did not disdain beauty, but it was not an ideal they extolled. Not only do biblical heroes rarely merit a physical description, but even traditionally heroic attributes are portrayed as worthless if they lack a spiritual foundation. In the Bible, if someone is physically imposing, that usually signals trouble. Samson is a boor who redeems himself at the last minute. Saul stands a head above the crowd, but is an utter failure as king. The English critic Matthew Arnold famously said that the Greeks believed in the holiness of beauty, and the Hebrews believed in the beauty of holiness.

The veneration of physical beauty, the Instagramization of culture, is pagan to its roots. The overwhelming cascade of drugs, surgeries, and procedures intended to enhance one’s physical appearance—all precursors to “designer babies”—is a tribute to the externalization of our values. Movements of hypermasculinity, championed figures such as the now-indicted Andrew Tate, flow from the elevation of the human body to idolatrous status.

It is not enough to look good for a while; we have to look good forever. Attempts by some billionaires to become immortal, and the conceit that we should never die, are born of a conviction that we can transcend our finitude, that we can become as gods. Other billionaires make forays into space, or dream of conquering other worlds. Although this is sold as utilitarian—we are using up the resources of the planet on which we are planted—this is not a public-works project, but a Promethean one.

The virtue that falls furthest in the pagan pantheon of traits is humility. In the ancient Greek epics, humility is not even reckoned a virtue. Edward Gibbon, in his monumental history of the Roman empire, assigned Christianity a large role in its fall: “The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.”

Wealth, power, beauty, and lust for domination made Rome into Rome, in Gibbon’s account. Humility, sexual restraint, patience, and tolerance sapped the brio of a once-great empire, and it fell to the barbarians, unbridled by the strictures of monotheistic faith. What we might call the religious virtues, according to Gibbon and his ideological successors, made defending society impossible.

You can see the same worship of power over heroic endurance and restraint today on the political right. “I like people who aren’t captured,” Trump infamously said about John McCain. Consider how Trump reframes heroism, making it not about bravery, but about success. And the idolatrous slant is also visible in the symbology of the far right. January 6 made Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” with his bare chest and Norse headdress, instantly notorious. Norse and Viking mythology have played a large role in the far right, just as they did for the Nazis. The Norse were people of conquest, rape, and pillage, at least in the popular imagination. That the right, which has long marched under the banner of Christian values, is beginning to embrace pagan symbols ought to be deeply troubling.

[James Surowiecki: Why Americans can’t accept the good economic news]

But modern paganism is hardly confined to the political right. The left-wing movement to demote the status of human beings displays a complementary form of paganism. In The Case Against Human Superiority, the Harvard philosopher Christine M. Korsgaard argues that because no standard is common to humans and animals, we cannot sustain a moral hierarchy. In other words, because wildebeests don’t read Kant, we cannot hold them to the categorical imperative. Korsgaard doubts whether one can say that the death of a human being is really worse than the death of, say, an aardvark. Such arguments go back to Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation was a landmark in the field. Interviewed almost 50 years after the book was published, Singer told The Guardian, “Just as we accept that race or sex isn’t a reason for a person counting more, I don’t think the species of a being is a reason for counting more than another being.”

For those who believe that the pagan outlook has no consequences, Singer illustrated the radical difference between believing that human beings are created in the image of God and believing that they are animals like other animals. In the same interview, after saying that a child on a respirator should perhaps be allowed to die, Singer said, “And I think, even in cases where the child doesn’t need a respirator, parents should be able to consult doctors to reach a considered judgment, including that the child’s life is not one that is going to be a benefit for the child or for their family, and that therefore it is better to end the child’s life.” After all, we shoot horses to put them out of their suffering. If we are all animals, why morally elevate an infant over a horse?

* * *

The monotheistic faiths are not without their own failings. Their critics note the manifold cruelties that have been perpetrated in their name. No one who looks at the history of any faith can have illusions about the ability of believers to prosecute the most horrendous atrocities. As a Jew, I am not likely to overlook the cruelties of religious people to one another throughout the centuries.

The question, however, is not whether beliefs can lead us astray, as they all can, but what sorts of beliefs are most likely to lend themselves to respect for human life and flourishing. Should we see human beings as virtual supermen, free to flout any convention, to pursue power at any cost, to accumulate wealth without regard for consequence or its use? Are gold toilets and private rocket ships our final statement of significance? Or is it a system of belief that considers human beings all synapse and no soul, an outgrowth of the animal world and in no way able to rise above the evolutionary mosaic of which everything from the salmon to sage is a piece?

Monotheism, at its best, acknowledges genuine humility about our inability to know what God is and what God wishes, but asserts that although human beings are elevated above the shackles of nature, we are still subordinate to something greater than ourselves.

If we are nothing but animals, the laws of the jungle inevitably apply. If we are all pugilists attacking one another in a scramble to climb to the top of the pole, the laws of the jungle still apply. But if we are all children of the same God, all kin, all convinced that there is a spark of eternity in each person but that none of us is superhuman, then maybe we can return to being human.

This Christmas season, I have been reflecting on the words of my favorite author, C. S. Lewis, who once observed: “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

Speaking about American evangelicalism was never my intention. Having grown up steeped in Christianity’s right-wing subculture—the son of a megachurch minister, a follower of Jesus, someone who self-identified as “evangelical” since childhood—I was a reliable defender of the faith. I rejected the caricatures of people like my parents. I took offense at efforts to mock and marginalize evangelicals. I tried to see the best in the Church, even when the Church was at its worst.

It took the loss of my father, and the traumatic events surrounding his funeral—as I write in the prologue of my new book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, which is excerpted in our latest issue—to reconsider the implications of that silence.

The corruption of American Christianity is nothing new: Modern-day pharisees from Jerry Falwell Sr. to Paula White have spent 50 years weaponizing the gospel to win elections and dominate the country, exploiting the cultural insecurities of their unwitting brethren for political, professional, and financial gain, all while reducing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a caricature in the eyes of unbelievers. The resulting collapse of the Church’s reputation in this country—with Sunday attendance, positive perceptions of organized religion, and the number of self-identified Christians all at historic lows—leaves evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors like never before. Unbelievers might well prefer it this way. They might be tempted to shrug and move along, assuming that the crack-up of evangelicalism isn’t their problem. They are mistaken.

The crisis at hand is not simply that Christ’s message has been corroded, but that his Church has been radicalized. The state-ordered closings of sanctuaries during COVID-19, the conspiracy-fueled objections to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, the misinformation around vaccines and educational curricula—these and other culture-war flash points have accelerated notions of imminent Armageddon inside American Christendom. A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear—that Christianity is in the crosshairs of the government, that an evil plot to topple America’s Judeo-Christian heritage hinges on silencing believers and subjugating the Church—now animates the religious right in ways that threaten the very foundations of our democracy.

“You sound like a hysterical maniac if you say the government’s coming after us. But I believe they are,” Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor and longtime Trump loyalist, told me in the book. “It happened in Nazi Germany. They didn’t put six million Jews in the crematorium immediately … It was a slow process of marginalization, isolation, and then the ‘final solution.’ I think you’re seeing that happen in America. I believe there’s evidence that the Biden administration has weaponized the Internal Revenue Service to come after churches.” (The “evidence” Jeffress cited in making this leap—bureaucratic regulations clearing the way for concentration camps—was nonexistent. When pushed, he mentioned a single court case that was ultimately decided in favor of religious liberty.)  

Mobilizing in response to this perceived threat, the forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. It is no coincidence that, just recently, Donald Trump began suggesting that he would ban any migrant from entering the United States unless they are Christian. Those who don’t share “our religion,” the famously impious ex-president pronounced, won’t be welcome here if he’s elected again. Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism is authoritarianism infused with religious justification. It hardly matters whether the would-be tyrant is personally devout; Vladimir Putin’s lack of theology didn’t stop him from partnering with the Russian Orthodox Church to frame the bloody invasion of Ukraine as God’s ordained conquest of a satanic stronghold. To believe that it couldn’t happen here—mass conflict rooted in identitarian conviction and driven by religious zeal—is to ignore both 20th-century precedent and the escalating holy-war rhetoric inside the evangelical Church.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model servanthood and self-sacrifice; I believe he commanded us to love our neighbor, to turn the other cheek toward those who wish us harm, to show grace toward outsiders and let our light shine so they might glorify our heavenly Father. Not all professing Christians bother adhering to these biblical precepts, but many millions of American believers still do. It is incumbent upon them to stand up to this extremism in the Church.

Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray it might be so.

After Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in 2021, Donald Trump Jr. made a public appeal to Elon Musk for help. “Wanted to come up with something to deal with some of this nonsense and the censorship that’s going on right now, obviously only targeted one way,” he said in a video that was posted to Instagram. “Why doesn’t Elon Musk create a social-media platform?” (The video was titled “Here’s How Elon Musk Could Save Free Speech.”)

This was—I think we can say it—prescient.

A little more than a year later, Musk was promising not an entirely new site, but a hostile takeover of a familiar one. And he explicitly presented this action as a corrective to right-wing grievances about “shadowbanning” and censorship. He promised to use his new platform to combat the “woke mind virus” sweeping the nation and said he wanted to save free speech. (His supposed devotion to unfettered expression, it’s worth noting, sometimes comes second to his personal feuds.)

So here we are. Liberal activists used to be the ones suggesting that the social network could be used to organize in defiance of the state; now technology accelerationists are the ones saying this. “Elon acquired Twitter, fired the wokes, and removed DC’s central point of control over social media,” the tech-world iconoclast Balaji Srinivasan wrote in November. At a conference he led in Amsterdam the month before, he talked about how the tech world could build a “parallel establishment” with its own schools, financial systems, and media. Co-opting existing organizations could work, too.

[Read: Twitter is a far-right social network]

Previously, the “alt-tech” ecosystem was a bit of a sideshow. It encompassed moderation-averse social-media sites that popped up in the Trump era and resembled popular services such as Twitter and Facebook; their creators typically resented that their views had been deplatformed elsewhere. Parler and especially Gab (which is run by a spiky Christian nationalist) were never going to be used by very many normal people—apart from their political content, they were junky-looking and covered in spam.

But now, alt-tech is emerging from within, Alien-style. Twitter’s decade of tinkering with content moderation in response to public pressure—adding line items to its policies, expanding its partnerships with civil-society organizations—is over. Now we have X, a rickety, reactionary platform with a skeleton crew behind it. Substack, which got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements, has embraced a Muskian set of free-speech principles: As Jonathan Katz reported for The Atlantic last month, the company’s leadership is unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform. (In a statement published last week, Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, said, “We don’t like Nazis either,” but he and his fellow executives are “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”) The trajectory of both resembles that of Rumble, which started out as a YouTube alternative offering different monetization options for creators, then pulled itself far to the political fringes and has been very successful.

These transformations are more about culture than actual product changes. Musk has tinkered plenty with the features of Twitter/X in the past year, though he’s also talked about changing far more than he actually has. More notable, he’s brought back the accounts of conspiracy theorists, racists, and anti-Semites, and he got rid of Twitter’s policy against the use of a trans person’s deadname as a form of harassment. In a recent Rumble video, the white supremacists Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes praised Musk’s management of the platform, saying that the “window has shifted noticeably on issues like white identity” during his tenure. And in support of anecdotal claims that hate speech rose after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a team of researchers has shown that this was actually the case. They observed a large spike right after the acquisition, and even after that spike had somewhat abated, hate speech still remained higher than pre-acquisition levels, “hinting at a new baseline level of hate speech post-Musk.”  

Social-media platforms are kind of like parties: People’s perception of them matters almost as much as the reality. You can see changing attitudes about whom Twitter or X is for in recent polling from the Pew Research Center. Two years ago, 60 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning Twitter users thought the site was having a negative impact on American democracy. In 2023, the number was just 21 percent. And the percentage of those users who thought Twitter was having a positive impact jumped from 17 to 43 percent. Conversely, Democrats and Democratic-leaning users were more likely this year than they were two years ago to say that Twitter was having a negative impact on American democracy, and less likely to say it was having a positive one. Pew also found a partisan divide regarding abuse and harassment on the platform, with 65 percent of Democratic users saying these are major problems and just 29 percent of Republican users agreeing. The gap between the two positions has quadrupled in the past two years.

[Read: To be honest with you, no influencer has been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump Jr.]

When I spoke with Keith Burghardt, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California who worked on the hate-speech study, he emphasized that the research doesn’t address the specific cause of the increase. It could be that reductions in staff or the disbanding of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council had a significant effect. Or that may have stemmed from other changes in moderation policy or enforcement that aren’t visible to the public. It could be that Elon Musk’s public statements made people rush to the site to see what they could get away with saying. “In fact, it’s important to mention that we found hate speech increased a little bit even before Elon Musk bought Twitter,” Burghardt told me. “Perhaps because of users anticipating a perceived drop in moderation.”

This is not an end point but a funky state of limbo. Instagram’s Threads signed up 100 million people in its first week, but activity dropped after the big debut and growth appears to have slowed. Platform migration is complicated, and early research has found that many people who are unhappy on X have not left the site entirely. Instead, they tend to make secondary accounts on alternative sites. They show “wavering commitment” to staying on X, while still being more active there than they are on alternatives like Bluesky or Threads. Pew data published in May showed that the majority of “highly active tweeters” were still Democrats and Democratic leaners. However, these people were posting less frequently than they had been before, and this data was collected before Musk’s recent public display of anti-Semitism.

“Does the Musk Twitter Takeover Matter?” Deana Rohlinger, a sociology professor at Florida State University, asked in a February analysis of the site’s supposed mutation. The question was rhetorical; when I spoke with her recently, she said the answer was definitely yes. “Despite its flaws,” Twitter was something of a common space in its prime, she said. New microblogging sites may want to serve that same purpose, but she isn’t sure that it will be possible. The hostility between these two entrenched, polarized online factions may be so much that they just don’t want to share a space anymore. “Perhaps it’s a reflection of our broader political environment and media environment,” she said. “I don’t know that you can re-create what Twitter did, because things have changed entirely too much. It’s not 2006 anymore.” The Twitter diaspora, she thought, was cursed to just drift.

As alt-tech has taken over the mainstream, the old mainstream has found itself in a funny position. Five years after the #DeleteFacebook campaign, many are cheering Mark Zuckerberg—a literal Elon Musk sparring partner—as a hero in the platform wars. Our only response to the current state of the web seems to be a sigh of resignation: Sure, let’s just do everything on Instagram.

The Washington, D.C., my sisters and I grew up in was known as Chocolate City for good reason. As Black children in the city then, we were a majority. We sauntered from school to store to home to kickball field, oblivious to our segregation. When I was a tween, and just beginning to be conscious about the giving of gifts, my sisters and I were Christmas shopping at one of the festive pop-up markets in our corner of the city. We found a stellar gift for one of our grandmothers, which we knew for sure she would love. We knew for sure because of her religiosity.

No one was more openly devoted to the will of the Lord than Ma Jones, our father’s mother. Mabel Irene Young Jones was her name. She traveled very few miles in her lifetime, and yet she traveled a long way during her 65 years in Northwest Washington, D.C., where she was born, Black and poor, in 1912. When she died, in 1977, she was proud to have obtained with her mother and daughter a rowhouse, which they’d purchased collectively and occupied as multiple generations.

Unlike so many Black parents who faced unrelenting poverty and all the attendant ways that Black lives are cut short, Ma Jones had managed to raise to adulthood all four of her children. She had not had to live her life out of order. Her children buried her, and not the other way around.

By her own careful design, Ma Jones was the personification of Black matriarchy: loving, hovering, caring, devoted almost to the point of martyrdom. She worked three jobs not for herself, but for the family; not for herself, but for our future. Not one of us doubted that she modeled herself after Jesus—his behaviors, his ideals. For the most part, we did not talk about religion with Ma Jones; we watched her Christianity in action. For Ma Jones, the principles of Christianity were to be accepted, not discussed.

We found a painting of Jesus who was as chocolate brown as Ma Jones. I can still see her—dark skin ringed with wisdom lines, showing age in the same way as trees. To me, this was definitely a gift opportunity, because the image was recognizable as the holy man Ma Jones was so engaged with. The painted image carried the same gaze as the generalized, ubiquitous portrait of Jesus. But this one was a Black man. His rich brown skin was a pleasant surprise. We had found a religious artifact, but with an update.

Black Jesus in his frame was too big to wrap, so we covered the painting in a sheet and stood it upright behind our grandmother’s couch, which was slipcovered in plastic and never sat upon. Not even by visitors. (If you came into the house and someone was sitting on the sofa, you knew it was death. Or the census. Or the pastor, bringing holy counsel.) Our Black Jesus waited his turn in the holiest spot in the house.

[Read: Insisting Jesus was white is bad history and bad theology]

When gift-giving time came, my sisters and I worked as a team to ceremonially reveal our studiously selected present. Our grandmother looked on, smiling. We carefully unsheeted our Jesus, and we watched our grandmother as recognition slowly dawned. Our grandmother’s smile turned downward. While we stood, primped and positively beaming, her smile transitioned to a gasp. Our spirits could not help but droop. Our Christmas dresses and shiny knees at once seemed like overkill. Our grandmother turned and left the room, holding her hand over her mouth. Sacrilege!

Babies of the ’60s, we were shocked, incredulous. Before our era, Black people were discouraged at every turn. We were conditioned to look white or be called ugly. Mostly everything you bought was organized for the white-skinned. Makeup, toys, hosiery, books. White all around. The color marked “nude” or “flesh” was pink or beige. American culture ignored our melanin.

But those days were done! We emerged from the belligerent, fire-hose, and dog-mauling ’60s with hard-won new energy, and big new pride. We chanted with James Brown: Say it loud. I’m Black and I’m proud. We wanted to wear hose dyed for our brown legs, to see dolls with sienna skin and woolly hair, to be self-reflective and not subject to images as imposed. We could and did make purchases that included and reflected our history and our interests and our ebullient view of our culture. We put ourselves on platforms in fashion we curated: kente, head wraps, Afros, African metallurgy, along with flowers, bell-bottoms, and platform shoes. We danced openly to djembe drums.  

My sisters and I, though young, were somewhat conscious of the change we were living. We knew we had made progress. We had mantras. Cue James Brown. And so, that Christmas Eve, we watched our grandmother wordlessly flee our unveiling, and we felt dejected and confused. We rested the frame of the painting on our insteps, between the strap and the arc of our patent-leather shoes. Ma Jones’s displeasure and abrupt departure shut down Christmas Eve.

We looked to the adults, assembled and bedecked in their Christmas red, to explain why our grandmother had run from our lovely, if revolutionary, gift. Could they, or would they, explain why our grandmother had not liked our Black Jesus? We were heartbroken that our deep-brown Jesus hadn’t inspired delight. No explanation was forthcoming. But even as a child, raised Christian, you learn that God is a power and a spirit. Children are aware that pictures and books emerge from the human hand.

To see Ma Jones so startled and unsettled has never left me as a memory of this season, even after decades of Christmases. Ma Jones could not or would not face a Black person depicted as the son of a God generally heralded as white. At that time, young and with a limited vocabulary, I was dancing between a poem and a theorem in my mind: If the good God cannot be Black, then just like they say, no Black can be good, and no good can be seen in Black you.

We did not keep the painting. My father took our gift out of the house; I distinctly remember a vibe of removing a bad spirit. We recognized this situation as a peculiar limitation. Ma Jones could love us so thoroughly, and yet her Jesus could not be like us. You learn, quickly, as a Black child in America, that what we can imagine and what we can achieve is bound by the time in which we live. Our Jesus experience raised questions about believing as a Black person in a God depicted and envisioned as white. Ma Jones was not to be blamed that the Jesus that hung in her household was an image of a young white man. She was like other Black Americans passing by that same picture of Jesus as one of the triumvirate of martyrs: Jesus, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr.

Over time, I have come to view this episode as a clash of generations. We could never deny our grandmother’s great pride in her three granddaughters. She was convinced of our beauty and enamored of our potential, and she consistently demonstrated her fond appraisal.

But in her expansive religion, she could not apply any vision of us, or of herself, to the image of the God she worshipped. It is a contradiction resoundingly emblazoned on my formative spirit. Most Christmases, I think of Ma Jones with deep appreciation. And now that he is gone, I think of my father, her devoted son, who whisked away our revolutionary childhood choice, our gift of Black Jesus, into history, into erasure, into the realm of solemn memory. Each new generation barrels on from the past. My sisters and I are now barreling toward matriarchy, but we remember the Christmas when we, as children, had to face my grandmother’s burden of envisioning all that is holy as white.

Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”

The web is full of tips for how to deal with challenging relatives in these months. But if you’re a bookworm, your first recourse might be to turn to reading: Other people’s emotional conflagrations, fictional or not, may help you feel better about any you’re currently living out with your own family. Anyone in need of an escape can turn to this list of books. Each serves as a reminder that although your own kin may be difficult, you at least aren't related to the ones below.

Penguin Books

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

The patriarchs of two insular, upper-middle-class families, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, have been at each other’s throats, academically speaking, for years. Their intellectual feud centers on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, but their disagreements run much deeper: Howard is white and liberal, an atheist, and a supporter of affirmative action, whereas Monty is Black and conservative, a devout Christian, and believes that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. Jerome, Howard’s eldest, interns with Monty in England and falls in love with his family, and particularly his daughter, Vee—an affair that ends embarrassingly for all. When the Kippses then move to Wellington, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks away from the Belseys, and Monty begins teaching at the same university where Howard is a professor, things get more complicated. The men butt heads over university policies even as their wives become friends, and their daughters eye each other suspiciously while taking similar classes. Although each family has tender moments and elements of happiness too, you may well be relieved that you are part of neither.

[Read: Why families fight during holidays]

Mariner

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

In Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir, she richly illustrates the beautiful Gothic Revival house she grew up in, complete with gas chandeliers, ornate lamps, and Chippendale furniture. Bechdel’s father restored this house with great devotion throughout her childhood, often enlisting her and her siblings’ reluctant help. The care he displayed wasn’t usually directed at his actual family, however. As Bechdel writes early in the book, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” He dies in an apparent suicide when Bechdel is in college, and in light of his death, the building he so lovingly worked on seems to have been a shallow front for his internal unhappiness. Fun Home’s pages reanimate Bechdel’s own coming-of-age alongside her growing understanding of her father, whose memory looms large over every scene—especially the ones where she visits home after he dies. When she does, it’s clear that “his shame,” Bechdel writes, “inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.”

Penguin Books

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

The Richardsons are perfect. They have a huge house and four cars (one for each parent, one for each child old enough to have a license), and live in an idyllic neighborhood (Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the earliest American planned communities, where lawns cannot be higher than six inches). Yet Ng’s second novel opens with destruction: The Richardson home is burning, and the cause is quickly determined to be arson. The narrative then rewinds to the previous summer, when Mia, a single mother, and her daughter, Pearl, moved into the Richardsons’ rental property at the edge of town. Pearl succumbs to the Richardsons’ charms, but Mia, an artist who has moved her child from place to place, is more cautious. Throwing further drama into the mix is the feud over Mirabelle, a baby adopted by friends of the Richardsons’ but whose birth mother is a Chinese-immigrant co-worker of Mia’s. As Mia’s, Pearl’s, and the Richardsons’ various opinions on the custody case become heightened, their worst sides quickly become apparent, and the reader can see how money and its attendant superiority complex have created a festering emptiness beneath the Richardsons’ immaculate exterior.   

[Read: How to enjoy the holidays your way]

Simon & Schuster

I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Everyone wants to be famous, right? Ask a former child star that question and you might get a resounding denial. In her memoir, McCurdy, who first became known for her role in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly, writes from the perspective of her child self to great effect, introducing readers to the cutthroat world of auditions, casting directors, and bodily expectations thrust upon her as early as age 6. Her mom, Debra, always made it clear that she was vicariously carrying out her own desire to be an actor through her daughter—and McCurdy, for her part, deeply wished to fulfill her mother’s dream. Despite the book’s title, McCurdy movingly writes about how much she loved Debra amid her mom’s mood swings, overbearing expectations, and manipulative behavior, which included introducing McCurdy to calorie restriction at age 11 and insisting on showering her up through her adolescence. The result is an emotionally complex portrait of painful, abusive family dynamics, paired with an adult’s journey of recognizing, grieving, and ultimately coming to terms with them.

Vintage

Meaty, by Samantha Irby

Irby is a fan of lists, which are used to great, and hilarious, effect in her first essay collection. Meaty confronts its reader with these facts: First, the author is comfortable plumbing the most intimate depths, dents, divots, and dimples of her body for comedy. Second, she’s happy to provide some seriously easy recipes that you can make even while you’re up to your elbows in family time. Third, in her youth, Irby was the caretaker for her mom, who had multiple sclerosis. Fourth, Irby’s big sisters had moved out already, while her father was in and (mostly) out of their home, and she had to deal with normal high-school woes while also hiding the severity of her mother’s illness from teachers and social-service workers. The author writes poignantly (and also hysterically) about their role reversal: The prepubescent Irby “didn’t yet understand the difference between God and the president,” but she knew “which pills went with breakfast and which ones were taken after dinner.” Once her mother was put into a nursing home, Irby took three buses to tell her mom about the “boys I had crushes on, the chemistry teacher I hated with the fire of a thousand suns,” while also worrying about the nurses hitting her mother when she wasn’t around. The precision and humor with which she conjures her life—without glossing over the hard parts—provides much-needed distraction for the reader.

[Dear Therapist: I don’t want to see my mom this Christmas]

Penguin Classics

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat, and her sister, Constance, live in a mansion on a large plot of land with their uncle, Julian, who is physically ill and forgetful. The Blackwoods are a small family, but there used to be more of them, Merricat helpfully explains; soon readers learn that everyone else died after a single dinner where the sugar bowl was poisoned with arsenic. Constance was the prime suspect, and despite her acquittal on murder charges, everyone in the village near the Blackwood estate is still suspicious and hateful to the point that Constance never leaves the house’s grounds. In response, Merricat, protective of her sister to a fault, harbors cheerful fantasies about the villagers’ bloody deaths. Still, the two sisters and their uncle are rather happy in their small routines: Merricat goes to get groceries twice a week; Constance finds joy in her bright kitchen; Julian is forever at work on a historical account of the day the other Blackwoods died, at times turning to Constance to confirm that it actually happened. When distant, snobbish Cousin Charles comes to visit, Merricat immediately distrusts him, and his presence throws their tightly calibrated lives into tremendous chaos. Many families have relations whose personalities mix poorly—take pleasure in yours (hopefully) not having a combination this explosive.

For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.

Then it all just kind of stopped. My family participated in this big Kwanzaa tradition, and then we didn’t. But, as fringe and out of style as Kwanzaa may be, I wish we’d take it up again.

Kwanzaa, which begins on December 26, is a seven-day, nonreligious holiday inspired by African “first fruits” festivals that focus on appreciation for what the earth provides. There’s a candleholder, or kinara—Swahili is the chosen language of the holiday—with seven candles representing the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. The holiday had a moment in the ’70s, and then again in the ’90s. But by the time my family was celebrating, in the 2000s, Kwanzaa was decisively on the decline. The reported numbers of Kwanzaa observers have varied widely since its inception—from half a million to 12 million—with recent reports suggesting that about one-fifth of Black Americans celebrate, which seems like an overestimate.

[Elijah Anderson: Black success, white backlash]

The holiday’s fortunes have tracked broader trends in African American life. Kwanzaa was born in 1966, during the ascendancy of the Black Power movement and the rise of Afrocentricity. Those ideas have since faded within the Black community, and so has the attraction of Kwanzaa. As the Gift of Gab rapped in 1999, “And them red, black, and green medallions / Was all just part of a trend, I guess / Hardly ever seem them around brothers’ necks no more.”

Kwanzaa’s legitimacy also suffered from the reputation of its creator, Maulana Karenga, who conceived of the holiday in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, where he lived. Five years later, Karenga was convicted of kidnapping and torturing two women within the Black-nationalist organization that he co-founded. He served four years in prison.

When I asked some of my family members why we stopped observing Kwanzaa, nobody brought up Karenga. Instead, the question was met with sighs and shrugs. “I think once the newness of it wears off, you might want to do something else,” my grandma told me. “And with the celebration that they just did for Christmas—by that time, they was all celebrated out.” My mother, who used to display a kinara in our house every December, said that no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

Whatever the reason for its decline, today Kwanzaa feels like a punch line: a Black Nationalist pseudo-holiday, a pastiche of Christmas and Hanukkah in which Black Americans with flimsy cultural connections to West Africa play dress-up in the generalized attire of a vast and diverse region. It isn’t taken seriously as an annual ritual in the way that Thanksgiving and even Valentine’s Day are. From a national perspective, Kwanzaa seems to have become an eccentric and slightly corny footnote. The viral fame of Sandra Lee’s infamously unappetizing Kwanzaa cake—which featured canned apple-pie filling and, inexplicably, a hefty sprinkle of corn nuts—might be the last time the holiday had any national relevance.  

But Kwanzaa still has so much to offer. It’s the only holiday that attempts to create and sustain a sense of shared Black identity. True, the “Black community” is not monolithic—but neither is the Catholic or Jewish or Mexican or Irish American community. And that’s kind of the point: A cultural holiday can help forge common bonds among the heterogeneous members of the same group. That’s especially important for Black Americans, whose ancestral knowledge was violently stolen from us for hundreds of years.

[Peniel E. Joseph: How Black Americans kept reconstruction alive]

Does it feel a little strange, as a third generation Baltimorean, to put on a kente tunic once a year and light some multicolored candles? Yeah. But there’s a deeper meaning to it. Seeing a bunch of Black people packed snugly in a church basement, talking about Africa and building a strong community, had a real effect on me as a kid, and I want more Black people to have that feeling. Kwanzaa helps us acknowledge where we came from, and reminds us that our history didn’t start in the hulls of slave ships or on the banks of Virginia. As welcome as the recent spike in interest in fighting anti-Black racism has been, Blackness involves much more than that struggle. Kwanzaa’s principles of self-determination and collective responsibility emphasize that we are more than just the victims of oppression; while knowing our past is vital, our identity doesn’t revolve around white folk and the many sins they’ve committed against us.

I can understand why so many Black people feel uncomfortable with the overt Afrocentricity of Kwanzaa. Why should Black diasporans with European names who have never set foot on African soil have any reason to “reaffirm and restore African heritage and culture,” as Karenga put it? As Robbyn Mitchell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times in 2015, “My history is America’s history. Africa is an ocean away, and I feel no need to look there for inspiration.”

To me, this is a false choice. Black people can celebrate our Africanness without diminishing our Americanness. In fact, our understanding of the latter is incomplete if we lose sight of the former. The drum patterns that West African slaves used to communicate with one another when they were first taken to North America became the foundations of jazz—one of the crowning artistic achievements of American culture, not just Black culture—and later of hip-hop. We still taste the influence of West African cooking in the traditional dishes we eat today. Yes, it’s fair to criticize people who celebrate Kwanzaa for conflating different West African traditions and being hazy on their African history. But a people that has no real way to specify its origins needs to work with what it has. Nor should Black Americans feel embarrassed because they can’t pinpoint the precise region their ancestors were stolen from.

So this year, among my friends and family, Kwanzaa is coming back. We may not come close to duplicating my cousin Olivia’s old events, and we may not even observe all seven days of Kwanzaa. But, while working on this article, I pestered my mother so much that she decided to bring the kinara out of storage, and that’s a good start. Next year, who knows—maybe we’ll rock the kente cloth, too.

Gaza’s journalists are being killed at an unprecedented rate. Plus, Israel’s powerful US allies: Christian Zionists.

From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.

The best account of how Democrats and Republicans improbably joined forces in the lead-up to this effort to reduce mass incarceration comes from the political scientists David Dagan and Steven Teles. On the left, progressives managed to persuade centrist Democrats that Clinton-era tough-on-crime policies, such as lengthy prison terms for drug crimes and mandatory life sentences for repeat violent offenders, had done more harm than good. Meanwhile, on the right, a group of savvy conservative activists, some moved by Christian notions of forgiveness, reframed mass incarceration as an example of wasteful government spending. With crime hovering around a 50-year low, a vanishingly rare moment of cooperation became possible. Trump was proud to seal the deal.

We’re not in that moment anymore. Violent crime rose during the pandemic, and although it has since ebbed somewhat, fear remains high. Republicans have seized the opportunity to mobilize their base and court independents, attacking progressive criminal-justice reforms and calling for a retrenchment. Taking a dig at Trump earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described the First Step Act as a “huge, huge mistake.” (He’d voted for an early version of it while in Congress.)

In our current environment, an ambitious initiative like the First Step Act seems impossible. Only the most commonsense proposals for improving the system stand much of a chance. But they exist, and one such idea has been gaining attention recently: reinvigorating the parole process so more prisoners who have already served years for their crimes and no longer pose a threat to public safety might be able to go free. How many prisoners fit those criteria is hard to say, but Ben Austen, a Chicago-based journalist, reports that approximately 165,000 inmates older than 55 are in American prisons, many of them sentenced for violent crimes committed in their youth. In his new book, Correction, he makes a case for giving them a way out.

Correction centers on the experiences of two Black men doing time for murder. One evening in 1971, Michael Henderson, an 18-year-old welder, was hanging out in front of a lounge in East St. Louis, Illinois. Richard Schaeffer, a high-school student, had been driving around with some friends; the group stopped Henderson and asked if he’d buy them beer. He did and then demanded a tip. When they refused, Henderson produced a gun, shooting as the kids tried to speed away. Schaeffer was killed. Henderson turned down a plea deal and was convicted, sentenced to 100 to 200 years behind bars.

The year before Schaeffer’s murder, 1970, two Chicago police officers, James Severin and Anthony Rizzato, were ambushed and killed as they walked through the Cabrini-Green housing projects, shot with a rifle at long range before they’d had the chance to draw their weapons. After an intense manhunt, the police arrested Johnnie Veal, a 17-year-old gang member, along with a janitor named George Clifford Knights. Someone reported that they’d heard Veal speak about his role in the killing. Narrowly escaping the death penalty, Veal got 100 to 199 years.

Given the life span of human beings, these sound like irrational, gratuitous sentences. What interests Austen about them is that they were handed down during a period when sentences were often indeterminate: However big the numbers pronounced by a judge, a prisoner could be released at whatever point a parole board decided that he’d been punished enough and had been rehabilitated.

Indeterminate sentencing was an invention of the progressive era. Although the practice gave prison authorities tremendous discretion, it may have had the paradoxical effect of reducing the amount of time prisoners would in fact serve, in part because it created an incentive for them to abide by prison rules and participate in rehabilitative programs.

In the early 1970s, however, indeterminate sentencing came under sharp attack. Echoing the complaints of prisoners radicalized during the ’60s, legal scholars charged that parole-board members—often political appointees with no special expertise—were incompetent at best, and vindictive and racist at worst. These criticisms gained traction, and in 1976, the state of Maine became the first mover in a trend toward the end of “discretionary parole.” In the ’80s and ’90s, victims’-rights advocates and law-and-order types came at parole from the other direction, favoring prison terms with less opportunity for early release that would at least have the benefit of “truth in sentencing.”

States would still use “supervised parole”: After serving a statutorily defined minimum term, prisoners could be let out under the supervision of a parole officer before the end of their sentence, if they’d earned so-called good-time credits inside. Yet there was much less flexibility in the process.

[Read: The forgotten tradition of clemency]

Illinois abolished indeterminate sentencing in 1978. But inmates such as Henderson and Veal, who’d been sentenced before then, remained governed by the old rules. Austen got to know the two men well. He paints a vivid portrait of what it’s like to be incarcerated for decades and have one’s fitness for freedom continually assessed, a dynamic that may be loaded with particular meaning and complexity for Black inmates.

Henderson owned up to his responsibility for Richard Schaeffer’s death; Veal maintains his innocence in the Chicago police murders. (Austen suggests that he was wrongly convicted.) Regardless, although neither was a saint in prison, especially in their early years, both eventually decided to make something positive of their lives.

Henderson became an expert tailor. He stopped smoking and took to running laps in the recreation yard, the exercise an opportunity for meditation and introspection. He counseled other prisoners on staying out of trouble and sought to mend frayed relationships with his family.

While surviving several years of near solitary confinement, Veal discovered reading. He was drawn to books that provided solace and insight. Later, he learned to play the saxophone and flute, mentored and protected younger inmates, and developed a political consciousness.

For both men, going up for parole every few years only to be turned down again and again was excruciating, the process marked by irrationality and unfairness. (For example, prisoners aren’t always represented by lawyers in parole-board hearings.) But the prospect that, at any of those hearings, the work they’d done to better themselves might be recognized and rewarded also served as a powerful incentive toward self-actualization.

Austen would prefer that America rely far less on imprisonment to deal with those who have broken the law. But the conclusion he draws is that if we’re going to have prisons, we should dramatically expand eligibility for parole, make the parole-decision process more transparent and fair, and boost our investment in rehabilitation (he favors a Scandinavian prison model that includes vocational training and mental-health care). That way, more inmates could have a shot at one day regaining their freedom.

Correction is smart and well reported. Austen is deft at interweaving policy and narrative, and he has an ethnographer’s eye for the social drama of parole hearings. Injustices and hypocrisies abound in our penal system, and Austen does good work in unearthing them. If the book has a weakness, it’s that Austen—like many contemporary writers on criminal-justice reform—sometimes seems to be writing more for his fellow progressives than for the centrists and conservatives who actually need convincing.

Consider an important claim he makes in arguing for an expansion of parole eligibility: that for most offenses, 20 years in prison should be the maximum punishment. Criminological research shows that sentences longer than 20 years have no additional deterrent benefit. Two decades behind bars is a harsh penalty. And keeping prisoners beyond that is extraordinarily expensive, especially as their medical-care costs mount later in life—yet another reason, Austen says, that we need “a carceral system focused not on vengeance and permanent punishment but on the possibility of everybody going home.”

These are all reasonable points, likely to resonate with lefty readers who find the very idea of prison abhorrent (with the caveat that prison abolitionists may wish that Austen had gone further with his critique). But readers with different moral sensibilities may think that some crimes are so heinous and destructive to the social order that the appropriate punishment is lifetime incarceration without the possibility of parole, if not death. They may also believe that we should therefore focus our energies on preventing these crimes, so that the double tragedy of a victim being injured or killed and the offender losing his freedom can be averted.

In many states, enough people take a position roughly like this to doom any political attempts at meaningful parole reform for violent offenses. (Almost two-thirds of Americans believe that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for a crime such as murder.) What would be required to bring them on board?

Probably not what the book offers. Austen aims to convince primarily by making readers feel sympathy for and invested in Henderson and Veal’s fate, which is revealed before the last page. This is an admirable goal given that the incarcerated are often dehumanized. But many opponents of parole expansion won’t find Henderson and Veal to be sympathetic figures. Even if they did, you can feel sympathy for what people are going through because of their life choices without concluding that society should spare them those consequences.

Part of the problem is that Austen never takes his opponents seriously as interlocutors. When he writes about a debate program at Stateville Correctional Center, outside Joliet, where in 2018 the participants considered whether Illinois should bring back discretionary parole, he outlines only the “pro” argument. (The debaters themselves never took the negative side, deciding in the end, perhaps for strategic reasons, that the debate should be about how to reinstate discretionary parole, not whether.) When people who would presumably disagree with Austen’s proposals appear in the book, they’re cast as biased and reactionary. This is the treatment he gives to the Chicago police officers and members of James Severin’s family who showed up in protest to every one of Veal’s parole hearings.

Yet had Austen approached parole opponents with the same openness he extended to Henderson and Veal, he might have learned something valuable.

[Read: What prison takes away]

Is the motivation of such people truly to make sure that crime victims are never forgotten, as many of the Chicago police officers intimated? Then could they be persuaded by the argument that you honor those victims better by taking the money saved through parole reform and funneling it into local law enforcement, to help prevent future crimes? Alternatively, could you resurrect the argument that worked so well before the passage of the First Step Act, namely that lifetime incarceration means lifetime government benefits—shelter, food, medical care—at taxpayer expense?

Could you argue that, with relatively high levels of substance abuse among American adults, it won’t be long until just about everyone knows somebody locked up for making the worst mistake of their life, and wouldn’t it be good if redemption were possible for them too? Maybe the Chicago police officers who came to Veal’s parole hearings had someone like that in their families. Or maybe that was true for other Chicago police officers who didn’t come and who might not have been as hostile to the idea of second chances. That would have been a powerful story to tell.

David Dagan and Steven Teles’s research on the First Step Act shows that minds can be changed regarding criminal justice, even amid polarization. But it requires that you engage creatively and on their own terms with the worldviews you’re trying to shake loose.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

If you celebrate Christmas, you might assume that the “right” way to do so is simply to let loose: destroy your usual healthy diet with a lot of sugary, rich foods; drink more wine and liquor than normal; spend loads of money. Researchers have long affirmed that many people love this abundance bordering on excess. One study from 2007 found that the most common groupings of Christmas-holiday feelings related to bonhomie, gay abandon, ritualism, and love of shopping. Even hearing “Frosty the Snowman” in the pharmacy puts people in a festive mood.

But the researchers found one other common holiday feeling: “dejection.” That included annoyance, disappointment, sadness, irritation, and boredom. If that describes your state—or if you’re simply uncomfortable with the season’s overindulgence—you might feel like a Scrooge. Because the world certainly wants you to understand your reaction in this way.

But your response could be anything but misanthropic. On the contrary, a rejection of the seasonal overconsumption might emanate from a deeper longing for what Christmas truly represents, and what you want the festival to create in you.

This year, whether you’re an observant Christian or not, you might want to consider a new kind of feast that has some characteristics of ancient Christian observance. This would be one that doesn’t encourage your worldly vices but gives you instead an abundance of the detachment and peace you truly crave.

Christmas feasts are no recent phenomenon, but they are not how many early Church leaders commemorated the birth of Christ. As Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, wrote in his Christmas sermon in 380 C.E., “Let us not adorn our porches, nor arrange dances, nor decorate the streets,” nor, he went on, make “tabernacles for the belly of what belongs to debauchery.” This was meant not as joyless, puritanical religiosity but as an invitation to a special bliss that comes from being at one with God’s love, attained uniquely in mystical stillness. Christmas, to Gregory, was a day for meditation.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Eight ways to banish misery]

In modern times, we associate this kind of tranquility and meditativeness with Eastern traditions. But the practice is deeply Christian as well, dating back to the earliest days of the faith. Third-century Christian hermits—known as the desert fathers—would use stones and knotted ropes as aide-mémoire to enable them to chant all of the 150 Psalms. In later times, monks and nuns would recite the Jesus Prayer hundreds, even thousands of times each day in tandem with the rhythms of their breath and heartbeat (“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me”).

As the centuries passed, the rosary became common, and praying the rosary is still practiced daily by millions of Catholics (myself included). Praying the rosary takes about 25 minutes and involves repeating the Hail Mary 53 times, interspersed with other devotions. The worshipper contemplates events in the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and meditates on their significance for their own life.

One of the events contemplated in the rosary is the nativity of Jesus, or the Christmas story of his birth in a Bethlehem stable. But reflection on this story does not focus on celebrations, feasts, or gift giving. Rather, it centers on the miraculous idea that an omnipotent creator of the universe would show each of us our own divine nature not by making us great but by making himself tiny, by coming to Earth as the most vulnerable of human creatures: a helpless baby, born to destitute parents in a lowly corner of the world, among animals, in the silence of the night.

The contradiction with the conventional wisdom about what divinity means is inescapable: God touches humankind not amid grandeur and opulence, not with fame and power. He becomes one of us in the very absence of these things. In praying the rosary, as I contemplate the nativity, I consider the worldly attachments in my own life that impede selfless love and surrender to the divine. There are so many.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The difference between hope and optimism]

This idea—the false promise of temporal desires’ fulfillment and the need to move away from them to find true bliss—occurs in many mystical traditions. Contemplatives have long found that our cravings for pleasure deceive us. This is nirodha, the Third Noble Truth of Buddhism, which conveys that suffering from dissatisfaction (dukkha) ceases when we renounce our cravings and attachments. Actually doing that is not so simple, of course—it requires practice through the gentle repetition of a prayer or a mantra.

No matter your personal beliefs, if you find that the seasonal holidays are leaving you a little cold, your personal celebration may not need more excess, but less. I’m not going to recommend that you renounce all celebration and cheer, but the ancient rites—especially those based on the actual Christmas event—can add new meaning and depth to your experience of the holiday.

Start Christmas Day before dawn, in the wordless stillness that marked what Christians believe was the divine miracle of God becoming human. Consider your own worldly attachments—they might be the monomaniacal drive for money or success, the animal cravings expressed in what you consume or the way you spend your time, the hunger for the attention and admiration of others—and how they distract you from the deeper question of the why of your brief time on Earth.

If you can, go for a walk outside in the cool quiet before daybreak, and allow yourself to feel grateful for the gift of life, which fuses the physical and the metaphysical. If you are Catholic—or maybe even if you’re not—try praying the rosary, or find another way to focus your mind on what the nativity represents in its essence. Direct your contemplation outward, not inward on yourself and its desires; allow that self to be unencumbered for just a few brief moments.

As the day opens around you with your loved ones, share your inner delight with gifts that go beyond socks and scented candles. Offer something more meaningful and personal, such as a personal gratitude letter. Accompany each gift with a silent wish that each person’s own life journey be transcendent.

Amid the day’s abundance, don’t forget that God chose the poorest of the poor to connect with humankind. In Christianity and other traditions, the needy and marginalized have special status in his eyes. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus taught, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Recalling the stable in Bethlehem, this was not a metaphor. Ask yourself what you can do today to join God’s divine love for people at the margins. How can you serve those in need with your gift giving, your celebrations, your prayers, and the way you spend the day?

[Elizabeth Breunig: Have yourself an early little Christmas]

After the nativity itself, no Christmas story has perhaps come to be more famous than Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which the Christmas-hating miser Ebenezer Scrooge is converted into a lover of the holiday by ghosts that show him visions of his own demise if he does not reform. Made a new man after the apparitions, he showers one and all with lavish gifts, and declares, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

A lovely sentiment—though one that could, according to common custom today, imply eating 5,000 calories a day, staying mildly drunk, spending wantonly, and exchanging inedible fruitcakes. You can honor the mystery of Christmas in your heart every day in a countercultural way. A good place to start is by contemplating the mystical contradiction of a humble stable in Bethlehem, where you just might find the divinity within yourself.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home. Why the U.S. is pumping more oil than any country in history Our forests need more fire, not less.

Culture Break

Apple TV+

Watch. Slow Horses (streaming on Apple TV+) features an island of misfit spies with a subversive worldview.

Read. These seven books actually capture what sickness is like, by avoiding simple narratives and exploring the textures of human life.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.