Why So Many Christians Still Say “Yes” to Christmas — and What That Choice Really Signals

By Ephraim Agbo 

For more than a billion Christians worldwide, Christmas is not simply a date on a calendar. It is a negotiated settlement—an uneasy but enduring truce between theology and culture, belief and memory, sacred intention and secular excess. To accept Christmas is not to passively inherit a tradition; it is to participate in an act of meaning-making that has been continually remade by history, politics, and pastoral need.

Christian acceptance of Christmas is often misread as sentimental inertia. In truth, it reflects a deliberate, sometimes fraught, set of calculations about how to preserve and transmit the core claim of the faith in a plural, distracted age.

A Date Chosen, Not Discovered

December 25 is not the product of a biblical timestamp but of ecclesial strategy: a fourth-century attempt to fix a communal rhythm and to claim public liturgical space. The church’s choice to schedule the Nativity points to an important theological principle: time shapes faith. Fixing a feast day creates a regular practice that forms memory and identity—an idea reflected in New Testament freedom about days and observances (see Romans 14:5–6; Colossians 2:16). Those verses invite theological humility about calendar disputes while still allowing communities to use ritual time for formation.

The Incarnation as Pastoral Engine

At the center of Christmas is Christianity’s disruptive claim: God becomes flesh. That claim—summed in the Gospel’s assertion that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14)—is the season’s theological engine. Philippians 2:5–8 interprets the Incarnation as divine humility and kenosis: the One who is in the form of God “emptied himself” and took on human likeness. These passages explain why the nativity resists mere doctrinal abstraction: the Incarnation lends itself to image, story, and ritual, making dense theology accessible through senses and narrative.

For pastors, the Incarnation is a pastoral aperture: Christmas draws back large numbers of people—nominal, curious, grieving—into the life of the congregation. The Gospel’s pastoral mission language (“the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost”) captures this outreach impulse (Luke 19:10).

Unity Without Uniformity

Christmas looks near-universal, but practice exposes deep internal variation. Eastern Orthodox communities that keep the Julian calendar (celebrating the Nativity on January 7) signal theological and cultural difference; other differences show up in worship emphasis—sacramental mystery, prophetic humility, conversion rhetoric, or ecstatic testimony. Scriptures that counsel freedom over disputable matters (Romans 14) help explain how diverse practices can persist without dissolving communal coherence.

The Problem of Popularity: Platform vs. Dilution

Christmas’s cultural dominance gives the church a rare public platform: an annual megaphone for themes of peace, charity, and reconciliation. Yet ubiquity breeds dilution. When “Christmas spirit” becomes mere sentiment or branding, the theological content risks being reduced to mood. The New Testament’s warnings about a faith that is only outward form (e.g., calls to authentic worship and heart-transformation—see Romans 12:2; Matthew 6:19–21 on where treasure lies) underline the pastoral urgency: the Church must decide whether and how to resist, redeem, or repurpose the season.

Commerce and the Church: An Uncomfortable Symbiosis

Modern Christmas and consumer capitalism have grown together. The market amplifies giving and generosity even as it commodifies the season. Churches respond in a pragmatic register: they critique materialism—consistent with Jesus’ critiques of wealth and excess—while also redirecting the season’s energy toward acts of service and solidarity (Matthew 25:35–40; 2 Corinthians 9:6–7). In practice, commercial infrastructure becomes a resource for charitable work, hospitality, and visible witness—an uneasy but effective partnership.

The Living Compromise

To say “yes” to Christmas is less affirmation than wager. It is a strategic choice that balances three goods Christianity cannot easily relinquish:

• Pastoral Efficacy: Christmas reaches people who will not otherwise step through the church door (Luke 19:10).
• Memetic Power: Yearly rituals make belief habitual and handed down across generations (the use of repeated liturgy and story is consistent with the biblical practice of memorializing God’s acts—e.g., Deuteronomy 6; Psalmody).
• Cultural Capital: The season secures social space for public witness and service (acts of giving and hospitality are scripturally encouraged—Hebrews 13:2; Acts 20:35).

Yet this “yes” is guarded. Many congregations recover Advent as a counter-narrative of waiting (Romans 8:22–25 on groaning and hope), reorient gift-giving toward sacrificial generosity (2 Corinthians 9), and insist that festivities be anchored to the scandal of the Incarnation rather than consumer fever (John 1:14; Philippians 2:5–11).

Conclusion: The Nativity as a Test

Christmas is not pure; it never was. But the Christian wager is that an adopted container—a chosen date, a crowded season, a commercial surround—can still hold a subversive truth: that God entered history as a vulnerable child. The biblical texts that name the Incarnation, call for humility, and insist on sacrificial love give the Church both the language and the ethics to keep that infant at the center. The real question for contemporary Christians is not whether to celebrate, but whether to celebrate in a way that preserves the Gospel’s disruptive claim.