accounts, documents, or corroborating witnesses – so figures like Jesus and Moses are sort of a blank slate, historically speaking. “Yet we want to have images of their lives, their thoughts, their achievements,” he continued, “so we have Moses and Jesus films made in Hollywood. People know that these are fictions when you compare them with the text of the Bible. Yet having seen them, you cannot get them out of your mind. So for many Americans, Moses becomes Charleton Heston in the 1956 spectacular, The Ten Commandments.” Over the years, Jewett and Lawrence have written books about religion and popular culture, including Captain America and The Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism and The Myth of the American Superhero. Forbes said these two scholars really fed his interest in the field, first as their student and later as their colleague. After earning a master of theology degree from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and a doctorate in the history of American Christianity from Princeton (N.J.) Theological Seminary, Forbes returned to Morningside to teach in 1978. ENCOuRAGING WIDESpREAD STuDy For some time after Forbes began teaching at Morningside, the study of popular culture still wasn’t getting much respect in academic circles. However, he and a colleague would help to change that. As the predominant organization for scholars of religion, the American Academy of Religion meets annually for an exchange of ideas. It’s not unusual for close to 10,000 people to attend the conference. In the mid-’90s, Forbes presented a successful proposal that the academy add to its conference a section on religion and popular culture. He did so with Dr. Jeffrey Mahan, who is now academic vice president and dean of the faculty, as well as a professor of ministry, media, and culture, at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. “It opened up space in the academy to talk about religion not only in its formal expressions – things that denominations do, considerations of theological questions at a kind of theory level – but also how religion was presented in everyday cultural experience,” Mahan said. Mahan said the new section on religion and popular culture created space for an exploration of “how the culture was thinking about theological questions at a time when, in some ways, the churches seemed to be declining.” He said, “What we found was that all of these expressions of religious and theological values and concerns were embedded in popular culture. So we began to suggest that it wasn’t in fact that religion was less important, but that the location of religion had shifted.” The American Academy of Religion’s section on religion and popular culture continues successfully to this day. TEACHING STuDENTS In addition to that achievement, Forbes was also co-editor and an author of one of the first – if not the first – textbooks on religion and popular culture published by a major university press. Religion and Popular Culture in America was originally published by the University of California Press in 2000, and there was enough demand that a revised edition was published in 2005.
Photo by Jim Lee
discovering the History of Christmas
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By Bruce david Forbes 1970
or years, whenever Christmas was fast approaching, it was not unusual for friends and acquaintances to ask me about the season. They wondered how certain traditions developed and wanted to understand how things got to be the way they are. I suppose they came to me with their questions because I am a religious studies professor who specializes in the history of Christianity and is interested in analyzing popular culture, and thus they assumed I would know the answers. In many cases I did not, but at least I had an idea of where to find answers for them. I already was fascinated with Christmas, and their questions fed my curiosity even more. I eventually developed a lecture about the history of Christmas, accompanied by some PowerPoint visuals, and audiences responded enthusiastically, even suggesting that I should put all of this information into a book. One friend told me he would be very interested in reading a brief overview of the way Christmas developed, but he did not have the time or inclination to read a 500-page book, and he really did not want me to give him a list of a dozen books. As he said, “I’m curious; not obsessed.” Christmas: A Candid History is written for my friend and people like him. I do not claim to have a major breakthrough thesis, because most
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Forbes said it’s important to study religion and popular culture, for one thing, because it can show what a society truly believes – not just the beliefs advocated by formal religions – and this sometimes leads to unexpected results. For example, he said that, generally speaking, Christianity teaches that people are both saints and sinners – neither entirely good nor entirely evil – but popular movies, television shows, and comic books most often present characters as either all good or all bad. He said that instead of encouraging evil characters to change their ways, the dominant belief in American culture is that evil comes from the outside to hurt innocent people and that evil must be annihilated – thus, the audience cheers when the Death Star blows up at the end of the first Star Wars. “Christianity talks about wanting to transform people – not kill them,” Forbes said. “So I think this would be a case where the religion of American popular culture is different from, let’s say, the religion of the formal Christian churches. Most of us are part of both, and yet we don’t even realize there’s a tension there. Don’t you think that’s interesting?” Forbes said this kind of analysis not only raises people’s awareness of what they actually believe but also encourages them to reflect on the messages they are receiving through popular culture so they are not being blindly influenced by them. REACHING OuT TO THE GENERAL puBLIC Besides teaching students at Morningside, Forbes has also written a number of articles and chapters in books examining religion and popular culture. Especially in his most recent works, he has written for a general audience – not just religion scholars. He said that’s because he wants the public to be involved in a discussion of these issues. His new book, Christmas: A Candid History, was published this fall by the University of California Press. The UC Press is among the six largest university presses in the United States, and its Web site featured Christmas: A Candid History in October and November as one of five current bestsellers. The subject of Christmas fits well with Forbes’s interest in religion and popular culture. Forbes said that, before Christmas started, Europeans had winter festivals as a way of coping with the cold and the dark. He said Christians later began celebrating Christmas at the same time as the winter festivals, but it was not until 300 years after the birth of Christ. He said Christmas has continued to be both a religious and cultural celebration ever since that time. Some books look at the history of Christmas from a religious perspective, while others take the popular-culture point of view. Forbes said he offers something unique as an academic who understands both perspectives. He has a doctorate in the history of Christianity, and he also has become a specialist in religion and popular culture. Forbes said there are practical reasons to read his 153-page book. He said some people worry that Christmas is not spiritual enough, while others wonder if it is OK to send Jewish or Muslim friends a Christmas card. He said understanding the history of Christmas, from both the religious and popular-culture perspectives, could help answer some of those questions. “If we as a society are trying to figure out what we want Christmas to be, it would be good to have a realistic understanding of its history and how it became what it is today,” he said.
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of the information is a distillation of what a reader could find scattered throughout many scholarly sources. My contribution, I believe, is the way I pull the story together in a narrative that is brief and understandable, using some of my own unique analogies and accenting them with examples and stories. I also have tried to be candid and plain-spoken, when some authors seem to sugarcoat everything and others tend to bury their meanings under academic jargon. Working on this book, I encountered many surprises. In my excitement I would share them with friends and colleagues, and sometimes they told me they already knew that piece of information, making me feel a little foolish. But often times my information would surprise them as well, and what people knew varied greatly from person to person. For example, did you know the following? * The early Christians did not have a Christmas observance. It took 300 years or so before they established an annual celebration of the Nativity. Today we think of Christmas and Easter as the two most important days in the Christian year, but it was not always that way. * In the Middle Ages, representatives of Bari, Italy, stole the bones of Saint Nicholas from his hometown (in what is now Turkey), so that they could have a pilgrimage shrine in their Italian seaport city, essentially as a religious tourist attraction to help the economy. To this day, most of the bones of Saint Nicholas still rest in Bari. * Puritans in England and in New England made Christmas observances illegal, because they said that early Christians had no such celebration (which was true), and because Puritans felt Christmas had become an excuse for too much immoral behavior, from idleness to dangerous carousing. * As a lingering influence of this Puritan view of Christmas, in the next century John Wesley and other early Methodists ignored or de-emphasized Christmas; they treated it like any other day. The same was true of Presbyterians. I am a United Methodist minister, and Morningside College is historically related to the United Methodist Church, but I have never heard any Methodists mention the absence of Christmas in early Methodism. * President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the traditional date of Thanksgiving, moving it from the last Thursday in November to the next to last, for one reason: to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. After a couple of years of confusion, Congress intervened and designated Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November, which was a compromise. These are samples of interesting tidbits, but the overall historical story also is important. When we wrestle with Christmas, trying to keep in touch with its spiritual meanings or struggling with commercialization and stress, it is not especially helpful to base our solutions upon unrealistic nostalgia about a Christmas that never was. The real history of Christmas is fascinating in its own right, and it also provides a helpful basis for reflecting on how we might shape our Christmas celebrations today and in the future.