No. 078 TYPIFICATIONS OF CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS AND EASTER: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL USES OF THE JESUS SYMBOL T. R. Young
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of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of the RED FEATHER INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
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TYPIFICATIONS OF CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS AND EASTER: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL USES OF THE JESUS SYMBOL
Abstract
The categories of cultural Marxism are used to explore the ideological fields in which the Jesus Symbol is located. The typifications in which surround the Christ figure define two quite different ideological fields: the one at Christmas lending itself t the social and commercial needs of advanced monopoly capital while the Easter ideological field and the significations surrounding that Jesus lends itself more to a radical revolutionary movement. While commercial capitalism in crisis may prefer the Christmas Jesus, the Easter Jesus has more appeal to oppressed people and resonates with their lived experience.
INTRODUCTION: Durkheim said that when we celebrate the gods, we celebrate our society. Marx said that when we speak to the gods we cry out, in anguish, for a better society--a futile, misdirected, pathetic, fruitless cry for help. Both contradictory positions have merit. For Durkheim, religion heals, binds, consolidates and transcends social cleavages. For Marx, religion is a fraudulent institution, a false healer, a patent medicine itself oriented to private, not social ends. In the United States the Durkheimian view is the received truth for most American sociologists. For those who look at national and international structures and see widening faults glossed over by established religion, the Marxian view has considerable appeal. The truth-value of a theoretical explanation is always grounded in the shifting, complex whole of a society, the boundaries of which may go far beyond the area in which particular gods are constituted by the worshipping activities of the religious practitioners.1
The analysis which follows applies some recent developments of Christ at Christmas and at Easter in Macherey's (1978) explanation of the literary subject. In general, Macherey holds that the irreconcilable cleavages in society can be expressed in concrete terms, in the written/spoken/singing text. In the novel, in the story, in the song and in the religious myth, these cleavages are transformed from the ungraspable richness of everyday life into a graspable, solvable symbol. These cleavages are realized in a form, in a format, which offers a solution to them on a fictive plane. All the varied, shifting complexities of the "signifying practices" of people are reformulated in language alone--in the text of song, poem, novel, play, or myth.
It is through language that people are inserted into life and literature as subject. The form of language is such that an I, or a me, or a we is constituted as subject perforce--even if that is not the case in the lived experience. One cannot, of course, literally be inserted as a subject in a novel, song, movie or television program. But in every case of fictive literary art--and in most non-fiction--there are characters with which one identifies. In the novel, play, or poem the point of view of the central character becomes the point of view of the reader, auditor or viewer. The subjectivity of that character is presented as the proper, natural, normal way to experience life. To develop the analysis here we must shift, as Macherey shifts, from the subjective experience of the central character--as well as from our identification with it--to the larger social context in which the author writes.
The author who creates a work of art works out of an ideological structure. This ideological structure is grounded in the material interests of a given social group. Depending upon the author and the text at hand, the group is one connected to another by the larger structures of social life. In American society, the divisive structures are class, ethnic (race), gender, age, and nationality. In the class structure, capitalists and proletariat are related and have, each, an ideology which helps interpret, justify, and sanctify the lived experience of each group to the other. It is always a political question which ideological field will prevail. The same is true of gender, ethnic and other social divisions. Out of these ideologies, the author of the song, movie or novel creates a fictive subject whose lived experience helps interpret, justify and sanctify a solution to the problems of life brought into focus by the story-line of the novel or song. In the case at hand; Christian plays, programs, songs, and pageants, the ideological field is mediated by a sponsoring process on the mass media. This sponsoring process ensures that the dominant typifications suffusing the Jesus symbol are compatible to the concrete interests of the sponsor--in this case that of commercial capitalism undergoing a crisis of accumulation and of legitimacy (O'Connor, 1973).
Macherey adopts Althusser's view of ideology in which the role of ideology is to dispel the contradictions of the lived experience of people by offering a solution which is framed within the logic of some one privileged group. An ideology is always a closed system. In order to stay within its boundaries, the ideas which contain the solutions to life's difficulties must remain silent on problems which call into question the relationship as lived. In order to free oneself (and society) of the ideological work going forth in song, novel, and ceremony, it is necessary to step outside the social group whose interests are celebrated.
The novel, song, or movie, then, enables us to experience a given problem and a putative solution as understanding subject. In the case of the Jesus symbol, the authors/artists who present it to us grasp the fundamental problematics of an age from the perspective of the group in which the author/artist arises and lives. The defining quality of great art is that it cannot be reduced simply to those interests. If it is, it is merely bad or mediocre and strikes us as dull. But Christmas and Easter are seldom dull--nor are the stories which grasp the fullness of the contradictions which are experienced at Christmas or Easter time. Irreconcilable positions are delineated in play or song at Christmas time and Easter time. In each story a fictive solution emerges. For Macherey, the appeal of literature and language is the illusion of reconciliation of that which is, within the existing structures of society, irreconcilable. However, one must add to Macherey that such fictive symbols can show the way to new radically different social arrangements. This is the emancipatory dimension of every authentic work of art whether it is Goya, Gerschwin or Brecht.
It is the particular appeal of the Christ figure that it allows one to experience, in differing typifications, alternate reconciliations of one's own experienced unsolvable fears. However, Christmas and Easter offer two quite different problematics and two quite different solutions to these private fears and collective conflicts.
The Subjective Experience of Christ at Christmas. At Christmas, we experience life from the perspective of the holy child and of the holy family. In song, in cinema, on television and in the novel, as well as the news story, the perspective which we are expected to take is that of the child, helpless in a hostile world but embraced by a living, protecting mother and a more distant but dependable father. At Christmas time in the United States in 1983, the themes of Christmas center around the family. The plight of the family as experienced in the 1980's includes the problematics of generational conflict, homelessness, inflation, employment insecurity, divorce, child abuse and disintegrating kinship structures. The story-line at Christmas time in song, play, and pageant suggest how these may be repaired within the structure of commodity consumption. We are offered a solution which does not take up questions about the larger structures which strain and crack the family. In fact, the mythic solution offered on commercial television is a warm, strong caring family circle made holy by the delight we take in each other's joy in gifts--toys, cameras, perfumes, wines, watches as well as kitchen appliances, video games, and power tools.
In its noncommercial moments, television offers a wide variety of fictive Christmases. Children can learn through Raggedy Ann that Alexander Graham Wolf can ruin Christmas by sealing toys in unbreakable, transparent boxes. The (Christ) child experiences life thusly as visible but untouchable--and within the context of gifts as a central typification of Christmas. Peanuts, Bugs Bunny, and the songs of Perry Como interpret, justify and sanctify Christ as the collective child and justifies the family as the receptacle of alienation. Parental love, abstractly embodied in the gift as a concrete expression of that solution to alienated relations in family, school and society is also sanctified. The fact of the matter is that the sources of inflation, unemployment, family violence and juvenile delinquency run far beyond the boundaries of the family in the first instance and gift-giving cannot repair the structure of alienated familial, class, gender or ethnic relations in the second instance.
The use of Christmas and the Christ figure in American society to interpret the structure of alienation and to sanctify gift- giving-in-the-family as the solution warrants critical reflection.
For six weeks out of the year, beginning in October, amid great excitement and effort, Christmas is made to embody the full range of these structural distortions. No other institution--not even the American presidency or the American state--is so celebrated. Consumption of non-necessary products come to preempt the meaning of Christmas, while its meaning as communal activity as in some European or South American villages is progressively lost. The notion of the religious experience as a binding, incorporating experience oriented to the widest possible social solidarity is de-emphasized. The notion of the church as an encompassing fellowship in which each person stands in unshakable supportive relationships to all is quietly displaced by the notion of Christmas as a mass of isolated families engaged in a great shopping spree attended by ringing bells, electronically broadcast street carols, special town decorations and cheerful clerks ringing up record sales until after the New Year.
Such an organization of the Christmas experience represents a response to the needs of industrial capital to produce and to dispose of high-profit, capital-intensive products; of commercial capital to merchandise such products to uncritical, vulnerable customers; and to the needs of finance to loan out the high reserves of capital it has accumulated at the highest possible rates of interest. The joy of Christmas and the promise of surcease from alienated work, politics and sex are thus shifted neatly from serving the need for community and intergenerational accord to sales on favorable terms in the market place. The mass electronic media as well as the mass print media are preempted by the task of constituting this typification of Christmas as a marketplace; the problematic of alienation for the capitalist system is consumption and the redemptive act is shopping. Visa, MasterCard, and Carte Blanc replace the three wise men as the givers of gifts.
Easter, on the other hand, receives considerably less attention in the mass media. It is located mostly in the social media, i.e., home and church. Easter receives but two or three days attention in the media. The central typification of Easter is change and renewal of the social order. In earlier times, Easter had to do with change and renewal of the seasons. In Christian times, the death of the old social order is symbolized by the crucifixion while the birth of the new social order (Heaven on Earth) is symbolized by the resurrection of Jesus. On television, this change and renewal motif is reduced to clothing and fashion and the Easter Parade. While Christmas is a six billion dollar economic complex (1980), fashion is a three billion dollar complex (1980) spread out over the year and only marginally connected to Easter. Easter does not lend itself to the economic and political needs of advanced monopoly capitalism as does the fictive Christmas. Easter programs are far fewer on mass media, slotted outside of prime time and presented as a public (i.e. religious) service. Inserted into Easter through the symbol of the Crucified Jesus, the agony of the individual and the anguish of the grieving Christian community attracts few sponsors and fewer playwrights. What can one learn from Disney or Dr. Seuss about Easter which meets the needs of commodity capitalism?
The viewing audience, then, can be inserted in the Christmas myth through the protected Christ child in ways which help reconcile (fictively) the cleavages of family and society in modern capitalism. The viewing audience, when inserted in the Easter myth through the symbol of the suffering adult Christ does not heal the cleavages of the existing social order but would, rather, call it into doubt, cast it aside and move to a qualitatively new social order--the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The Easter message, founded in Christian understanding by the new testament, especially in Revelations, calls forth a utopian vision of Satan thrown into a bottomless pit and of Christian martyrs reigning on Earth with the resurrected Christ for a thousand years. In the millennium there is to be peace on earth, freedom from evil as well as the rule of righteousness realized by faith in Jesus and the power of God. The advent of millennium is concerned with the prospects of a human community on earth. This is not the subjective experience useful to the sponsors of the American Christmas on mass media. Insertion of the alienated person in such a fictive vision creates trouble rather than a happy consumer whose compulsive shopping helps 1) reunite production and distribution, 2) realize profit, 3) dispose of surplus production, 4) accumulate capital for further expansion of the economy, and which 5) displace pressing, macro-structural questions. Easter brings these macro structural distortions into focus for the understanding subject.
One can better understand the way in which the Jesus figure is mediated by the mass media and the needs of advanced capitalism by comparing the central typifications of Christmas with those of Easter.
The Structure of Christmas Hymn. There is a semiotic approach which helps us understand developed singing: voices-without- information.2
Semiology is an effort largely stimulated by Barthes (1971) which tries to place a given message--photo, text, or art form--in the ideological field which helps define its meaning and in the same instance, reproduces that ideological field. The search in semiology is for the "significations" which are preferred in any message and which gives an ideological field meaning as a totality (Weedon et al., 1980). At the level of pure semantics, Christmas songs are nonsense.3 At the level of semiology, they are important events in renewing an ideological field. The structural features of these songs are significations which constitute the ideological field. The first signifying structure is the tonal structure which tells us we are not to respond at any action level to any given information bit of any word in any lyric in any given Christmas carol. We are to respond to the whole ideological field- -that which constitutes the setting of the songs. Tonality, tonality-in-song, tonality-in-Christmas-carols have no message and no meaning on their own terms at purely the linguistic level. It is only when we enlarge the analysis and place it in the totality of the entire life-world of which it is a part can we make out its meaning. Its structural characteristics provide the significations--how we are to take these songs--which shape our consciousness and guide our overt behavior. We will make the interpretations on the semiologic meaning of Christmas, Jesus, and the carols as we explore and make visible some of the structures of these songs. Generally, songs are a form of social opinion and help reproduce existing social structures
1. The Structure of Gender Domination. Almost all of the popular Christmas songs are sung by an older male. Crosby, Como, Torme', Johnny Cash, Glenn Campbell, Mac Davis and Dean Martin have a virtual monopoly on Christmas singing in the year of this Study. Taking a look at the list of Christmas songs ranked in order of popularity, we see several women listed. Women's liberation will, doubtless, continue to change the gendered nature of Christmas as an ideological field. However, at present I think it fair enough to say that the use of a male voice is a structural device which signifies the gender division and reasserts the superior status of the male in celebrating the sacred.Female voices, as in the family setting, back up the older male voice. This emphasizes the baritone--hence maleness-- quality of the voice lead and, in the same moment, asserts the power relationship between male and female in the family. The politics of gender is an important part of the total ideological field in the U.S. Such song format, even when they do not say so specifically, linguistically, say so structurally. Power--this time sacred power--is a male monopoly in song, in family and in society.2. The Nuclear Family as the Significant Social Unit. The structural arrangement of voices often reproduces the structure of a small kinship network called the family. The choral group typifies, in its form, the structure of the gender differentiated extended kinship system. The choral group is more often found at Easter than Christmas. In the U.S. there are about 55 million such kinship units. The trend is changing toward childless couples and to single-parent families. The ideological content of this male-dominated song structure is to deny and discourage this trend. Get married, have children, let-the-male-dominate this structure is the unvoiced message of this format.3. Jesus, the Sacred Child. The fictive subject in Christmas songs is the sacred child represented by the real person of the infant Jesus. Every child who is old enough to grasp the ideological system of its own culture understands itself as the object of the lived experience of the Christ-child as it is depicted in song. The child is inserted into the song as object of all of Christ's experiences--as a precious, loved, and cherished object. As the lived experience of the child deteriorates the fictive expectations incorporated in the song become all the more urgent. A loving mother, a protective father, a warm strong family setting, the touch of a benevolent God, the unending flow of gifts and food astonish and sanctify the child--especially those as in Dickens' Christmas Carol whose lived experience is different.The vision and image of life presented in this voiced music is at once a prophecy and a command--and, in modern times, an impossibility. On the one hand the songs command solidarity; on the other, they sing of an impossible dream since a Christmas, even if joyous to a few million parents and a great many million children is not the lived experience of most people, most of the time in Christendom in 1981. It is no accident that suicide, alcoholic excesses, depression and family violence increase in the Christmas season.4. The Gift Structure. The structure of Christmas which validates the sacred character of the child is the gift structure. In most societies, the gift is the non-exchange, non-commercial practice which demonstrates beyond question the social character of a relationship (Mauss, 1955). Gift-giving when it is irrational, when it is painful, when it is troublesome, when it serves no productive purpose, is the generic form of the practice and the highest test of the social nature of a relationship. The child is sanctified and brought into a social relation by being identified as the subject of gift-giving. When kings and princes and saints bear the gift, all the more special is the child. Saint Nicholas brings the gift; not the more mundane (profane) parent. Christmas is the peculiarly modern expression of the Potlatch.5. Society as Harmonious, Orchestrated Object. The form of the music is of special interest. Music produced by choral groups, orchestras and in programs have, as their structure, the idealized structure of bourgeois society. Christmas carols in concert, for example the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, have all of the idealized characteristics of a well-ordered society. Everyone has a part, is part of a social division, everything is prescheduled, coordinated and contributes to the emergent whole.4 At the level of lived society, Christmas music often takes the formal characteristics of a well ordered society with a single dominant male orchestrating everything. At the level of abstract theory, the use of the orchestra format resonates with structural-functional theory of Parsons, Merton, Radcliffe-Brown and other consensus-oriented theorists.In contrast to jazz which is idiographic, concerts are nometheic. Jazz is unpredictable, in choral concerts everything is predictable since it is planned and rehearsed. In jazz, there is no ordered division of labor, no leader and led as in the case of the orchestra or choral group. Jazz could, of course, be used in Christmas song but it would not have the structural characteristics of the present form. It would not contribute to an ideological map of Christmas which sanctifies a special, bourgeois form of social organization; control, predictability, profitability, and commercial transformation of gift-giving into gift-buying.6. The Structure of Belief, Faith, Innocence, Awe and Mystery. The tone of the songs at Christmas about the Jesus-child are full of the awe and wonder of the ineffable. This emphasis upon belief and faith, innocence and magic stands in sharp contrast to the profane world of physical reality in which cause and effect is mechanical and mundane. The important thing to note is that social reality requires faith, belief, and innocence in the process of constituting it while physical reality does not. And the effect of Christmas song, taken innocently, preserves the ability to create social reality even as this ability is eroded by secularization trends in the production of culture in politics, marketplace, factory, shop, office, and classroom.7. The Structure of Peace. A conflict-ridden world requires peace to suppress the aspirations of the oppressed. Class elites need labor peace to keep the factories going. Transnational corporations need peace to keep the traffic in wealth and food flowing out of the poor countries toward the rich countries. Merchants need safe, peaceful streets to keep customers coming. Politicians need peace to maintain their continued political legitimacy. A central message of Christmas is unreflexive, unqualified peace. The ideological utility of peace arises when class and national interests are threatened. The use of Christmas as an ideological instrument for peace is made possible by the conflation of the special interests of class elites with the general interest in a peaceful society. The experience of the various revolutions in history often demonstrates that the general interest is better served by the violent overthrow of feudal, slave, and despotic elites then by peace per se. Song, pageant, and television programming separating peace from social justice is part of the ideological field of contemporary Christmas.
The structures above abstracted from Christmas song together, with other structures, synergistically, define the ideological field in which the figure of Christ is situated at Christmas time. Since these are the stressed features in Christmas song these are the typifications by which the ideological field is made visible.
Below is a list of the all-time favorite Christmas songs according to CDCB, an on-line record company.
However, Church programs, Network broadcasts and radio offerings do not follow popular taste. Christian and Patriarchal cultural themes are more determinative in determining ideological fields in these forums.
White Christmas - Bing Crosby 2.Merry Christmas all - Brook Benton 3.O, Little town of Bethlehem - Dinah Shore 4.Away in a manger - Bing Crosby 5.I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus - Bobby Sherman 6.Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow - Bing Crosby 7.I wanna rock 'n roll guitar - Johnny Preston 8.The little boy that Santa Claus forgot - Vera Lynn 9.Little Drummer boy - Rosemary Clooney 10.The Christmas song - Peggy Lee 11.Silver Bells - Bing Crosby 12.When a child is born - Brook Benton 13.Jingle Bells - Nat king Cole 14.We wish you a merry Christmas - The Drifters 15.You're all I want for Christmas - Brook Benton 16.Blue Christmas - The Platters 17.Jingle bell rock - Bobby Sherman 18.Beautiful memories - Brook Benton
In brief that ideological field posits as sacred a social form in which a male-dominated family structure uses gifts to celebrate the position of the child. This family of three generic roles-- mother, child, and the commanding father is the basic building block of a highly orchestrated, highly stable peaceful social life world. Other possible building blocks are foreclosed in this ideological field. The community, the individual, the friendship, the cohabiting couple, the homosexual couple, the extended family, the clan or other, historically viable, building blocks are excluded from the ideology emergent from this structural combination. Excluded as well are democratic societal forms, spontaneity, rotas, and unique, idiographic permutations.
The transformation of Christ from a revolutionary in the early years--symbolized by his crucifixion--can be seen in the treatment of Christ by Weber (in Lash, 1980:7). Weber notes that transforming social change (diachronic change) became embodied in the Christ figure as he became the vehicle of natural law (Wertrationalitat). While the priests preempted legal rationality (Zweckrationalitat), Christ had to resort to Charismatic nonrationality as his source of authority. It is possible to understand that the Wertrational Christ of biblical times has been replaced at Christmastime, by the Zweckrational Christ of advanced Zweckrational Capitalism. The Christ of Easter is altogether a different story. There remain elements of Wertrationalitat in the Christ of Easter among many Latin Americans associated with the Liberation Theology movement.
In interpreting the selection of typifications in Christmas song, the first point I think is useful to make is that the structures selected are of significance (and thus worthy of selection) only when they are problematic. One does not have to create a special ideological field for structures which are not undergoing change; which are not threatened by still deeper, unexamined reified contradictions. Only when structures are undergoing dereification is the social labor of reification and deification necessary. Out of the thousands of taken-for-granted structures the production of which are necessary for a given social-life world--a culture as we say--only a few are problematic enough to burden the Christmas season with them.
The status of the family is made more problematic as the need for more labor from both males and females increases. Christmas carols and caroling formats which reproduce the family structure (e.g., The Osmond family, the old Crosby shows, the Johnny Cash, Glenn Campbell, Lawrence Welk television programs of the 1981 season) vary in popularity over the years. By problematic, I mean that some processes in society depend upon the family while other processes tend to change it. In capitalist society, a large number of highly mobile family units with highly productive members blessed with a lot of disposable income for consumption is just the family structure best suited to capitalism. It supplies the highly trained labor force so necessary to produce profit. Family units with disposable income help realize profit. The structure of gift- giving absorbs that disposable income. But family and other structures in late capitalism must be reproduced if they are to absorb the costs of supplying trained labor, help to realize profit by absorbing surplus production and help provide the dramaturgical facsimile of a solution to the problem of alienation. The use of Jesus as Christ-child helps the family--on a yearly basis--to make the sacrifice for twenty years or so to rear and train a child to be a punctual, conscientious, productive worker and dedicated consumer. By the time the child is twelve, he or she has learned that the good life, obedience, and consumption are ineluctably tied together through the Sacred Christ of Christmas.
The American Christmas, in its television, radio and newspaper version, orients the family to absorb 6 billion dollars (1980) worth of surplus production. In a Marcusian analysis, the Christ of Christmas helps sanctify to parent and child alike to an expanding layer of false needs. The economic dynamics of Christmas are such that high profit is realized and, to some extent, the accumulation crisis of advanced monopoly capitalism is moderated. Buying at Christmas time is especially irrational. That is, the ordinary canons of caution, calculation, and utility are set aside- -indeed they must be set aside if the spirit of Christmas is to be captured. And the control over media accorded to commercial capitalism by virtue of the advertising format of television sponsorship provides the industry with a virtual monopoly over the defining process. What is defined as a suitable gift is controlled by the sponsor. It is in the fiscal interest of such private sponsors to define high profit/capital intensive items as the appropriate gift. A full analysis of this control is a long treatise itself but it suffices to say that such control over the defining process creates a long time trend to economic distortions among which is the movement of private capital to cheap labor countries as well as the movement of investment capital to high profit lines of production. The essential lines of production are thereby deprived of capital investment. Housing, health care, child care, education, pollution control and other labor intensive, low-profit lines of production are deprived of resources. the ideological field at Christmas contributes in some small but important degree to this institutional distortion. It is difficult for parents and others to define labor-intensive necessities as suitable gifts in the face of this multi-million dollar campaign by commercial capital at Christmas to dispose of high-energy, high technology, high profit forms of production.
However, the aspects of Christmas and the aspects of Christ selected by sponsors of television, radio and municipal pageants are also mediated by tradition, by family needs, and by religious functionaries as well. needs for love, affirmation, selfless giving, surprise oriented to affection and to the warmth of the extended kinship/friendship complex are not false to the human process--these are central to it. The Christ of the American Christmas also endorses and elevates these out of ordinary time and ordinary experience. The American version of Christ at Christmas is not entirely alien to the human project. There is a whole universe of experience at Christmastime which, although not the focus of this analysis, deserves to be included and weighed against the mystifications of Christmas.
The Jesus of the Easter Ceremony. Once again, it is central to a critical semiology to identify the ideological field in which this version of Christ is created and helps recreate. The immediate observation which presents itself is that the Jesus of Easter does not lend itself to the capitalist venture to the same extent as the Christ-child of Christmas. The centrally important significations of the Easter Child are far different from the Christmas Christ.
A structural analysis of the Easter Christ provides us with these typifications: In the first place, the Christ at Easter is an adult, not a child. He embodies suffering and the accumulated sins of the whole society rather than the joy of the hearth and home. The Easter Christ stands as a voiceless critic of the established institutions of society: of the marketplace, of the occupying army, of alienated governance, of personal greed and collective indifference to justice. Church, state, police and ordinary life are the targets of the protesting Christ-figure. A child cannot carry such a burden.
Easter, of course, can be depoliticized and, as the hoar leper, refreshed once again to the April day. Easter can be trivialized by egg-rolls on the White House lawn, by tiny chicks and rabbits held by inept tiny hands as well as by melting chocolate candies but this is not the central feature of Easter in the lived experience of many Christians, especially those in the poor capitalist countries--the "Third World." For these people, the typifications of Easter are more oriented to Christ and to his crucifixion.
A structural analysis of the Easter Christ provides us with these ideological typifications:
1) The suffering of Christ and rejection of a sinful world.2) The symbol of the egg and the spring colors used to decorate it are both typifications of rebirth brought over from the pagan spring rituals which predate the Easter service. Change and renewal are the significant meanings.3) The renewal of the human spirit and the reconstitution of a moral order oriented to community embodied in the resurrection myth.4) The emphasis upon the Holy Mother Mary and her despair at the sacrifice of her child.5) The association of Christ with the outcast and the thief on the Cross.6) The redemption of sin through the death of Christ.7) The emphasis of the church (congregation) as the social unit rather than the family as in Christmas. In the same moment, there is the collective anguish among the disciples and the small following of Christ at his death.8) The displacement of redemption from the present to the future; from this world to the heavenly city, from the gift to the sacrifice of human beings.
The pain, anguish, suffering, sacrifice and rebirth of the Jesus symbol does not lend itself t a safe resolution of the defects of advanced monopoly capitalism. Compared to Christmas, sponsored radio ignores Easter. Sponsored newspapers stress clothing and Easter parades. Television finds few sponsors for Easter specials. In the face of the suffering Christ, one cannot create false needs for electronic toys, automobiles, or such solidarity supplies as beer, candy, and food. The simple, unadorned seminude body of Christ on the Cross is not conducive to the realization of profit. The generation of false needs so vital to consumerism cannot be supported by the real grief of Mother Mary at the loss of her son. Buying high-profit items cannot be made to assuage the grief one feels at the death of Christ.5
The Christ at Easter reflects the alienation of humanity in a world defective in significant ways. The resurrection of Christ is a promise for transcendence of the humiliation, the indignity, and the suffering of the oppressed. It is precisely the same promise of a critical and revolutionary marxism. it would be a distortion to say that the typifications which infuse the Crucifixion Myth lead toward the radical transformation of life in this world. Such an ideological field may lead to mysticism and not explicitly toward emancipation. However, it would be equally a distortion to deny that the Jesus of Easter is indifferent to human suffering and does not, cannot, speak to an authentic emancipation. The ideological field in which the Easter Christ dwells defines an apocalyptic view of redemption. It is an ideological field which is fundamentally critical of injustice, oppression, and the suffering produced by an exploitative/privileged society (Quinney:67).
The figure of the crucified Jesus continues to rage against the corruption of every society in which a Christian suffers from structural sin--the institutional distortions of war, profit, privilege or denial of a common human part. This is the grounding of every revolutionary faith--Muslim, Marxian, and Christian alike. Every social movement which teaches the irreformability of the present system, that teaches the radical transformation on a new and more communal basis is apocalyptic in its typifications and emancipatory in purpose whether it couches its argument in scientific or in sacred language.
It is the ideological map of Easter typified by anguish, suffering and rejection of corruption in this world which informs the liberation theology of the third-world poor especially in Latin America. In the capitalist third world each suffering Christian is inserted as subject in the crucifixion by the Christ figure. The Christian is not inserted as subject in the ideological field of the Jesus child comforted, plied with gifts or defined as bringer of joy to the world. The subjective experience of that Jesus speaks to the middle class children in the fourteen rich capitalist countries more so than the increasing desperation of poor children in the 115 deteriorating capitalist countries (Table 1).
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Figure 1. Structural Characteristics
AT CHRISTMAS |
AT EASTER TIME |
Anthropomorphic Subject |
Jesus as Child |
Jesus as adult male |
||
Subjective ontology |
Joy and Comfort |
Suffering and Sin |
Redemptive action |
Buying |
Death of the old and birth (resurrection) of the new |
||
Social Unit in Focus |
The Family |
The society (The Church) |
||
Social Action required |
Peace and Goodwill |
Sacrifice and renewal |
||
Medium (U.S. 1980) |
Mass
Media |
Social
Media |
||
Media Controlled by: |
Capitalist ad agencies |
Church and Community |
||
The Political Message |
Repair
the present |
Overthrow the present; establish Heavenly Kingdom on earth(Revolution) |
||
The Agent |
The Parent |
The Son (as society collectively) |
||
Economic Meaning |
Consumption
= |
Redistribution/Social Justice |
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For the unemployed, the ill, the elderly, or the lower echelon employee as well in the still wealthy European and North American countries, it is the Jesus of Easter which answers to the lived experience of the alienated Christian. In a society which has become accustomed to better things, to responsive action in this world, the Easter Christ poses more danger than in other, more docile times. The fifty million born-again Christians in the U.S. turn to right-wing politics and toward that ideological amp for responsive action. As the contradictions of capitalism exacerbate rather than transcend the situation for these millions, the ideological field of the apostolic church, the social gospel, and liberation theology stand by close at hand as a revolutionary alternate for alienated Christians.
Conclusion. There are two generalizations to be made in light of the foregoing analysis. One generalization is germane to the sociology of religion while the other speaks more to the sociology of knowledge. Which of the two ideological fields takes precedence in the religious practices of the Christian World is a historical question related to quality of life variables--including those of a spiritual nature. By spiritual I mean here those variables relating to joie de vivre, enthusiasm for work, self-esteem, social anchorage, confidant, easy interpersonal support and boundless affection for life and for living peoples. The final judgment we must make at this historical juncture is that the Christ-child of Christmas takes precedence in the media as well as in the social life world over that of the Crucified Jesus in the United States and Europe. It is organized to repair exploitative cleavages and so works to some degree. The analysis is that religion, in the present Christmas mode, preserves defects in the structure of society and thus stands against human emancipation. However, the efficacy of Christmas to help bind together a given society varies over time.
Such efficacy varies with the material conditions of a society as Marx would have said. It is my present opinion that Richard Quinney (1980) is correct in his insistence that the spiritual and the sacred are important to humans and must be accommodated within critical, socialist analysis and practice. An open cultural Marxism must examine the Quinney thesis unblinded by a dogmatic anti-religious bias. (Quinney (7) argues that it is wrong to dismiss the revolutionary and human character of a religion even if the capitalist version is particularly subversive of community and in many ways hostile to social justice. Neither Marx nor Durkheim can tell us whether religion* is always and in all ways hostile or conducive to the human process--that is an empirical question.
In South America, a different finding might be appropriate. There is an open invitation for competent research on the South American situation. The future will reveal any social and ideological changes in the way the Christ figure is mediated and constituted in the capitalist complex. I expect a shift in the importance accorded to the two ideological fields. I should think that Easter will gradually displace Christmas as the significant way to experience the Christ figure as the crises in capitalist societies continue.6 Along with Quinney, I am willing to concede an emancipatory dimension to a religious ideological field, especially as it is developing in liberation theology.
A second generalization is that to fully understand how ideological fields are constituted and used, one must go beyond semantics, information theory, and the spoken language to include typifications and semiotics. An understanding of the ideological field of Christmas cannot be acquired by listening to the words of the Christmas song, by following the line of meaning of a Christmas play, by attending to the words of the announcers, critics or by reading the listings in television guides and sections. The meaning of Christmas, Easter, Veteran's Day, Halloween or any collective cultural production must be located in the social totality. Such meaning arises out of nonverbal typifications and significations. Sometimes these meanings are located in deep structures--in the very form and sequence of patterned activity. The work of Macherey, Barthes and other cultural Marxists help provide the analytic tools with which to extract those earnings and to contribute to the authentic and self-knowledge of a society in its quest for social justice.
Finally, those who believe all religion to be alien to the human condition must pause and ask themselves what other ideological field speaks clearly and deeply to the oppressed masses in Latin America. Surely it is not a scientized Marxism any more than a scientized capitalism. Whatever are one's views on the reality of God, Christ and the religious doxology, the oppressed of the world act upon their own beliefs, understandings and interpretations. I agree with Quinney that:
*It is important to remember that religion is a word which simply means "to bind," "to bind back." It has the same etymology s ligature (a thread), the word "religion" does not appear in the Bible. It is necessary to solve problems of integration, unification, coordination and solidarity in every social philosophy. As there are no Gods to do it for us, the operative question is how to do this in a secular world.one must speak to the oppressed through the symbols they know, accept and believe. "
That these symbols are not now of the choosing of critical theory is a small tragedy on the scale of tragedies now haunting the world. Seventy-five percentage of the capitalist world face starvation; infant mortality rates once again rise, the technology of coercion continues building, torture is official policy in thirty-eight capitalist countries, the global corporation needs dictatorships to guarantee its markets and labor peace. In the face of all this, the redemptive power of Christ is a more realistic instrument of social justice than the sanitized structural analysis of orthodox Marxism for most of those people who will have to finally act on their own understandings.
And, apart from Cuba and perhaps China, the socialist world has little to offer the third world other than the model of a dispirited bureaucratic socialism. That the socialist block outperforms the capitalist block in measures of social justice counts little and in fact these data are not even available to the peasant in the third world. They are not even available to the highly educated worker in the information-rich societies of Europe and North America. Still less is the Marxist vision of authentic democratic socialism celebrated and sanctified in the West. In the short run, it matters little what Marxist theorists prefer--what counts is commitment to revolutionary ideologies. In that arena, the Easter Christ has a present advantage. Another century or two may alter that fact but right now, the student of revolution, social justice, moral development, and spiritual renewal might well focus in on Jesus of the Liberation theology--the crucified Jesus of Easter rather than the helpless child of Christmas.
ENDNOTES
1A critical sociology is not the carping, debunking, cynical sociology as the atheoretical criticism of American sociology has turned out to be. Rather critical sociology is one in which the contradicting positives of a society are made visible and those social practices most conducive to the human project are illuminated. The purpose of critical sociology is political: to locate the knowledge process both as product and process in the social sphere. In the case at hand, I am not so much interested in the destruction of Christmas and the Jesus myth but rather in extracting the positive aspects of these so that they might transform to a less alienated; more praxical form. The alienating aspects of the Jesus myth and the Christmas season are also made more visible, of course.
2I'm not sure why tonic sound is not keyed to information while atonic sound is. It may be that the infant learns how to respond to which voice. When the parent talks, the child must answer in words or behavior. When the parent sings, the child need not. But I rather expect that singing frequencies somehow mesh with basic frequencies of the body--especially in harmonic relation to alpha waves.
3Technically, a signal set (sound, electronic or light waves) have no meaning until they are interpreted by a second person. At the social level of informing practices, this means someone must hear, see or feel the signal set, decode it and act in ways compatible with the message. If there is no action then, there is no meaning. The signal set is noise in the system. Hearing and thinking and feeling alone while important in psychological terms, is not sufficient for social meaning--action is necessary.
4The concert form used by the N.Y., Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Denver Symphony Orchestra is modeled on the traditional European concert. This concert format recapitulates the feudal system. Indeed the system of ranked hierarchy, the division into mental and manual labor and the integrated parts of the emergent whole which marks all stratified societies whether feudal, bureaucratic and elitist.
5Advertising genius has come up with ways to use God the Father figure in selling and realizing profit. The Xerox ad in which a group of "Monks" display astonishment at the "miracle" of xeroxography as they look up (toward God) is perhaps the best of the current lot. Any number of ads use the structural features of the religious experience (again without words) to solve the realization problem of private capitalism.
6The role of the mass electronics media is strategic here in as much as they are controlled by private capital. Christmas can be elevated in importance. Since Easter is primarily experienced in small face to face situations, it is easy to see the uneven contest. Mass media overwhelms the social media easily. But about one television station a month is purchased by religious organizations as are about 12 radio stations (1979 figures). And all the cable television have religious programming available continuously. This may alter the rate at which a given ideological field displaces another in Christendom.
REFERENCES
Barthes, Roland 1971 "The Rhetoric of the Image." In Working Papers in Cultural Studies for the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.
1977 Image, Music Text. Stephen Heath, ed. London: Fontana.
Burneston and Weedon 1978 "Ideology, Subjectivity and the Artistic Text." In On Ideology (Bill Shwartz, ed.). London: Hutchinson and Company.
Lash, Scott 1980 "Right and Liberalism in the Thought of Weber." Paper presented at the Conference of the American Sociological Association: New York.
Macherey, P. 1978 A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge: London.Mauss, Marcel 1955 The Gift. (I. Gunnison, Tr.) Glencoe: Free Press. (1928)
O'Connor, James 1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Quinney, Richard 1980 Providence: The Reconstruction of Moral and Social Order. New York: Longman.
Sumner, Colin 1979 "The Semiology of Roland Barthes." In Reading Ideologies. New York: Academic Press.
Weedon, Chris, et al. 1980 "Introduction to Language Studies at the Center." In Culture, Media and Language. London: Hutchinson.
Young, T. R. 1980 Social Opinion, Public Opinion and Mass Opinion. Red Feather: The Red Feather Institute.
NICARAGUA'S REVOLUTIONARY EASTER
By Alma Guillermoprieto in Managua
It could be an ordinary Easter, except that it is the second time Jesus has risen again in Nicaragua since the Revolution. The difference shows most inside the churches. At the Church of Mercy, Father Antonio Castro is proud to show the new alter, built in the shape of a barricade, out of the same paving stones local children used to build barricades with against the National Guard of the late dictator, Anastasio Somoza. "The congregation wanted it that way," he said. There was popular enthusiasm as well for the new Stations of the Cross. The First one--Jesus condemned to death--shows a young man being pushed in the back of a lorry by the National Guard. "At first some people objected to that," said Father Antonio, "but I explained that the old paintings we used to see were of old people, who painted a thousand years ago what they thought happened two thousand years ago. We have to do that again today." The initiative to make Christ a contemporary figure is transforming the Nicaraguan Church and the way it is perceived by the faithful--and creating some internal friction. What a local observer calls "the great battle for Jesus Christ" is on between the prorevolutionary clergy and the traditional Church. In the name of Jesus, the "popular Church," as it is sometimes known, is actively collaborating with the revolutionary regime. In the name of Christ, the religious hierarchy is warning against excessive Church involvement and cautiously siding with the Opposition. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) could not be happier with its success in capturing the imagination and loyalty of so many of the clergy. Four priests serve in cabinet- level positions. Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-priest, is Minister of Culture. His brother, Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit, headed the literacy campaign. He is now executive director of the Sandinista youth organization. Miguel D'Escotto is in charge of foreign relations. Edgar Parrales is Minister of Social Welfare, and like his colleague in culture, a lay priest. In addition, many of the country's 300 or so priests are serving in government. The alliance of a left-wing revolutionary organization with the radicalized pro-pounders of "liberation theology" is not a Nicaraguan phenomenon. In the early 1960s Father Camilo Torres of Colombia was one of several priests to exchange his vows for a guerrilla rifle. The difference in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America is that the clergy does not give up its vows, but preaches liberation from the pulpits. Many revolutionaries are no longer ashamed to call themselves Christians. Among the Sandinistas, many of the leaders-- among them the National Directorate member, Louis Carrion, and the army's second-in-command, Joaqui Cuadra--began as members of the Christian communities. The FSLN's statement on the role of religion in the Revolution last November made the new alliance explicit: "Our experience shows that one can be a believer and a committed revolutionary at the same time, and that there is no insurmountable contradiction between the two." The Nicaragua Church hierarchy disagrees at least with the interpretation of the statement, and a year ago it asked clergy serving in government positions to resign. The priests asked the Vatican to mediate. The Church softened its position to say that those priests who could be replaced in their government tasks should resign. The Vatican said the affair should be settled in Nicaragua and to date, no priest has withdrawn from the Government and more have joined. The Opposition here is as intent as the clergy in claiming the certificate of Christian authenticity. The Catholic radio station and the Opposition daily, La Prensa, use the Christian vocabulary to voice their attacks on the Government. The Archbishop of Managua's homilies are regularly reprinted in La Prensa and the Opposition and the FSLN think that the sermons are subtle attacks on the Government. The archbishop claims neutrality. "The hierarchy is growing isolated, and it is concerned about that," said Father Antonio Castro, as he prepared for an austere celebration of Good Friday.
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IS "CHRISTIAN" JUST A CODE WORD?
Here's what the spokesmen for the Religious New Right say:
"We've already taken control of the conservative movement. And conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party. The remaining thing is to see if we can take control of the country." Richard Viguerie, key fundraiser and strategist for the Religious New Right.
"Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process...a group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean." Terry Dolan, Chairman, National Political Action Committee.
"We're radicals working to overturn the present structure in this country...we're talking about Christianizing America." Paul Weyrich, Director, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress.
"If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who might not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom and the interests of the ethical and the Godly." Rev. James Robison, TV evangelist.
"You can't be a good Christian and a liberal at the same time." Rev. Jerry Falwell, TV evangelist, President of Moral Majority, Inc.