God and Sinners Reconciled

Adoration of the Shepherds
by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

by Bob Morrison, Contributing Author: I can remember when I did not love Christ, but I cannot remember when I did not love Christmas. And part of my earliest Christmas memories was watching a movie my parents loved, the English version of A Christmas Carol.

Charles Dickens' little novel has been a part of the season for English-speaking peoples since its first appearance in 1843. It was so popular that even a century later, President Roosevelt made it a family tradition to read the entire story to his children every Christmas Eve. The White House was keen to let the whole country know it. One suspects that FDR shrewdly used Dickens' story of the redemption of the miserly old London grain broker, Ebeneezer Scrooge, to let Americans know what he thought of his bitter opponents on Wall Street and in the GOP.

The movie version was scary, too, especially for young kids. The ghost of Scrooge's long-dead business partner, Jacob Marley, manages to come through the locked and bolted heavy oaken door to Ebeneezer's bedchamber. Only very rich English people had bedchambers. "Old Marley was dead as a doornail," we are informed. But there he is on screen moaning and shaking his chains. Those chains are attached to clunky cash boxes. He is condemned in death to lug those strongboxes with him wherever he goes.

But there is merriment in this story from Victorian England. Scrooge's nephew Fred, son of his late sister, is a kindly, forgiving soul. He tries to get his uncle to push back from his desk, to take one day away from getting and spending, and to join in the holiday revelry. The same people who urged us to "deck the halls with boughs of holly" wanted us to have a party.

Scrooge will have none of it. "Bah, Humbug," he says. "If I could work my will," Scrooge tells his nephew, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips would be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!" That would be figgy pudding, of course.

No, says Nephew Fred. He has the courage to confront his rich old uncle. He knows his childless Uncle Scrooge is probably worth millions and he is the likely heir, but still Fred answers back:

There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmastime, when it has come around—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good and will do me good; and I say God bless it!Dickens's London was as proud and pompous and powerful then as our City of Washington is today. His character Fred was doubtless thinking of England's urban poor when he spoke of caring for "people below them," and maybe even of the slaves' unrequited toil in the American South. Their consciences stirred by the writings and works of Evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce, the English people of the Victorian Era were sincerely and passionately anti-slavery.

When some of his fellow businessmen ask Scrooge for a small contribution—gold or silver will do--to relieve the poor at Christmas, he says the poor should go to the workhouse. "They would rather die," says one of the volunteers. "Then let them die," says Scrooge, "and decrease the surplus population!"

Today, in Washington, great forces contend, usually over silver and gold. We recently saw Dr. Jonathan Gruber testify before Congress. Gruber is the one who boasted to an academic audience of how stupid the American voters are and how good it was to make the health care legislation so "opaque" that neither the people nor Congress could figure it out.

Gruber has written of the great benefit to America of Roe v. Wade. It has eliminated millions of poor and perhaps criminal people and saved the taxpayers fourteen billion dollars, Gruber said. He might have added: "Let them die and decrease the surplus population."

So, it's not surprising that the Bah Humbug Lobby--those folks who want to banish Christmas from the public square--are also the ones so eager to reduce the surplus population. But I'll vote with Scrooge's nephew, Fred.

He who is rich in Mercy has been merciful to me. So I thank God for His Son. Christmas has done me good and will do me good. When I joined a carol sing-along at our Naval Academy Chapel, I sang the words I learned as a boy. I knew them by heart—but now I sing them with a grateful heart:

Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.-----------
Bob Morrison is a Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council. He has served at the U.S. Department of Education with Gary Bauer under then-Secretary William Bennett.  He is a contributing author to the ARRA News Service.

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