By Editorial Board December 24 

​JESUS OF Nazareth was born a displaced person. As the writer Garry Wills relates it: “He comes from a despised city and region. Yet he cannot be allowed a peaceful birth in that backwater. His parents are displaced by decree of an occupying power that rules his people. For the imperial census to be taken, Joseph his father must return to his place of birth. . . . Joseph does not even have relatives left in his native town, people with whom he can stay. He seeks shelter in an inn, already crowded with people taken away from their own homes and lives. Because of this influx of strangers, he is turned away. There is no bed left, even for a woman far advanced in pregnancy. She must deliver her child in a barn, where the child is laid in a hay trough.” Soon afterward, the infant and his family become fugitives from King Herod as he seeks out the child he fears will one day replace him on the throne. And so it went.

Long ago, John Milton wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But well before that, governments were showing their ability to do much the same thing: to bring either peace, order and a measure of prosperity to their people or to create a place where destruction, hunger and hopelessness drive many into the deserts and overseas.

This Christmas there are many such people fleeing violence, living hand-to-mouth, without warmth or medical help or food, desperately seeking refuge wherever they can find it for themselves and their children. In prosperous Europe, the most encouraging response has come from Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, the conscience-driven leader of a nation that, three-quarters of a century ago, created its own version of hell on Earth. But this openness to the dispossessed and the desperate has not been entirely matched in other parts of Europe or even remotely so in our own country. In part this is because of fears about possible violence by some small number of the refugees and in part because of anxiety about the burden they might place on Western societies. As always, domestic politics has played a role for better and worse — here and in Germany and elsewhere.

Christmas has become an almost universal holiday, celebrated, observed or at least tacitly acknowledged as a festive occasion even by peoples who have no history of Christianity. And, indeed, many of the values of that faith are universal, if sometimes honored only in the breach. But the word “Christian” is often misused in our times, in a way that implies some allegiance to a particular political party, economic doctrine or set of moral strictures that are not representative of large numbers of true Christians. (The media are often complicit in this confusion.) There is a broader concept of the term, one that is succinct, relevant and all but imperative in this season when we face a humanitarian crisis that tests our character and our compassion. It comes from the Gospel of Matthew and is stated as an ideal voiced by Jesus:
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“I was hungry and you gave me food.
I was thirsty and you game me drink.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/22/obama-faith/
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You’re a Merry Man, Charlie Brown
The 50-year-old Christmas TV tradition endures because Chuck knows the reason for the season.
By 
STEPHEN LIND
Dec. 20, 2015 4:11 p.m. ET
Every year millions tune in to “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” a 50-year-old TV special that shows its age. The animation looks rudimentary by Pixar standards. The voice acting, performed by real children, isn’t exactly a Shakespearean triumph. So what makes this “Peanuts” television special, in a word, special? It’s that Charlie Brown knows what Christmas is all about.

The creator of “Peanuts,” Charles Schulz, was surprised by the opportunity to make a TV special at all. In 1963 San Francisco producer Lee Mendelson made a documentary about Schulz’s cartooning, but it failed to sell. Two years later, however, advertising giant McCann Erickson called Mr. Mendelson, inquiring about the possibility of an animated Christmas program for its client, Coca-Cola.

In a mere handful of months, Schulz, Mr. Mendelson and director Bill Melendez pulled the show together. To elevate it to fit the paradoxical sophistication of “Peanuts,” they scrapped the traditional laugh track and opted for a jazz score. To maintain the strip’s ethos of authenticity, they had children voice the characters and brought in a choir from a local church. Schulz insisted that they include a passage of scripture—Linus’s recitation of the Gospel of Luke. When his creative partners voiced concern that broaching religion might be risky, Schulz responded simply: “If we don’t do it, who will?”
The trio showed their completed reel to CBS network executives just shy of the scheduled airdate. The execs hated it. “The Bible thing scares us,” they said, as Mr. Mendelson later recalled. They complained about the music and plodding animation. Lucky for Chuck, it was too late to change the programming schedule.

The show was met with wild adoration. More than 15 million viewers tuned in, and it won an Emmy for children’s programming in 1966, beating out Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color.” Many of those who sent letters to Schulz and Coca-Cola said that the Biblical content, rare on television even then, resonated. “I am encouraged,” one read, “to see a national company willing to sponsor not only an excellent production but also a Christian one.”

Re-aired every year since—more than any Christmas special save “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted a year earlier—the show pushed Schulz’s strip to fresh heights. CBS ordered more specials, including a Halloween tale that also still runs. The shows became an entry point as the changing newspaper industry strove to bring new readers to its funny pages. They drove the “Peanuts” licensing operation, now owned 80% by New York-based Iconix and 20% by the Schulz family.

Half a century later, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is far more than a quaint historical artifact. The slow and yet sublime story proves that purposeful characters and a simple aesthetic can beat fancy computer algorithms. The annual spiritual validation on mainstream television is a breath of fresh air. Free from gross humor or double-entendres, the show is a reminder that Hollywood need not reach to the lowest common denominator. A lonely kid who hears deep truths and is comforted by flawed but well-meaning friends is enough.
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In the first of this year’s two broadcasts, seven million viewers tuned in to see old Chuck struggle with the meaning of the season. It is a struggle, at once simple and complex, that the studios thought would result in failure. The viewers continue to say otherwise.
Mr. Lind is the author of “A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz” (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

By W. Bradford Wilcox December 15, 2015

Washington Post
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W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project, an American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar, an associate scholar at Georgetown University's Religious Freedom Project and co-author, with Nicholas H. Wolfinger, of "Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos."

It’s a message we hear more and more: Religion is bad.

And certainly recent headlines — from terrorist attacks perpetrated by radical Islamists in Paris and San Bernardino to the strange brew of warped Christian fundamentalism that appeared to motivate alleged shooter Robert Dear at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs — feeds the idea that religion is a force for ill in the world. But in “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason,” Sam Harris not only asserts that the “greatest problem confronting civilization” is religious extremism, he further waxes that it’s also “the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”

Taken together with the assessment of social scientists — the high priests of our contemporary culture — the message, increasingly, is clear. Just last month, a new University of Chicago study conducted by psychologist Jean Decety posited that religious children are less altruistic than children from more secular families. He went so far as to contend that his results reveal “how religion negatively influences children’s altruism. They challenge the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior, and call into question whether religion is vital for moral development — suggesting the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite.”

It’s a sweeping indictment of the role of religion in society based on a study of sticker-sharing and cartoon-watching among children aged 5-12 around the globe. Using a non-random and non-representative sample, Decety found, among other things, that children from religious homes were less likely to share stickers with an unseen child than children from secular homes. In response to Decety’s findings, a Daily Beast headline proclaimed “Religious Kids are Jerks” and the Guardian reported “Religious Children Are Meaner than Their Secular Counterparts.”

As I see it, the impulses behind this thinking are several and, to some degree, understandable. Religion is frequently seen by secular observers as an obstacle to social progress on issues like abortion and gay rights, or as an adjunct of conservative politics in general. Meanwhile, a growing number of young adults in America identify as religious “nones,” often with little appreciation or understanding of religion. But is religion really as negative a force in our daily lives as its detractors and skeptics suggest? No.

On average, religion is a clear force for good when it comes to family unity and the welfare of children — the most important aspects of our day-to-day lives. Research, some of it my own, indicates that on average Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.

Data taken from National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveyindicate, for instance, that Americans who attend religious services often are markedly more likely to report they are “very happy” in their marriages compared to those who rarely or never attend. Frequent attendees are about 10 percentage points more likely to report they are “very happy” in their marriages, even after controlling for their education, gender, race, ethnicity and region. So, faith seems to be a net positive for marriage in America.

And when it comes to kids, the research tells us that religious parents spend more time with their children. Indeed, the Deseret News/Brigham Young University American Family Survey tells us that parents who attend religious services weekly are more likely to eat dinner with their children, do chores together and attend outings with their children, even after controlling for parental age, gender, race, marital status, education and income.

Religious parents are also more likely to report praising and hugging their school-aged children. Contra Decety, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter finds that religious teens are more likely to eschew lying, cheating and stealing and to identify with the Golden Rule. Children from religious families are “rated by both parents and teachers as having better self-control, social skills and approaches to learning than kids with non-religious parents,” according to a nationally representative study of more than 16,000 children across the United States.

In contrast to Decety’s assertions, faith is a net positive when it comes to “prosocial behavior” among American children.
French sociologist Emile Durkheim explained that what makes religion vital, in part, is that it provides rituals, beliefs and a sense of group identity that deepens people’s connections to the moral order. In his words, the faithful “believe in the existence of a moral power to which they are subject and from which they receive what is best in themselves.”
The rituals associated with religion lend meaning to life, including its most difficult moments and seasons — from the loss of a job to the loss of loved one. Moreover, as I’ve noted elsewhere, more formal “rites as a baptism and a bris, congregations erect a sacred canopy of meaning over the great chapters of family life: birth, childrearing and marriage.” Religious rituals encourage us to take our family roles more seriously and to help us deal with the stresses that can otherwise poison family relationships. The norms — from fidelity to forgiveness — taught in America’s houses of worship tend to reinforce the faithful’s commitments to their spouses, family members and children and give them a road map for dealing with the disappointments, anger and conflicts that crop up in all family relationships. And as one of the most powerful sources of social capital outside of the state and workplace today, religious social networks provide support and succor to millions of Americans.

Religious faith is not a cure-all when it comes to families and children. And, of course, millions of secular Americans enjoy strong and stable families — indeed, a majority of husbands and wives who rarely or never attend church report that their marriages are “very happy.”

To be sure, there are scenarios in which religion can be a source of tension. Evidence suggests that religious children are “less tolerant of social change and diversity in lifestyle,” according to Hunter. Their identification with and adherence to orthodox religious beliefs, in particular, seems to make them less likely to support abortion and gay rights.

And religious disagreement in the family — whether between husbands and wives or between parents and children — can spell trouble, especially when this disagreement is deep and heartfelt. Less conservative, less religious women married to theologically conservative men, for instance, are more likely than average to be physically abused. Nominal evangelicals — especially nominal evangelicals from the South, the region I hail from — are more prone to higher rates of domestic abuse and divorce, even compared to their fellow citizens who have no religious affiliation.

But religion in America is not the corrosive influence that it’s often made out to be nowadays. On the contrary, for many Americans, it’s a source of inspiration that redounds not only to their benefit, but also to their families and communities.