In this Advent Special of the Foreign Policy ProvCast, Mark Melton speaks with Walter Russell Mead about his annual Yule Blog series, which begins on Christmas Eve and runs through Epiphany on January 6. Mead explains that he originally created the Yule Blog several years ago because Americans have forgotten so much about the holiday’s religious grounding and message. While the series covers a range of topics over 14 days, Melton and Mead focus on two: first, Mead analyzes the role of Mary in the New Testament and the early church; then he talks about what Jesus’ Jewish identity and love of his people means for Christians’ love of their country and home, and what it means that Jesus was able to reach out to people from other nations while still loving his own.
They conclude by offering a message of what Christmas means in a year that the COVID-19 pandemic has scarred. Particularly, Mead explains that this year, when many are celebrating the holiday away from family, the separation should remind us that the heart of the Christmas holiday isn’t about those gatherings or events, but about the birth of Jesus Christ. “So what we’re going to live through this year, is Christmas stripped down to the basics, and that may be a way to get in touch as never before with this eruption of meaning into a dark history.”
Be sure to read the Yule Blog daily during the Twelve Days of Christmas here.
Special Intro Music: The US Marine Corps Band, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” via Pixabay.
Rough Transcript
Mark Melton
Welcome back to the Foreign Policy ProvCast. My name is Mark Melton and I’m the managing editor of Providence. And today we have a special Christmas edition of the podcast. And I’m going to be speaking with Walter Russell Mead. He is a professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, a distinguished scholar in the American strategy and Statecraft for the Hudson Institute. And he is the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal. So first off, Walter, thank you so much for joining us today.
Walter Russell Mead
It’s great to be here. You’re putting out a terrific magazine.
Mark Melton
Well, thank you so much and thank you for all your contributions on that. And I said earlier that this is a Christmas edition, but in some ways it’s an Advent edition because we are putting this out before December 25th. But Walter you for the past several years, have done a Yule blog and Providence has been hosting it since, I believe 2017. So first off, Walter, what is the Yule blog and why did you write it?
Walter Russell Mead
Well, the Yule blog is a set of meditations around the 12 days of Christmas. And I started it, I guess, because I was… when I teach undergraduates and deal with young people in all kinds of professional settings, I’m aware that somehow or other my generation and I guess now the one after me, dropped the ball on giving new generations a basic religious education. And far, and, you know, forget the question of belief… simply knowing what Christianity or for that matter, even Christmas is about, is something that a lot of young people just don’t know. So I thought, well, uh, you know, why not try to do something about it? And the Yule blog is what I came up with.
Mark Melton
So I know that a lot of listeners may not realize that Christmas doesn’t end on December 25th, but it begins. And I think it’s important to kind of remember that. I know we’ve had a couple of people who’ve wondered, why are we posting Christmas stuff into January? And I know for me personally, I realized that Christmas continued when I roomed with several Anglicans. You’re, are you Anglican? Is that right?
Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, I’m an Anglican. And so, you know, well but you don’t need to be an Anglican. You just need to visit shopping malls to know about 12 days of Christmas. I mean, you know, that’s one of the most famous, if also one of the most perplexing Christmas carols. If Christmas ends on December 25th what is your true love doing, giving you 11 maids… ladies dancing on the 11th day of Christmas? There are 12 days of Christmas.
Mark Melton
Right. And it’s also… It gives me a very good excuse to keep the Christmas tree up until January.
Walter Russell Mead
It’s amazing how much you can procrastinate once you fully internalize this important truth about Christmas.
Mark Melton
So in the blog posts or in the series the Yule blog, you write that for Christians, Christmas is the hinge of the world’s fate, the turning point of life. So why is Christmas the hinge and why isn’t something like Easter, the hinge?
Walter Russell Mead
That’s a good question. I think because the incarnation, you know, when God becomes a human being and joins our life. Easter, at least, you know, the way I think of it follows from that. And yes, I mean, you know, there are a lot of moments you could say where the hinge of history… C.S. Lewis, I think, would argue that, you know, every moment can be viewed as the hinge of history. And they’ve all… And you can make a good claim for all of them. So you can certainly make a claim for Easter. But I think God joining the human race, not as a conqueror, not as a king, not, you know, as some kind of supernatural, spooky being, but as a little baby in a manger during the reign of Caesar Augustus, is in historic terms… That divides history. Well for that matter AD and BC are based on the birth of Christ, not on Easter. So literally it’s the hinge, I suppose.
Mark Melton
I know for each year you kind of update the blog post. And I believe a couple of years ago, the first post, I think you’d called it the ’13th Post of Christmas.’ You wrote about how, you know, America is moving into this post-Christian phase and that we’ve had a taste of what politics would look like in this environment. And so in that situation, why do you think non-Christian Americans should understand the religious point of Christmas?
Walter Russell Mead
Well, for the same reason that you should try to understand your neighbors, even when they are different from you and especially when they are different from you. We are in a diverse society. Christians need to understand non-Christians, non-Christians need to understand Christians. But also if you want to understand American history, if you want to understand the Constitution, if you want to understand the sort of intellectual and cultural traditions that you know, plant the United States in a Western tradition, and then plant that Western tradition in the world tradition, you can’t do it if you don’t understand Christianity. You don’t have to be a Christian to do that, but you have to understand it. And I should say, by the way, that doesn’t mean you’re going to necessarily celebrate that tradition. But even if you want to condemn American history on the grounds of slavery, racism, or capitalism exploitation, you need to understand the framework in which this vile thing was created, if your criticisms are really going to be solid and have a fact. So I just say it’s an essential part of education, regardless of what you want to do with that education.
Now, I happen to think there’s another reason for wanting to understand it, which is that I think Christianity is true. And I think the Christmas story provides an extraordinary vision of the great Christian truths in a way that’s very accessible. You know, a kid can understand it participating in a nativity play in church and a great scholar who spent their whole lives studying theology can learn new things by thinking about that Christmas story.
Mark Melton
One of the things I appreciate about the Yule blog is you seem to be kind of gearing it toward young Christians so that they can understand. And I think it’s always helpful to kind of go back through and read some of the stories. And we don’t have you know, I know you’re a busy man, I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. But so we can’t do a deep dive into each of all of these total of 14 posts there, but I wanted to bring up a couple of points that you make. First, you emphasize the importance of Mary, mother of Jesus. So this becomes kind of very controversial and contentious for Protestants, but what do you want Protestants to know about Mary?
Walter Russell Mead
Well, I don’t, you know… I mean, I don’t know that Mary should be that controversial among Protestants. And certainly, I mean, some Marian doctrine that’s taught in the Catholic church -Roman Catholic churches- is controversial. But the idea that Mary is an important figure and that Christians who want to understand and follow Jesus need to understand his mother and to think about his mother, that doesn’t strike me as a particularly controversial idea in and of itself.
But I think you can add to that a couple of things. Number one, is that theologically, going back a very long way, the sort of universal church looking in… you know, speaking in those ecumenical councils in the early years, made the conclusion that Mary needs to be regarded as the mother of God. And that’s, that’s not about Mary, you know. That’s not, oh my goodness, how great is Mary. It’s who is Jesus? And what does it mean that Jesus is fully man and fully God? And how is Jesus as one person? How does he have this divine and human nature in him, to him?
As they worked that through, they realized that you have to accept Mary as the mother of all of Jesus. That makes her the mother of God. What does that mean for God? And what does that mean for us? So that’s part of it.
Part of it, I think is we have that commandment there, “honor your father and mother.” And as Jesus’s siblings by adoption, his mother and father are ours also. We know how Jesus honored his father through his ministry and his work and his acceptance of a terrible death. Might be worth thinking about what would it mean for Jesus to honor his mother, the mother of God?
I’m not suggesting, as I say in the posts, that Southern Baptists need to start saying rosaries. But I am saying that our understanding of Jesus and his word becomes deeper when we think about Mary.
The third area that I would point to is that I think the Bible actually teaches us much more about Mary and gives Mary a bigger role than many of us sometimes think, if we aren’t looking. And the key to this for me really, is the Magnificat, which is the hymn that -it’s in the gospel of Luke- that Mary utters when she is reflecting on God’s choice to make her to ask her to be the mother of his son. And if you read that as a very, very powerful hymn and you can, or, you know, piece of poetry, and you can hear in it themes that resonate through Jesus’s ministry.
You know, ‘scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.’ You can see, in a sense, the biblical portrait of Jesus is also a portrait that shows his mother’s influence. There’s another piece of this to me, Mark, that I think is important. And that is one of the the most distinctive things about the portrait of Jesus in the Bible. Something that marks him off, as far as I’m aware, from every other historical figure in any civilization or religious tradition, particularly at that time… Is there’s not a single place in the Bible where Jesus condescends to a woman or treats a woman as somehow a lesser being. He has theological discussions with women, he takes them seriously as independent people, he responds to them on a one-on-one personal way, he listens to them. He doesn’t make one little remark ever, “well you know, she’s only a woman and what can you expect,” or “women aren’t really supposed to be doing this or that.” It’s actually quite extraordinary. It’s actually one of the arguments one could make for why Jesus is different from all other teachers and you know, prophets who’ve ever appeared. I don’t think it’s stretching it very far to think about the woman who raised him having that kind of an impact. And then the fact that Christianity’s founder was the “least” quote “sexist person” in the historical record in many ways, certainly among men, has had a profound and continues to have a profound effect on the lives of billions of people in Western civilization and in Christian communities around the world, has historically inflected, not enough, but had an impact on the way the church has treated women and the way women have been able to flourish in the church. If you read […] Starks’ histories, it had something to do… the special place that women had in Christianity had a lot to do with Christianity’s early success in the Roman empire, the establishment of Christianity as a great religion.
So the Virgin Mary is a force of nature in the Bible. It’s also, I think, worth, and I’m sorry if I’m going on too long about this Mark, but I think it’s a really important set of points is that, people sometimes take the idea that, you know, that Christians believe that the mother of Jesus was a Virgin before he was born, as somehow being this kind of anti-sex thing. Sex is too dirty for God to be mixed up in it in some way. That is certainly not obviously the impression one gets from reading the Old Testament. I think it’s better… it’s better understood that the virginity of Mary is that, here is a young girl who takes a consequential decision -at least up there with Abraham’s decision to have faith in God- and she does it not for the sake of a man or in connection with a man. God approaches her as a person, as a free actor. And she responds.
You know, if Jesus had had a human father, I say this in the blog, the Bible story would be about like how the young prince won the love of Mary, and so was able to father the savior of the world. She would drop right out of that story or become a kind of an object. That God chose to do it this way is an extraordinary declaration about God’s view of women. So I think when we think about the Virgin Mary, we are thinking about you know, her influence on her son, her influence on our culture and the message that God’s use of the Virgin Mary and relationship with the Virgin Mary, through the Bible, has for all of us. And I don’t know why Protestants can’t get with that.
Mark Melton
In another post you write about how the Christmas story suggests that we can somehow try to be loyal to members of our nations, our families, and our tribes, and to reach out to the broader human community, of which we are a part of. But what does the story of Jesus and Christmas teach us about our nations and tribes?
Walter Russell Mead
It’s always interesting. You know, when you think about that story, you realize that Jesus was not nobody from nowhere. He was born into… here he is the son of God, the creator of the universe, is born into a particular family and into a particular small nation. And we can see in Jesus’s life, how the culture of that nation, obviously the religion of that nation, the history of that nation, the literature of that nation shaped his mind and his heart. And we see he has a kind of an instinctive love for members of quote, “his tribe.” And he’s at home in his tribe and then you think, “well, wait a minute, he’s a universal God. What is this?” But we see in his encounters with others, with Samaritans, with the Syrophoenician women, with other foreigners and outsiders that he comes across in the course of his ministry -Roman centurions and others- he leaps over these bounds. His identity forms him and grounds him and gives him a context. But it doesn’t limit his sympathy or his solidarity. And so he can honor the virtue of a Samaritan, or he can appreciate the quick wit and the repertoire of a Syrophoenician woman. He can honor the faith of a Roman.
Here I think we see, all of us, you know… we all need to be people and, you know, there’s biological studies and brain studies and so on, that show that we’re sort of made this way… To feel part, it’s important to us to feel part of a group, to be in a family, to be in a culture, to be in a country, whatever it may be. Yet clearly also, we need to be accountable to universal values. We can’t… maybe it’s, you know, I’m not going to get into a political dispute here.
I can see, you know, it’s not a completely unreasonable position, though. It can be a counterproductive position for a political leader to say ‘America first’ in my policy, but that’s very different from ‘America only.’ So as human beings, we have to be a good citizen, a loyal member of our community. But at the same time, ultimately we are part of a global species, a global community, a global family, and we can’t interpret our parochial identity so narrowly that it destroys our ability to do what Jesus does and reach out and have genuine human relations. And of course, Jesus ends by dying for humanity, the vast majority of which are not Jewish and had nothing to do with his history and community.
Mark Melton
You know one of the things, you know, when I was reading that last year, I was reminded of what Tim Keller wrote in Prodigal Prophet about how our nations, where we come from have such an important influence on who we are as a person. And we don’t… When we become Christians, we don’t abandon where we come from. C.S. Lewis also wrote something about it. But in the story he’s talking about Jonah. And he says the problem with Jonah wasn’t that he was a nationalist. Like he was, but his problem was he didn’t put God first within that relationship. And when he describes himself, he describes himself first as a Hebrew. And then he’s like, “oh yeah and then there’s this God thing.”
And so, anyway, so yeah, so I thought, you know, what you kind of write about with Jesus and his Jewish identity is important. And I think there’s a lot for us to learn about it today and kind of that prioritization, the right ordering of loves, I guess you could put it.
Walter Russell Mead
Well I think too, remember that Jesus was given the opportunity to quote, “make Israel great again” by the devil, when he offered to give him control of all the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus had to reject that vision in order to be able to fulfill his mission -and as we Christians believe, the mission of the Jewish people. He had to transcend that narrow loyalty in order to fulfill that narrow loyalty. Now you can go way too far with this and sort of, you know, well, since we’re supposed to transcend our nationality, I’m gonna think it’s a bad thing to be a patriot or to love my country and that anybody who loves their country doesn’t really love God.
I don’t think that’s what the Bible is getting at here. But it does say, you’re right, that all of our loves… All of our loves and passions are under the judgment of a sovereign and universal God. And it’s our responsibility… We must put God first or we will pervert the other thing, the other loves that we have.
Mark Melton
And I know you update the blog post every year. And I’m kind of curious to know, considering the pandemic, like what the Christmas season, what meaning it might have. You know, for me personally the most memorable sermon I’ve heard about Christmas emphasized how the holiday occurs at the darkest time of the year, at least in the Northern hemisphere. And then depending on where one lives, the days start getting longer and longer in early January after Epiphany through Easter. And so the pastor was bringing up the point was that Jesus can enter the world into our darkest moments and that life improves.
And now when I look at the news and I see how we’re over 300,000 dead with the pandemic, we’ve had a couple of days or so where more than 3000 have died. You know, people are having to stay home and not visit family that they would normally go see because they want to protect the health of their loved ones. Or they’re somehow limiting their life for the health of others. And yet we still have this vaccine. And so we have like this promise of a brighter future and the idea that, you know, sometime next year, things will be better, but we’re still in this dark moment. And so I kind of see a comparison in Christmas there where we have this dark moment, that’s still the promise of a future. And I’m just kind of curious, like, if you had any thoughts on what any special lessons for Christmas this year.
Walter Russell Mead
Well, certainly this is going to be the first Christmas in my life where I’m not going to be with a large gathering of family. And that is a, you know, that is really not the happiest moment. I have wonderful siblings and nieces and nephews, and at this point, great nieces and great nephews. And so much of the joy of the holiday is about seeing them. Well, we’ll have family zoom and so on, but it’s really not the same.
I guess it does remind me of the thing that we always say but I think we don’t often truly believe or experience… That the heart of the Christmas season is none of that. The heart of the Christmas season is the birth of Jesus Christ. So what we’re going to see and what we’re going to live through in this year is Christmas stripped down to the basics. And that may be a way to, you know, to get in touch as never before with this eruption of meaning into a dark history and dark lives.
Mark Melton
Walter, thank you so much for joining us on the Provcast for a special advent last Christmas version. And I really appreciate your Yule blog and everything you do for us.
Walter Russell Mead
Well thank you Mark. And you guys are doing great work and I look forward to finding ways to work with you in the new year. And wishing you and yours and all of our listeners, the happiest of holidays, and most joyous of times with friends and families and especially a clearer vision of the baby in the manger this year.
