Mix and Match Religion

Gerald L. Zelizer

As a convenience for those who celebrate both Christmas and Hanukah, one can purchase reversible table wear- napkins, place mats, and tablerunners with a Christmas motif on one side and Hanukah motif on the other. Also for sale is a greeting card, which depicts Santa and a Hasidic rabbi, standing together in front of a Christmas tree and menorah, singing from a booklet marked "Holiday Duets." And, of course, this month we shall see an even more serious crossing of religious borders with the more than occasional Star of David on Christmas trees, and bushes of Hanukah in Jewish homes. For year around use, an entrepreneurial Christian acquaintance showed me a hollow brass case in the shape of a cross into which are inserted passages of the New Testament for fixture to the door post of a Christian home, much as Jews hang on their doors a mezuzah, also a hollow container with passages from the Hebrew Bible.

On one level, this amalgam celebrates the universality of the religious urge. But religious symbols partake of deeper theological principles. Can they be mixed and matched easily like items in a spiritual boutique? The spillage not only occurs with the symbols themselves, but with the language of religion and ethnicity. USA contributor Samuel Freedman, has written how the use of the word "Holocaust" by groups other than Jews raises the issue of who owns the language of sacred symbols and memories. "Groups as varied as Cambodians, Armenians, American Indians, AIDS activists, environmentalists, anti- abortionists, have also seized upon the noun "Holocaust", its appropriation by blacks is the most pervasive…"

Even though I understand the good will, which accompanies this grab bag religious and ethnic symbolism, I am dubious about the exchange. Indiscriminate borrowing by one faith from another ruptures an essential purpose of the sacred. A major function of the sacred is to establish boundaries- permitted from forbidden, right from wrong, sanctified time and space from mundane time and space, and, ultimately, one's own religion from that of another. It is the secular, which levels, joins, removes boundaries, homogenizes rather than demarcates, and blurs distinctions rather than preserving them. When religious symbols are fused eclectically, we see a secular phenomenon that strikes at the heart of the religious process.

To be sure, pastiche religion did not originate in modern America. . The very placing of Jesus' birthday on December 25 was because the Romans on that date celebrated the Mithraic feast of the sun -god, at the Saturnalia. Scholars explain that the early church grasped this as an opportunity to turn away from pagan observance, to a day celebrating the birth of Jesus, a date of not actually recorded in the New Testament. Evergreen decorations are borrowed from the Roman ornamentation of their houses in the darkest of winter as homage to the fecundity of the world in spite of short days and long nights.

My religion, too, has occasionally appropriated rituals from others. Some attribute the yahrzeit candles lit in Jewish homes on the yearly anniversary of the death of a loved one, to emulation of votive candles in the Catholic Church which are called anniversaria. Archeologists have discovered that the fringed prayer shawls worn by Jewish men, and some women, in public prayer, originated in religions of Mesopotamia, where priests wore such shawls, and the fringes were customized signets.

If the history of religion is a record of much borrowing and appropriating, is there any gauge for evaluating its appropriateness today? I would suggest that when the symbol has, in effect, become on "permanent loan"- that is, when it is no longer recognizable as belonging to the original religion but rather matched with the new one, then it is a vital and legitimate augmentation of the Holiday. Christmas trees and wreaths today are divorced from their pagan origins, and universally recognized as Christmas decorations. However, when the symbol still retains a significant connection to the original religion, then the cross over can only obfuscate sacred boundaries. Thus, the same evergreen tree at a Jewish celebration of Hanukah, or a Moslem crescent on a tree, is inappropriate, and only blurs what should remain differentiated.

This guideline applies, as well, to the overflow of a particular religious symbol into the public arena. The town of Republic, Missouri held a contest to design a local logo that would decorate flags, street signs, and Chamber of Commerce brochures. Marilyn Shexsnayder, a stockbroker, won the contest with her design of a fish. "I wanted a symbol that would represent religion totally, all religion," she explained. A Bible dictionary and an encyclopedia explained, however, that the fish symbol emanates from a Greek acronym that spells "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." According to the ACLU, the fish symbol was still particularly religious and not secular and universal.

When President Clinton last year took communion in a South African Catholic Church, New York's Cardinal O'connor objected because the Sacrament of Communion cannot be given or received "merely as an act of courtesy or a spiritual gesture." Some of the courtesies and gestures between religions that we welcome as sound ecumenicism make for unsound theology. Respect and even admiration for another's faith, as well as one's own, dictate, on the contrary, keeping the symbolism separate and apart.