Tidings of Fear and Sadness : The Christmas season offers no reprieve from the violence tearing at the fabric of American civil society.

By Martin E. Marty

Dec. 25, 1994 12 AM PT

<i> Martin E. Marty, who teaches the history of religion at the University of Chicago, is senior editor of the Christian Century and author of "The Noise of Conflict" (University of Chicago Press)</i>

CHICAGO — Forget about Christmas. Forget the song about the angels bending near the Earth to touch their harps of gold. Forget the angelic words: “Peace on Earth, goodwill to all, from heaven’s all-gracious king.” Forget the efforts to locate the world that “in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.”

The cynic who counsels such forgetting knows Christmas peace is only a dream. Violence rules the real world. Skip Christmas. Three days after it comes Holy Innocents Day. Many Christians then read a story in the Gospel of Matthew. When the Wise Men told King Herod that a new king had been born, Herod was “exceeding wroth” and “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem,” in the hope of killing the child Christians call the Prince of Peace. Believers pray, “We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem.”

Innocents today are close to home, not only far off in Bosnia or Haiti. They come in all sizes and ages. Bearing Christmas gifts just purchased, or just going home weary, New Yorkers on a subway find their day disrupted by an explosion. In horror, hundreds run; 45 victims, in flames, suffer burns and will bear physical and psychic scars. It took no Herod to blast their world apart. An extortionist, a deranged and angry citizen, took out his violent instincts on them.

Violence in big New York makes daily news. But the journalistic year-end reckonings show there is no place to hide from the terror. Small city Fort Wayne, Ind., counted 38 murders, up from 18 two years ago. Small town Geneseo, Ill., needs new police patrols to counter gang attacks and violence against property--vandalism being a new fashion there.

Church parking lots need to be well-lighted and churches must provide police protection as believers crowd sanctuaries to pray at Christmas, as if it were Holy Innocents Day: “Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims.” Their Lord’s arms had to be extra large in 1994.

The use of the holiday week to ponder innocent victims would be an appropriate way to promote “goodwill to all.” High and low are the intended or actual victims in this “no place is safe” year.

Thus, the newspaper caption “Violence at White House” makes the point with map marks “A, B, C, D”--indicating sites of “recent violent incidents at the White House” up to Dec. 20. The White House, “America’s House,” a symbolic place for all citizens, turns into a fortress. Many violent Americans want its chief occupant dead. Deranged Americans seek attention by attacking the building.

Near where I write, in quiet, suburban Chicago, a front-page Christmas-week story tells of the murder of a 4-year old. He was at a temple that Sikhs here call “Gurudwara”--meaning a place of generosity and openness. No Sikh who needs help, food or shelter is turned away. So a Michigan trucker, Satpal Singh Sanghera, accepted hospitality and is alleged to be the stabber of the child, the innocent one.

“This is a mystery to us. How could anything like this happen at the temple and to such a loving child?” asked his aunt. Non-Sikh Chicago could only ponder with her, as her nephew was counted “the 62nd child under age 14 to be murdered in the six-county Chicago area in 1994.”

“This is a mystery to us,” this violence, so a benumbed nation mourns. It takes lessons from Jeremiah, quoted by Matthew in the Bethlehem massacre story. There was “a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping and great mourning. Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

“This is a mystery to us,” this violence. Social scientists, psychologists and theologians are busy offering never-quite-satisfying explanations of this close-to-home violence. Counselors deal full time with cases of wife abuse and child abuse, while in the national-culture wars, all sides debate “family values.” Commentators editorialize against violence but advertise its glorification in the entertainment media. Talk-show hosts stimulate verbal violence of citizen against citizen.

They show no awareness of how thin is the fabric of civility, how gossamer the web of nonviolence, how shattering words can be. Politicians and their well-paid advisers boast about the way they devastate opponents through TV ads. The public says it does not want attack politics. But voters, when polled, say such macho destructiveness influenced them against the defeated candidates, now victims.

Proving that verbal violence connects with physical violence is a difficult and unsure art. Confirming that being obsessed with violence in rap music, television and movie imagery, or that brutal art legitimizes or even causes actual violence against others, has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. Preferring mean politics to reason and gentility in public debate, as many see us doing this year, is not established as an element in the creation of a cruel climate in which physical violence becomes natural.

It would not hurt, however, if citizens experimented with showing concern for the other, the different one, the stranger and the enemy, instead of trying to destroy them with words. It would be worth exploring to see what rejecting the media that glamorize violence might do. And it might be an act of courage to treat the political foe as a human being of worth, even if he or she appears misguided.

“In your face”--the culture now needs that phrase to describe approved postures and gestures. But one cannot engage in in-your-face expressions and also pay attention to the value in the visage and presence of the other.

The recovery of civility and the advance of nonviolence cannot wait for a time when the religions and the philosophies come to agreement about all the causes and cures of violence. Americans are a practical people, however, and they could begin with a pragmatic philosophy in which they decide on creative ways of preserving life and honoring those who pursue them. Religious faiths can then go deeper than pragmatic philosophy--providing more profound motivations for turning against violence and saving innocent victims.

The world of frustrated or angry subway bombers, deranged wielders of knives or crashing airplanes at the White House, stabbers of children in temples, is not going to turn into the fabled Peaceable Kingdom through any single strategy. Violence will never disappear from the human story. To suggest that the recovery of civility and responsible regard for others might help produce a less violent society will seem to the “forget Christmas” cynic to be a futile strategy--an offer of plum pudding to the soldiers of Herod long ago or vandals now.

The places of worship--be they Christian in Christmas week, Jewish, where Rachel still weeps, or whenever shalom is sought, Sikh at various Gurudwaras or whatever else--all offer prayers to match the one for Holy Innocents Day. It asks, and they also ask, for divine help against those who would frustrate the “rule of justice, love and peace” and against the “designs of evil tyrants.” Saying a prayer is like holding up a mirror to the self--where it can be seen that the tyranny of evil may be as close as one’s own heart, where the purging has to begin.

Those who find moments for “solemn stillness” can help create the spiritual and moral space where resolves can grow, where civility can return and where some dreams of peace begin to be realized.