Jesus is not your friend with benefits

Plus: Proverbs for the new year, Christmas break, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to read the whole thing and support my work:

If you are a subscriber, I’ve got three free one-month trials to give away to my readers for

You Are Not Your Own Substack

. Comment or reply to request one. FCFS.

---

A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Jesus is not your friend with benefits

(via)

A friend shared a story from

The Free Press

in the group chat, and when I got to the bottom of it, another caught my eye: “I took religion out of Christmas. I regret it.”

Reader, I clicked it (and perhaps that’s my regret). The writer is an atheist who decided to celebrate Christmas minus Christ: yes to the tree and presents, no to all the God stuff. But now that her children are grown, she’s not sure that was the right call:

I couldn’t pass on to my kids a faith in God, but I could have shared the traditions that have always shaped and enchanted childhoods in this part of the world. The remnants were still there, and they were good. To today’s young atheist families building their annual rituals, I offer this advice: It’s okay if you don’t believe in God. Go to the Christmas Eve service anyway. Learn the carols, even the religious ones. Get the nativity set.

It is very difficult to know how to respond to this as someone who thinks the God stuff matters—and that you cannot really “take religion out of Christmas.” The phrase that keeps coming to mind is, “Well yes, but actually no.”

Well yes, please do come to church on Christmas Eve. Well yes, please do learn the carols; listen to their rather shocking words. Well yes, let your little children play with a toy Jesus, perhaps a first step toward the real thing.

But actually no, Christianity is not your holiday enchantment. It’s not a fairy story to give kids a ✨magical childhood✨¹ or a convenience to ease your mom guilt or a handy tool to shore up your vision for Western civilization (“this part of the world”).

Seriously, do we need to bring back the trilemma? Do you know about “let the dead bury their own dead”? Christianity is not Colonial Williamsburg! If you want in, you’re more than welcome, but stop messing around because you like the vibes.

There’s a good name for what this article is doing, and sadly, I can’t take credit for it. About a month ago, Daily Wire writer Megan Basham shared a colleague’s bon mot about the trend—which came to wide attention in 2023 and expanded in 2024—of secular figures flirting with Christianity because they’ve suddenly realized its social usefulness.

Turns out it’s bad, actually, when your society dismisses Christianity from its longstanding role as a primary fund of civic cooperation, shared norms, communal obligations, and aesthetic achievements and replaces it with … nothing. But it’s also bad to notice you’ve sold the cow, then try to get the milk for free. Basham’s colleague called this “wanting to be ‘friends with benefits’ with God.”

Very apt, though I think the phenomenon is rather broader than Basham’s summary suggests. We’re seeing this pattern and its variants from a number of figures; arranging them on a spectrum, I see at least six distinct types.