Christmas festivity provokes curiosity over the First Cause

OPINION:

Each holiday season, festivities for their own sake, complete with mouthwatering delicacies and eye-opening gifts, are sufficient for some. For others, the key to a merry Christmas is appreciation of the religious nature of the season: the gift of new life bequeathed by the Creator through the birth of Christ.

Then there is a middling course — an attitude of gratitude for being alive, but interest in pondering the origin of human existence, not so much. Skipping past the elementary question of from whence we came, though, risks a painful void of meaning that no amount of merriment can fill.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center reveals where contemporary Americans stand regarding religion, spirituality and the distinction between the two. Most telling, a preponderant majority, 83% of respondents, claim an embrace of the spiritual — including the belief in the existence of a spirit or soul beyond the physical body.

A similar cohort of 81% adhere to the notion of an encompassing invisible dimension beyond the natural world. And 74% assert there are phenomena that science cannot explain, and 38% express a conviction that someone who has died was communicating with them from beyond.

Pew polled respondents on whether they accept various concepts of the afterlife: 71% embrace the existence of heaven, 61% believe in hell and 60% lend credence to both. Also examined were views on animistic beliefs usually associated with primitives. Somewhat surprisingly, 57% of modern Americans embrace notions of a spirit or spiritual energy residing in animals, 50% believe unseen powers inhabit graveyards and 48% presume the natural world is filled with invisible forces.

“Overall,” the survey concludes, “70% of U.S. adults can be considered ‘spiritual’ in some way, because they think of themselves as spiritual people or say spirituality is very important in their lives.”

Earlier Pew polling has found that the growth of spirituality has come at the expense of classic religious beliefs that include the notion of God as the First Cause. Christianity, the faith that engendered the Christmas festivities enjoyed by believers, nonbelievers and everyone in between, has shown declining popularity in America since 2007. It is, after all, characteristic of this era that the trendy is valued over the traditional.

Despite the 21st century’s rapidly expanding body of knowledge, moderns are apparently less inclined to ponder penetrating questions about the origin of the life they enjoy. Rather, clever cinematic fictions such as “The Matrix” offer edgy existential sidetracks, like the notion that human consciousness is simply the function of a sophisticated computer simulation, a theory in which even Elon Musk has dabbled.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with holiday festivities, which echo with the call to “eat, drink and be merry.” But the disconcerting remainder of that biblical idiom — “for tomorrow we die” — is worth recalling. With a reminder of human mortality comes an incentive to ask: Does God exist as the creator and consummator of life? 

That query is noticeably absent from Pew’s new spirituality survey, but it’s one that Americans — the spiritual, the religious and neither — owe themselves to ask. It was Christ — the subject of Christmas — who urged, “Seek and ye shall find.”