Is It a Sin to Celebrate Christmas? No, Most Churches Say

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No. Nothing in the Bible forbids a Christian to celebrate Christmas, and most churches keep it as one of their greatest feasts. Nothing in the Bible commands it either. Paul leaves holy days to each believer’s conscience (Romans 14:5–6). Some Reformed churches let 25 December pass as an ordinary day, and so do Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Christians in Rome disagreed about questions like this when Paul wrote to them. Some ate meat and some ate only herbs; some set one day above another and some treated every day alike. Paul did not order either group to change. He looked at what each was doing, and he found the same thing in both: “He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks” (Romans 14:6). His words leave room for a believer who keeps 25 December as a feast, and for one who treats it as an ordinary day.

No. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell of Jesus’ birth, but they give no date, and the New Testament never asks believers to keep the day as a feast. Jehovah’s Witnesses put it in one sentence: “The Bible does not give the date of Jesus’ birth, nor does it say that we should celebrate his birthday.” The historian Andrew McGowan says the same of the Gospels: “the date is not given, not even the time of year.”

The first Christians kept the day Jesus rose long before they kept the day he was born. Easter was their great feast, and the earliest Christian writers say nothing of a feast of his birth. The Church waited some three centuries to give the birth a day of its own, and by the year 354 the church in Rome was keeping it on 25 December.

Yet the Bible does show the birth being celebrated, on the night it happened. Luke tells how a multitude of angels praised God before the shepherds, and how the shepherds went home glorifying God for all they had seen (Luke 2:13–20). Christians who keep Christmas join that praise, once a year and on purpose.

Yes. Paul leaves such days to conscience, and he warns believers not to make them a test of one another. “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:16–17). A holy day, Paul says, is a shadow, and the one who casts it is Christ.

Most churches keep the feast with joy, each in its own way, and how Christians celebrate Christmas gathers their customs, from Advent to the nativity scene. For the Catholic Church it stands next to Easter: “Next to the yearly celebrations of the paschal mystery, the Church considers nothing more important than the memorial of Christ’s birth and early manifestations,” say its norms for the liturgical year. Orthodox Christians keep the same Nativity, and the churches that follow the old Julian calendar keep it on 25 December by that calendar, which falls on 7 January in ours. Lutherans keep it in the freedom of the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which approves holy days and festivals that serve good order in the church and teaches that keeping them is not necessary to salvation. One church ranks the day next to Easter, another keeps it freely and will not make it a law, and in each of them believers are regarding the day “unto the Lord”, as Paul said they might.

Even Reformers who cleared the calendar kept this day. The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 was written by men who had abolished the saints’ days, which they said had “much that is absurd and useless”. When they came to Christ’s own feasts, his birth among them, they did not reach for the same broom: “if in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly.” Men who had swept the saints’ days from their churches still made room, gladly, for the birth of their Lord.

Because they read the same Bible and reach another answer. Most of them believe that worship must keep to what God has commanded, and that he never commanded this feast; some also believe that its customs dishonour him.

The Puritans

The English Puritans held that a holy day Scripture had not appointed should not be kept, and the drinking and disorder that came with Christmas troubled them as well. Their Directory for public worship, agreed by the English Parliament with the divines gathered at Westminster and approved in Scotland in February 1645, puts it in one line: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.” In the English of that time, “vulgarly” meant “commonly”. The sentence sounds severe to us. For them it was faithfulness, a refusal to set before God a day he had not asked for.

In 1647 Parliament went further and made it law. Its ordinance of 8 June begins, “Forasmuch as the Feasts of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and other Festivals commonly called Holy-Dayes, have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed,” and orders that they “be no longer observed as Festivals or Holy-dayes within this Kingdome of England and Dominion of Wales.” In their place, scholars, apprentices and servants were to have, with their masters’ leave, “Recreation and Relaxation from their constant and ordinary Labours on every second Tuesday in the moneth.” The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 dates the ban to an earlier Act of 1644, which made the day a fast and a market day; the ordinance of 1647 is the one that names the Nativity and ends the feast. Many people would not give it up, and at Canterbury, the same encyclopedia records, “blood was shed”. Christians wounded one another over the birthday of the Prince of Peace.

Across the ocean, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed a law on 11 May 1659 that fined anyone “found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” five shillings. Its reason was “preventing disorders” caused by festivals “superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others.” The law stood until 1681, when it was repealed under pressure from the government in London. For twenty-two years, believers who feared dishonouring God fined other believers for feasting on the birth of his Son. Paul had already set both of them in one verse: the one who keeps the day keeps it unto the Lord, and the one who will not keep it refrains unto the Lord.

Reformed churches that keep the old rule

Some Presbyterian and Reformed churches still hold to the Puritans’ rule, which is often called the regulative principle: in worship, the church does only what Scripture commands. The Westminster Confession puts it this way: God “may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men … or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.” Behind the rule is a fear any of us can understand, that we might bring God what we invented in place of what he asked for.

The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland is one of these churches, and it keeps no Christmas. It grants that Christ’s birth “was certainly a momentous day for the world.” Yet “One will search the New Testament in vain for a command to keep the birthday of the Lord Jesus Christ sacred,” it says in its magazine. For this church the Lord has already given his people a holy day: “the Church of God has her holy day in the Christian Sabbath as commemorative of His resurrection from the dead.” Its people keep a holy day every week of the year, and none in December.

Scotland had held that line from the start. When the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved the Second Helvetic Confession, it met on 25 December 1566, and it took exception to one thing in it: it disapproved of “days dedicated to Christ”. In its letter to Beza it said that Christmas and the other feasts of Christ “at the present time obtain no place among us.” The Scots signed what they could sign and said plainly where they could not, which is how Paul asks believers to differ.

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Jehovah’s Witnesses, who see themselves as Christians, believe that Christmas is rooted in pagan worship that God does not approve, and that Jesus asked his followers to remember his death, not his birth. Their teaching on God differs from the Nicene Creed that Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches confess: they hold, in their own words, that “Jesus is not Almighty God.” They know their stand on Christmas is unpopular. “The Bible encourages us to think for ourselves,” they write, and “we adhere to Bible principles even if it means that we become unpopular.” They also say that they leave other people free to keep the feast. Their reasons, and the Memorial they keep instead, are set out in do Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate Christmas?

Most historians say no, though some of its customs are older than the feast, and the evidence on both sides is weighed in does Christmas have pagan origins?

People who love Christ are found on both sides of this question. Most believers, in most churches, keep Christmas. Some Reformed churches today do not, as the Puritans did not in the 1640s, and neither do Jehovah’s Witnesses. Paul’s question to the Romans is meant for all of them: “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth” (Romans 14:4). The test he gives is whether a day is kept, or left, “unto the Lord”.

If your church keeps no Christmas and your family does, or the other way round, Paul’s counsel is for both of you. “Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way” (Romans 14:13). The one who keeps the feast should not scorn the one who refrains. The one who refrains should not condemn the table his neighbour sets.

Whether we spend Christmas Eve in a crowded church or 25 December at an ordinary day’s work, we can give God thanks for the same Child. That is what Paul asks of us all, and he gives the reason: “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).

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• Do Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate Christmas?
• Does Christmas have pagan origins?
• Why is Christmas on December 25?
• How do Christians celebrate Christmas?
• What is the true meaning of Christmas?

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