Every December, much of Christendom enters a familiar cycle of celebration: carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy, and warm images of snowy nights. In the United States and Europe, vague concepts such as “Western Christian values” or “Judeo-Christian civilization” are often discussed in public. These phrases have become so common that many people almost automatically assume that Christianity is essentially a Western religion, an expression of European culture, history, and identity.
it’s not.
Christianity was and is a religion of West Asia/Middle East. Its geography, culture, worldview, and founding story are rooted in a land with people, languages, and social structures much more similar to today’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than anything imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, which goes by the term “Judeo-Christian values,” is itself a completely Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West accepted Christianity, but it did not create Christianity.
And perhaps nothing reveals more clearly the distance between the origins of Christianity and its modern Western expression than Christmas. Nothing like Christmas tells the story of the birth of Palestinian Jews, children of this land born long before modern borders and identities emerged.
How the West created Christmas
In the West, Christmas is a cultural market. It has been commercialized, romanticized and wrapped in layers of sentimentality. Extravagant gifts overshadow concern for the poor. The season has become an expression of affluence, nostalgia, and consumerism, a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core.
Even the familiar lyrics of the Christmas song “Silent Night” obscure the essence of the story. Jesus was not born into stillness, but into turmoil.
He was born into a region under military occupation and under the shadow of violence, to a family that was evacuated by imperial orders. According to the Gospel story, the Holy Family was forced to flee as refugees after the infants of Bethlehem were slaughtered by a terrible tyrant determined to maintain his rule. Sound familiar?
In fact, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice, and the weakness of ordinary people caught in its path.
Bethlehem: Imagination vs. Reality
For many in the West, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is a place of imagination, like an ancient postcard frozen in time. This “small town” is remembered as a quaint village from scripture rather than a lively city with a unique history and culture, populated by real people.
Today’s Bethlehem is surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by the occupiers. Its inhabitants live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Not only do the occupiers not allow them to visit Jerusalem, but many feel cut off from the global Christian imagination, which reveres Bethlehem’s past and often ignores its present.
This sentiment also explains why many people in the Western world, while celebrating Christmas, pay little attention to the Christians in Bethlehem. Even worse, many have embraced theologies and political attitudes that completely erase or ignore our existence in order to support Israel, which is today’s empire.
In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred concept, while modern Bethlehem, where Palestinian Christians suffer and struggle to survive, is an inconvenient reality that must be ignored.
This disconnect is important. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they become disconnected from their spiritual roots. And when we forget that Bethlehem is real, we also forget that the Christmas story is real.
They forget that this event took place among people who lived under an empire, faced displacement, longed for justice, and believed that God was among them, not far away.
What Christmas means to Bethlehem
So what does Christmas look like from the perspective of Palestinian Christians who still live where it all began? What does it mean to this small community that has kept its faith for two thousand years?
The essence of Christmas is the story of God’s unity.
It is a story of a God who does not rule from afar, but instead exists among people and takes sides with those on the margins. The incarnation, the belief that God took on a physical body, is not a metaphysical abstraction. This is a radical statement about where God chooses to live. In vulnerable situations, in poverty, in occupied peoples, in peoples who have no power but the power of hope.
In the story of Bethlehem, God identifies not with the emperor but with those suffering under the empire, its victims. God comes not as a warrior, but as an infant. God is not in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most impressive form. God joins the weakest part of humanity.
Christmas is therefore a declaration of God against the logic of empire.
For Palestinians today, this is not just a theology, but a lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we perceive our world. The census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel is similar to the permits, checkpoints, and bureaucratic regulations that shape our daily lives today. The Holy Family’s flight resonates with millions of refugees fleeing war across the region. Herod’s violence is reflected in the violence we see around us.
Christmas is a great Palestinian story.
message to the world
Bethlehem will celebrate Christmas for the first time after two years without public celebrations. Although canceling the celebration was painful, it was necessary for us. We had no choice.
Genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and those of us still living in our Christmas home could not pretend otherwise. We couldn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus while children our age were being pulled out of the rubble to die.
Celebrating this season does not mean that the structures of war, genocide, and apartheid are over. People are still being killed. We are still under siege.
Rather, our celebration is an act of resilience, a declaration that we are still here, that Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this city tells must continue.
At a time when Western political discourse is increasingly weaponizing Christianity as a marker of cultural identity, often excluding the very people for whom Christianity arose, it is crucial to return to the roots of this story.
This Christmas, our invitation to the world church, especially Western Christians, is to remember where the story began. Remember that Bethlehem is not a myth, but a place where people still live. If Christendom wants to honor the meaning of Christmas, it must look to the real Bethlehem, not the imaginary Bethlehem. Bethlehem is a city where people still cry out for justice, dignity, and peace today.
To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed and that followers of Jesus are called to do the same.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
