Lois and I left for our winter in Florida by late October, a day or so before Halloween. We spent two nights on the road. Just outside Daytona Beach, we stopped at our first BUC-EE’S, a chain of travel centers known for all kinds of distinguishing features and services. BUC-EE’S has won a few world records; among them, the world’s largest convenience store (75,593 square feet in Luling, Texas), the world’s largest gas station, boasting 120 pumps on 1.7 acres in Sevierville, Tennessee, and the world’s longest car wash (255 feet in Katy, Texas). Every BUC-EE’s has amazing bathrooms, an enormous range of different foods, including every flavor of jerky known to man or woman, and an incredible assortment of branded merchandise. The store that we entered was unashamedly promoting Christmas at this early date, and the lines at the cash registers were long, and the jingle of huge profits was prominent. Merchandise was flying out the doors. The whole entrepreneurial extravaganza seemed over the top for both Lois and me, but we enjoyed it.
The crass promotion of Christmas happens earlier each year. A week ago, Lois and I went to the drive-thru at a local Starbucks, and they greeted us with the holiday jingle: Make it merry! Joy in every sip! Both Hallmark and the Great American Family Movie channel are only broadcasting Christmas movies, accompanied by Christmas advertising. The malls have their Christmas decorations out, and the music is being queued up as we speak. Good news, though, Michael’s is offering a 25% discount on all artificial Christmas trees! I have long taken offense at these societal corruptions of a sacred season, and I am sure that I have said so in a sermon or two over the years.
This year, however, my feelings and holiday expectations are vastly different. The promotion of Christmas cannot come too soon. We need the advance of Christmas and its encouragement to embrace a spirit of peace and goodwill, kindness, and generosity to confront the central and alarming focus and force of our contemporary culture, labeled by many as a culture of cruelty.
Most political commentators opine that last Tuesday’s elections across the country represent a seismic shift in the nation’s attitude toward Trump and his administration’s objectionable policies. One writer called it a ‘tsunami disapproval and opposition. I would like to think that as a society, we have finally had enough of Trump’s corrupt and cruel treatment of the vulnerable and marginalized.
In a recent interview with Laura Ingraham, Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, said:
What is more concerning is the way that Ingraham, Trump and their ilk are aggressively growing a culture of cruelty, conjuring up the ugliest roots of American history.
That is exactly what we are allowing the administration to do in our country, to grow a culture of cruelty, and together we need to do something about it.
We define this ‘growing culture of cruelty’ in the following terms:
A culture of cruelty is one in which social groups and organizations, including governments, engage in particularly cruel behavior in order to punish, humiliate and revel in the plight of others, particularly political opponents and scapegoated social out-groups. We only need to think of Trump’s deportation policies and the behavior of his immigration Gestapo, ICE, to see the culture of cruelty at work. We can see it in the DOGE chainsaw approach to public sector employment and federal regulations. We can see it at MAGA rallies. It is personalized in the behavior of Trump advisors like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt and Tom Homan, who show utter contempt for the suffering their policies have caused and in fact appear to relish being able to rub in the fact that they can act with apparent impunity due to the weakness of the courts and congressional or partisan complicity. (Kiwipolitico, April 26, 2025)
In today’s Opinion by the New York Times columnist David French, Pope Leo Doesn’t Want to be Anti-Trump. But He Is, the journalist writes:
In May, just after the pope’s election, I wrote that the most important American in the world was no longer named Donald Trump. The president has less than four years left at the center of the international stage. The pope will present a global moral witness for years to come, and it’s a moral witness that is fundamentally incompatible with the cruelty and corruption of Trumpism. (NYT, French, 11/16/25)
I would like to think that not only is Pope Leo the most important American in the world but so are each one of us, people of faith, followers of Jesus, called to make our local moral witness, a witness utterly incompatible with what we see happening in our cities and communities daily across the country.
In her Substack post, November 13, 2025, Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson made the following defining observation:
Today, retired Chicago broadcast journalists published a letter to people in the Chicago area saying what the federal government is doing to Chicago is “wrong.” It is “a brutal and illegal campaign against fellow Chicagoans, mainly Latinos: violent abductions, gutting families, using tear gas around children, roughing up witnesses, ramming cars and even taking a day care teacher from her school.” This “is not law enforcement,” they wrote; “it is terror.”
For the first time in twelve years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “Special Message” yesterday. Addressing the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, the bishops said they were “saddened by…the vilification of immigrants,” “concerned about the conditions in detention centers,” “troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and…hospitals and schools,” and “grieved” over the damage the immigration raids have done to families. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” they wrote. “We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
Pope Leo and the Catholic Church, both pulpit and pew, have stepped up!
David French reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
…the church is not to be the master or servant of the state but the conscience of the state.
David Brooks, in a column for the New York Times, recently offered some helpful observations. (How to Replace Christian Nationalism, NYT, 11/13/25). He began the article saying:
Every once in a while I come across a passage in a book that hits me with the force of revelation. Here’s one: “A person’s way of being human is the most authentic expression of their belief or unbelief. A person’s life speaks more about their faith than what they think or say about God. That passage is from Tomas Halik’s book “The Afternoon of Christianity.”
This growing culture of cruelty is evidence that too many have lost their way of being human and, as a result, betray the faith they confess. Truly, a person’s life speaks more about their faith than what they think or say about God.
Another quote by Brooks reads:
In the Book of Exodus, Moses asks to see God’s face, but God shows him only his back. Perhaps that’s because you don’t see the face of the one you are following. The early church father, Gregory of Nyssa argued that Christians are meant to attend Christ in exactly this way—to follow, to move in the direction of Jesus’ movement. Christian faith, Halik argues, is a journey toward and with Jesus, who said, “I am the way.”
Think of these few thoughts and they will hit with the force of revelation. Our Christian faith is a journey, especially when Christmas is in the air and all around us, calling us from the commercialized chaos to journey toward our spiritual Bethlehems and the silent sacredness of Jesus’ birth and the awakening of hope amid a dark and sometimes cruel world. We are meant to accompany Jesus among the poor, the vulnerable, the hungry, the homeless and the victims of the heartless powerful, being reminded along the way, that He is the way to our true humanity and most authentic life.
Sadly, and stunningly, however, the challenges are multiple and significant. A recent Gallup poll states that today the role of religion and the Christian faith are significantly diminished. It reports a 17-point drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life — from 66% in 2015 to 49% today — and ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007. About half of Americans now say religion is not an important part of their daily life.
We have our work cut out for us, and Christmas cannot come too soon. Let us make sure that among the merriment and music, the merchandizing and branding, we publicly testify that Jesus is the reason for the season, and we are His followers, living as He would have us live, reforming this culture of cruelty into one of compassion, mercy and justice.