ABSTRACT
Butcher deftly crafts his figurines to combine common cultural themes of childhood innocence, domesticity, and a simple Christian faith. His art is dependent on two salient features of Christianity: its narrative richness, and
its theological claim that people can be saved despite being sinful. Both of these features give Butcher leeway to depict his characters sentimentally. For example, a figurine shows the baby Jesus in a crèche, with two little children looking in on him. The girl is whispering to the boy “His Name is Jesus” (the title of the figurine; Martin 1994, 242). Theologically, this portrays the frailty and ignorance of the human condition, but not in a condemnatory manner. We are invited to project our limited selves into the salvific situation, and imagine that we could have played a role-perhaps as cute comic relief-in the cosmic drama. Since this cosmology assumes that we are all children in the eyes of God, each of us has the potential to be similarly winsome and lovable. God’s transcendence is maintained, especially given the evangelical overtones of the figurine’s title, but that transcendence is ultimately no more unbridgeable than that between parent and child. Hand-wringing over the commercialization of Christmas is as old as the
holiday’s prominence in America (Nissenbaum 1996, 140, 318). Christians of many denominations have decried the appropriation of Jesus’ birth in the service of fattening corporate profits (Schmidt 1995, 5-6). Genuine though these concerns may be, they tend to overlook larger cosmological contextsspecifically, the overarching universalism of contemporary capitalism and the ambiguous design of placing God amid these business details. The Precious Moments Chapel happily provides a site for baptized capitalism, where a religious sheen enhances the magic and greases the wheels of commerce. The chapel’s ritual of Christmas shopping represents the annual rebirth of a gentle apotheosis of capitalist calculation. Ritual commonly uses sacred objects: props such as incense, flowers,
vestments, animals, food, and coins. Similarly, any commodity, in its usevalue, “is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs” (Marx 1867/1977, 125). Despite the fact that both capitalism and ritual employ material objects, they disengage from that very materiality, deliberately projecting a cosmological overlay or abstract meaning onto objects. Instead of linking us to our physicality, our bodies, and our materiality, the processes of elevation in formal rites and of leveling quantification in capitalism tend to alienate participants from the material qualities of objects and from the ways in which they are made and exchanged (Marx 1867/1977, 126-28; Grimes 1990, 14). Of course, such alienation has not gone unnoticed, and various attempts
have been made to overcome it. The more radical wings of the Protestant Reformation, for example, repudiated the inherited ritualism of the medieval church. But such total rejection brought in its wake a strengthening of body/ mind dualism, and therefore did nothing to ease the alienation from matter. A seemingly more promising route emerged when the domestication of white urban America throughout the nineteenth century entailed moving both ritual and the exchange of commodities into the charmed, intimate circle of home. No moment better encapsulates this strategy than the Christmas
season, and few places rival the Precious Moments Chapel as an illustration of the collapsed logics of religious sentiment and capitalism. Christmas shopping becomes an adjunct ritual, a public enactment of one’s commitment to the ritual affirmation of personal domestic bliss. Sentimentality must be highlighted at every turn, either in the hopes of providing authenticity, or in the calculation and manipulation of human desires. As a ritual about buying commodities, Christmas shopping reinforces ritual and religious logic. The seasonal decoration of the grounds of the Precious Moments Chapel supports an atmosphere of total absorption in the “holiday spirit,” centered on buying and selling. Contradictions emerge when one inquires how, and how much, the entire operation is commercialized, and when one views the extent to which the attempts to disguise commercialization are both (and sometimes simultaneously) sincere and disingenuous. Christmas is, indeed, the season to see just how cute theology can get.
Upon entering the Christmas store at the chapel complex, the ornaments currently in production are arrayed for purchase.2 They include a ballerina entitled “Lord, Keep Me on My Toes”; the starchily uniformed but smiling visage of “Onward Christian Soldiers”; a girl reading the Bible in the tub, dubbed “He Cleansed My Soul”; a cheerful white policeman writing a ticket under the moniker “Trust and Obey”; and a pilot in his patched-up singleengine “Heaven-Bound” plane urging us to “Have a Heavenly Christmas.” The more expensive figurines-many of them representing current issues in annual, dated series-include a (most literally) fallen angel, halo askew, who looks rather startled as his bottom sinks into a cup of eggnog. In its title, this charmer assures us of yuletide cheer: our besotted angel is “Dropping In for the Holidays.” Such Christmas bibelots are tenderly described in the Precious Moments
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