The Power of Guns and Christmas

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Remember the fun, energetic folderol last week when Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) and family posed in front of the Christmas tree flexing their guns? Wasn’t that fun? Watching online leftists lose their collective marbles because the Congressman pulled a clickbait stunt on Twitter. Then for an encore, Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), probably disappointed she didn’t plan the extravaganza first, recreated the image with her four minor sons.

Initial criticism targeted the Representatives for posing with guns just days after the Oxford, Michigan, school shooting. More interesting for me than the rifles, though, is the other two props these photos share: children and Christmas trees. Both Representatives are professing Christians; Massie is Methodist, and Boebert describes herself as born-again. Why would they conflate military-grade firearms with the birth of the Prince of Peace?

I’m certainly not the first Christian to complain that Christmas has come unmoored from its liturgical roots. Long before Republicans embraced the “War on Christmas,” the expression “Keep Christ in Christmas” meant resisting the holiday’s creeping commercialization. It’s too late for that, though. Like Halloween before it, Christmas has become a secular marketing phenomenon, unrelated to a religion to which America overall has a fairly lukewarm relationship.

Once associated with childlike wonder as kids discover exactly how “naughty or nice” Santa deems their year, Christmas has become a holiday of adult self-indulgence. From relatively innocent traditions like spiked eggnog and ugly sweater parties, to competitive light displays and Elf on a Shelf, Christmas has become a commercial spectacular. Again like Halloween, Christmas is no longer for children; it’s become a massive, culture-wide bender, verging on suicidal.

This transition of childhood holidays into adult extravaganzas hasn’t happened coincidentally. It’s part of a pattern where citizens of the industrialized world see the season of childlike dependence extended well into adulthood. My parents’ generation could get married, buy a house, and start a family on a job secured with a high school diploma. Today, people with multiple college credentials are deferring home ownership and parenthood into their forties because they’re broke.

Children love displays of supposed adulthood. Feeling their social, economic, and sexual maturity thwarted by the constraints of industrial modernism, they find ways to display the grown-up identity they’ve been denied. Remembering my high school years, I recall minor girls finding inventive ways to display their breasts and butts, while boys displayed images of military-adjacent machismo. Carrying gun aficionado magazines to school sure seemed grown-up to us teenagers.

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Representative Boebert in particular matters here. A high-school dropout, Boebert never underwent commencement, one of the few adulthood rites remaining in American society. She later redeemed herself through entrepreneurship and a knack for PR, certainly. But in many ways, Boebert has become a public face of an American generation denied any passage to adulthood. Even her allies frequently comment on her youthful good looks, innately infantilizing her.

Consider the difference between the two photographs. Representative Massie’s family is well-groomed and posed, and look comfortable holding their firearms. (I’m unclear whether the small girl on the couch is Massie’s youngest child, or a grandchild.) By contrast, Representative Boebert’s kids look disorganized and are pointing their rifles randomly. Their facial expressions run the gamut from numb to hysterically terrified, less a family photo than a hostage situation.

Yet it’s Massie whose caption specifically invokes Santa. (The NRA posted a similar Santa-themed tweet days earlier, to similar umbrage.) This entreaty to childhood innocence, while desperately trying to look grown-up with military-grade weapons, reflects the conundrum almost every American born after 1970 has felt: we’re expected to act adult and responsible long before our society and economy trust us with more than the most rudimentary adult responsibility.

These demented family photographs make perfect sense in context. And that context is that of parents, even grandparents, trapped in a permanent cycle of adolescent dependence. We’re expected to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty to our economy, our government, our church, our nation—the wide-eyed loyalty of a child for a mother. A loyalty which anyone who’s ever worked for an hourly wage knows we’ll never see reciprocated in this lifetime.

I admit having an adverse relationship with guns. When American lawmakers display their weapons as literally children’s Christmas toys, my immediate reaction is hostility. But when I distance myself from that history, and consider the situation from the Representatives’ perspective, I realize: they’re a lot like me. They feel powerless and estranged in a culture they don’t understand. They handle it differently, but fundamentally, they’re not that different from me.