A church in Claremont featured a Nativity scene with Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus in cages. It was supposed to make a point about the plight of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
It didn’t surprise the locals when Claremont United Methodist Church unveiled its annual outdoor Nativity scene this week. In keeping with its spiritual leanings and activist traditions, this was no tender Christ-child-in-the-manger tableau.
The image has sparked a heated national debate about spiritual boundaries and moral commitments. Its caustic tenor online reflects the state of dialogue in this country today: warped by political divisions, riddled with gratuitous insults and sabotaged by self-righteousness.The pastor’s initial Facebook post was shared more than 24,000 times and drew more than 14,000 comments. Responses ranged from the grateful to the profane.
In its first departure from the Nativity norm in 2007, Joseph and Mary were a modern homeless couple on a ghetto street. The next year the Holy Family was depicted as war refugees in bombed-out Iraq. In 2009, they were Mexican migrants, halted by the U.S. border wall. In 2010, Mary was an African American woman holding her infant, alone in a prison cell.
When I look at those caged Nativity scenes, I can’t help but feel a sense of shame. My prayers seem puny; my guilt unearned yet unassuaged. Two years ago, a Catholic church in a Boston suburb made mass shootings part of its Nativity theme. This year it features the infant Jesus floating on water littered with plastic bottles, as the three wise men try not to drown. “God so loved the world,” it says. “Will we?”And across the country, Protestant churches in Oklahoma, Illinois and here in Los Angeles are being praised and pilloried for Nativity scenes that use fences to cast Jesus, Mary and Joseph as mistreated modern-day immigrants.
“But for the most part, people understand; this is part of our commitment,” Mozingo told me. His church is rooted in the LGBTQ community. “We’re a very diverse congregation. … There are no outsiders here.”
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