Christian Denominations and the Nativity Scene

The quarrel over images

It all starts with an argument about religious images, and that argument is older than the nativity scene as we know it.

In Zurich, at the second public debate of October 26–28, 1523, the reformer Ulrich Zwingli argued for removing all images from churches. The city council didn’t act right away; that took its order of June 1524. But the most telling detail is the one quick summaries leave out: the removal was orderly, with no rioting. Behind closed doors, over thirteen days, priests and craftsmen took the images down under the eye of city officials. Elsewhere, in Basel or Bern, it went differently and more violently. (overview of the Bildersturm, in German; Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.)

In Geneva, John Calvin took a similar view: he rejected any image of God in worship, while allowing that painting and sculpture could show historical events for teaching. If you want his view, read Book I, chapter XI, of his Institutes of the Christian Religion rather than the summaries floating around.

Luther classed images among the adiaphora, things indifferent: they are “neither good nor bad; we may have them or not, as we please.” He condemned by name those who “rush in, make an uproar, break down altars and overthrow images”; they should, he said, have preached that images are nothing, and “they would have fallen of themselves.” So Lutheran parishes kept their altarpieces, their organs and their statues. (Andrew Spicer, “Adiaphora, Luther and the Material Culture of Worship”, PDF.)

Forty years later, the Council of Trent answered. In its 25th session, on December 3–4, 1563, it decreed that images were to be kept, that the honor shown to them goes to the person they represent and not to the material, and that bishops should use them to teach the faithful. (text of the decree, session XXV.)

Remove them, don’t worry about them, or teach with them: those three positions explain almost everything that follows.

A tool of the Counter-Reformation

The church nativity scene with figures, as a widespread custom, isn’t really a medieval or Franciscan creation. What Francis of Assisi staged at Greccio in 1223 was a celebration with live animals, not a set of figurines, and the few carved groups of the late Middle Ages, like the one in Rome’s Saint Mary Major, stayed the exception.

The first documented nativity scene in the modern sense north of the Alps was a Jesuit one. It was set up in Prague in 1562, in the Church of Saint Clement at the Clementinum: a scene with figures, at the high altar. A description from 1581 shows it had grown, with life-size figures, ivy and singing.

The location was no accident. Bohemia was then a battleground between Catholics and Protestants, and the Jesuits believed faith reaches people through the body, the senses and the emotions as much as through texts. The nativity scene, like school plays, was a teaching tool. The Servites and the Franciscans spread it too.

A telling detail, and a documented one: the Jesuits themselves helped spread the idea that Francis of Assisi had invented the nativity scene. Linking it to Francis gave a new object the respect that comes with age. (National Catholic Reporter.)

What the bans produced

The 18th century is when the nativity scene came under the heaviest attack, and mostly from Catholics.

The story you read everywhere says Joseph II banned nativity scenes from 1782 to 1804. That’s at best a shorthand. What the archives show is more precise, and more interesting. In 1777, Joseph II banned popular plays: nativity plays and Three Kings plays, that is, theater, not figurines. The decree that really targeted nativity scenes was issued by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus von Colloredo: a Generale ordering that they be “either entirely removed from the houses of God” or purged of “all other unseemly accessories, figures and incoherent representations.” Visitation reports preserve the detail of the offending objects: soldier figurines at Tittmoning, a mechanical shepherd playing the flute at Laufen. Sources disagree on the year: November 22, 1782, according to the Salzburg State Institute for Folklore, November 22, 1784, elsewhere. (Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde.)

The result wasn’t what anyone expected. Instead of making the nativity scene disappear, the ban moved it. Many church nativity scenes were hidden in attics rather than destroyed, and a new tradition of the nativity at home grew out of these bans. When they were lifted, the nativity scene stayed in people’s homes. And enforcement had to be eased anyway, because people pushed back.

The same mechanism played out elsewhere, without any coordination. In England, the ordinance of June 8, 1647, abolished “the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and other Festivals commonly called Holy-Days,” deemed “superstitiously used and observed”; in compensation, scholars, apprentices and servants were granted an afternoon of “reasonable recreation and relaxation” on the second Tuesday of every month. (text of the ordinance of June 8, 1647.) In Massachusetts, a 1659 law fined anyone five shillings for observing Christmas by abstaining from work or feasting; it was repealed in 1681. (the 1659 Massachusetts law.)

France may have seen something similar. The Revolution closed the churches, and a long-told story says the nativity moved into homes and gave rise to the Provençal santon. Historians treat that link as a theory rather than a fact (see Jean-Louis Lagnel). But in Salzburg, at least, the record is clear: a ban helped create the very home tradition it was trying to stop.

Protestants and the nativity scene

For a long time, Protestants saw the nativity scene as Counter-Reformation propaganda. The Evangelical Church in the Rhineland says so itself, before adding that nativity scenes now have “an established place in Protestant spirituality.”

The link that helps explain this change is little known, and it runs through America. The Moravian Church (in German, the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) was one of the very few communities outside the Catholic Church to make nativity scenes a deliberate part of its Christmas worship, and it brought them to Pennsylvania, where the Moravians of Bethlehem built their famous putz. (the Moravians and the nativity scene, in German.)

The Moravians also gave us the Christingle: on December 20, 1747, at Marienborn Castle near Frankfurt, the Moravian bishop Johannes de Watteville gave children a candle wrapped in a red ribbon. The custom reached the Church of England in 1968, through John Pensom and the Children’s Society, and became hugely popular there. Moravian congregations in the US still hold candlelight lovefeasts on Christmas Eve.

Where there was no nativity scene, something else filled the gap: the Christmas tree. The Meertens Institute, the leading center for Dutch folklore studies, puts it plainly: Protestants often had a tree at home, while Catholics, more used to images of saints, had a nativity scene. The nativity only made it into Protestant homes in the mid-20th century. In Switzerland, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland calls the nativity “an expression of Catholic piety” and notes that the tree spread from Germany in the 19th century, first through Reformed churches, schools and pastors’ homes in the cities.

The Christian East: the icon rather than the nativity scene

In the Orthodox Churches, the Nativity is painted rather than staged. The icon of the Nativity of Christ plays the role the nativity scene plays in the West (people contemplate it, venerate it, learn from it), but its layout is set by tradition, not invented freely by a workshop. A santon maker can add a baker and a drummer; an icon painter works with elements that each have a fixed meaning.

First, the setting: no stable, just a dark cave opening in the mountain. The Child lies in a stone manger, wrapped in strips of cloth. Orthodox writers see this as a hint of the tomb: as OrthodoxWiki puts it, “his swaddling clothes look very much like burial clothes” and “the manger is like a coffin.” The icon of his birth already points to his burial. That’s the biggest difference from a Provençal nativity, which tells the story of one night and stops there.

Around it are figures you’ll find on icon after icon. The ox and the donkey come from Isaiah 1:3 rather than the Gospel (“An ox knows its owner, and a donkey, its master’s manger”), the same verse that brought them into the Western nativity. In the lower right, two midwives bathe the newborn. That detail comes from the Protoevangelium of James, an early Christian writing, and it underlines that the Child was born just as all children are. In the lower left, Joseph sits apart, head bowed, listening to a bent old man; tradition sees him as the tempter, come to whisper doubts. The Wise Men are painted at three different ages, angels fill the top of the icon, and the Theotokos (Mary, the Mother of God) lies at the center, turned toward Joseph. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America sums it up in one phrase: the icon is “theology in color.”

That leaves the question of the date, which comes down to the calendar, not doctrine. In 1923, the Pan-Orthodox Congress of Constantinople adopted the Revised Julian calendar. The Churches that followed it celebrate Christmas on December 25 of our calendar, while those that kept the old Julian calendar (Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Mount Athos) celebrate it on December 25 Julian, which is January 7 on ours. The line is still moving: on May 24, 2023, the synod of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine decided to switch to the revised calendar, starting that September 1. Two dates, one feast.

The Anglican Communion: the nativity comes back through the children’s door

The Church of England has seen both extremes. The 1647 ordinance mentioned above was passed by a Puritan Parliament that controlled the Church of England at the time. The return of the monarchy in 1660 brought Christmas back, but nativity figures didn’t come back right away. For nearly two centuries, an Anglican Christmas meant mostly music and readings, not figurines.

The turning point came in Victorian times. The 19th-century revival of worship (the Oxford Movement and, after it, the Anglo-Catholic parishes) brought back to English churches the ceremonies, vestments and images that had long been viewed with suspicion. The nativity scene came back along with them, as a simple parish crib set up near the front of the church, with the children gathered around it.

That’s how it has stayed, in England and in Episcopal parishes in the US. Today, the Church of England itself describes the Christmas Eve crib service as standard: “most churches will have a nativity scene,” and many add “a service for children and families based on the Christmas story.” The figures are usually placed one by one during the service, often by children, and the Baby Jesus comes last: the same order many Provençal families follow at home, only in church and as part of worship.

The other Anglican answer to the nativity scene is a service. On December 24, 1880, at 10 p.m., in the wooden shed that was then serving as Truro Cathedral, Bishop Edward White Benson held a service of nine readings, each followed by a carol. His son later summed it up: “a little service for Christmas Eve, nine carols and nine tiny lessons.” Dean Eric Milner-White, back from World War I convinced his Church needed more imaginative worship, brought it to King’s College, Cambridge, on December 24, 1918. The BBC began broadcasting it in 1928, it has been sung every year since, and many Americans hear it on public radio. A nativity scene tells the story with figures you move; the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols tells it with nine readings in order, from Genesis to Saint John. Both do the same thing: they spread the story out over time instead of packing it into one picture.

Today: an object more cultural than confessional

The Catholic Church has always defended the nativity scene as an expression of faith, and recently in the most official way possible. On December 1, 2019, Pope Francis went to Greccio (the village where Francis of Assisi held his Christmas night celebration in 1223) to sign the apostolic letter Admirabile signum Admirabile signum, entirely about “the meaning and value of the nativity scene.” It calls it “a living Gospel rising up from the pages of sacred Scripture.” A whole papal letter devoted to clay figures is rare enough to be worth noting.

Among Protestants, the old refusal has mostly faded, though not the same way everywhere. In the English-speaking world, and especially in the United States, the form that caught on best is the living nativity, acted out by church members and animals in the church parking lot, sometimes several nights in a row. It neatly avoids the old objection: there’s no image to venerate, just people retelling a story. In Lutheran and Reformed homes in Northern Europe, the nativity scene now sits next to the tree and no one sees a problem, even though the two long marked opposite sides of the divide.

In the United States, today’s arguments over the nativity scene are about the Constitution rather than theology. In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), the Supreme Court allowed a city-owned nativity scene in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, displayed along with Santa’s house, reindeer and a Christmas tree. Five years later, in County of Allegheny v. ACLU (1989), it ruled against a nativity scene standing alone on the Grand Staircase of the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh. Lawyers started calling the result the “reindeer rule.” France faced the same question: on November 9, 2016, the Conseil d’État (France’s highest administrative court) ruled that a nativity scene in a public building is allowed only if “particular circumstances” give it “a cultural, artistic or festive character” (no. 395223 and no. 395122). On both sides of the Atlantic, judges have had to decide, case by case, the question four centuries of religious quarrels never settled: what exactly a nativity scene is.

Sources

This page relies on documents you can read online. Original texts come first, then institutions, then reference works. Links open in a new tab.

Documents and primary texts

• Council of Trent, session XXV (December 3–4, 1563): the decree on the invocation of saints and sacred images, full text in English translation (Hanover College).
• Ordinance of the English Parliament, June 8, 1647: the abolition of the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, in the Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (British History Online).
• Law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1659: the five-shilling fine for observing Christmas, presented by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
• The decree of Hieronymus von Colloredo, November 22, 1782: the Generale removing nativity scenes from the churches of the Archdiocese of Salzburg, with the original German quotations (Austrian folklore institute).
• Apostolic letter Admirabile signum, December 1, 2019: Pope Francis’s text on the meaning and value of the nativity scene, signed at Greccio, official English version.
• Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984) and County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989): the two Supreme Court decisions on nativity scenes on public property (Oyez). In France: Conseil d’État, November 9, 2016, no. 395223; see also no. 395122 and the court’s press release (in French).

Churches and institutions

• Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America: The Icon of the Nativity: the theological reading of the icon’s elements.
• OrthodoxWiki: Nativity icon: the iconographic detail element by element: cave, swaddling bands, midwives, the old man beside Joseph.
• OrthodoxWiki: Revised Julian Calendar: the calendar adopted by the 1923 Congress of Constantinople and the list of Churches concerned.
• Kyiv Independent, May 24, 2023: the Ukrainian synod’s decision to move to December 25.
• Church of England: What to expect at church this Christmas: the official description of the crib service, the Christingle and Lessons and Carols.
• King’s College, Cambridge: history of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols: Truro 1880, Milner-White 1918, first BBC broadcast in 1928.
• Evangelical Church in the Rhineland (EKiR): the contemporary Protestant position on the nativity scene, in the Church’s own words (in German).

Studies and reference works

• Andrew Spicer, Adiaphora, Luther and the Material Culture of Worship: the scholarly article on adiaphora and its material consequences (PDF, Oxford Brookes).
• Historical Dictionary of Switzerland: Bildersturm: Swiss Reformed iconoclasm, its chronology and its justifications.
• Meertens Institute: De kerststal: the Dutch ethnology of the nativity scene and its rivalry with the tree.
• National Catholic Reporter: Did St. Francis invent the Christmas crèche?: setting the record straight on what Greccio was and wasn’t.
• Cromwell Museum: Did Oliver Cromwell ban Christmas?: correcting the common story: the ordinance was Parliament’s, and predates his personal rule.

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