Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us what is wrong.
There is a particular kind of person who feels most irritated by Christmas. Not the outright unbeliever, not the pagan who senses a mystery he cannot name, but the one who has already “been there.” The post-Christian knows the story. They know the carols, the manger, the angels. They have opinions about it all. They have moved on.
Or so they think.
This is the person C.S. Lewis had in mind in “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” when he spoke of those who are sick and do not know it. Not because they are immoral, or foolish, or uniquely corrupt, but because they have lost the ability to feel their need. They once heard the diagnosis and now believe themselves immune.
The post-Christian does not usually say, “I reject Christ.” They say something softer and far more dangerous. They say, “I know all that already.” They believe the faith has been outgrown, like a childhood coat. They remember the rules more clearly than the mercy, the prohibitions more clearly than the promise. And so they assume the cure was nothing more than a moral program they have since replaced with something more flexible, more adult, and more reasonable.
Christmas arrives and irritates them because it refuses to stay in the past. It insists on returning every year like an unanswered question. Lights go up. Songs drift through grocery stores. Old words reappear. “Prepare the way.” “Watch.” “Wake.” The post-Christian tells themselves it is nostalgia, or marketing, or cultural debris. But something underneath them stirs anyway.
Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us what is wrong. That is precisely what the post-Christian resists. They do not want to be told they are unwell. They prefer to believe the trouble lies elsewhere. In systems, structures, history, bad actors, anything but the human heart.
So they trade sin for psychology, repentance for self-expression, forgiveness for explanation. They learn to narrate themselves endlessly. They understand their wounds. They trace them carefully. They name every fracture in the family tree. And still the ache remains.
This is the quiet irony of the post-Christian life. They have thrown off guilt, yet cannot find rest. They have rejected judgment, yet live under constant accusation. They have abandoned absolution, yet they continue to rehearse their failures in their heads. They have learned all the language of healing except the one thing that actually heals.
Christmas does not argue with them. It does not try to win them back by force. It simply stands there and tells the old story again, slowly, stubbornly, like a bell that refuses to stop ringing.
It says the problem is not that you lacked information. The problem is not that you failed to try hard enough. The problem is not that you grew up in a bad church or heard the faith poorly explained. The problem is older, deeper, and far less flattering.
The world is sick. And so are you.
Lewis was blunt about this. He insisted that Christianity only makes sense if something has gone seriously wrong. Not slightly wrong. Not inconveniently wrong. Fatally wrong. Christmas dares to say the same thing without raising its voice.
The post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution.
It tells us that no amount of education, therapy, reform, or self-curation can mend what is broken at the root. It tells us the reason we cannot save ourselves is not that we have not yet discovered the right method, but because we are the problem we keep trying to solve.
This is where the post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. They want improvement, not resurrection. They want Christmas without the confession that makes Christmas necessary.
But Christmas refuses that bargain.
It insists that the cure comes from outside us. That help does not rise from within. That the center of the story is not human potential but divine interruption. A God who does not wait for us to climb toward him, but comes down into our confusion, our fatigue, our self-justifications, our well-polished unbelief.
This is why the incarnation offends modern ears. A teacher we can admire. A moral example we can adapt. A spiritual insight we can integrate. But a God who enters the world as a child because we cannot rescue ourselves? That is harder to dismiss and harder still to accept.
Christianity insists, stubbornly and repeatedly, that something had to die before anything could live.
Christmas does not shout this. It whispers it. Candles instead of spotlights. Silence instead of spectacle. A pregnant pause in the year that asks one uncomfortable question: What if you were wrong about what you needed?
Not wrong in the sense of ignorant, but wrong in the sense of misdiagnosed. What if your restlessness is not boredom, but hunger? What if your cynicism is not wisdom, but exhaustion? What if your distance from the faith is not maturity, but grief you never finished grieving?
Lewis once noted that Christianity does not promise comfort first, but honesty first. Christmas follows the same order. It tells the truth before it offers joy. It names the darkness before lighting the candle. It waits.
And then, quietly, it says this.
The cure is not an idea. The cure is not a principle. The cure is a person. A person who does not recoil from your doubt, your resentment, your past church wounds, or your practiced indifference. A person who enters history precisely because history cannot fix itself.
Christmas does not exist to make you feel nostalgic. It exists because without intervention, the story ends badly. Christmas is the season that remembers this without apology.
If you are post-Christian, Christmas is not here to drag you back. It is here to ask whether you ever truly left the question behind. Whether the ache you keep managing might actually be an invitation. Whether the cure you dismissed is still standing at the door.
The lights will come on soon enough. The songs will swell. The Child will arrive, unarmed, unguarded, unimpressive by every modern metric.
And Christmas will have done its work if, even for a moment, you wonder whether the faith you thought you outgrew might still know something about you that you have not yet dared to face.
The night is long.
The world is unwell.
And the cure does not wait for our approval.
