The Half-Believed Incarnation

It’s that time of year again. Christmas music blaring over the radio, in stores, on TV, and in ads. It’s everywhere!

Not that I mind. But I find it kind of ironic.

Here we are in 2025, a nation that mostly shrugs at the idea of God, and yet every December, we belt out lyrics that sound like the Nicene Creed set to music. “Born that man no more may die… Christ, the everlasting Lord.” These aren’t subtle. They’re ancient orthodoxy in surround sound. But the surveys say nearly half of us think Jesus was just a good teacher, nothing more.

It’s weird, isn’t it? We love the story. We love the holiday. But when asked if that baby in the manger was actually God, if He existed before Bethlehem, almost half of us say, “Nah.” The numbers keep dropping. Back in 2021, most Americans would call Jesus the Son of God. But ask if He’s eternal, and suddenly only four out of ten are in.

The numbers have been grim for years, and they haven’t improved. Back in 2021, Lifeway Research found that 72 percent of Americans believed the Bethlehem birth was historical fact, and 80 percent were willing to call Jesus the Son of God. But push a little further, ask whether that Son existed eternally before the manger, and the affirmation collapsed to 41 percent. The pattern holds in fresher data: by 2025, 49 percent of us now say outright that Jesus was not God. We like the story. We love the holiday. We just prefer a version that doesn’t make demands.

This isn’t new. We’ve been editing the Incarnation for centuries. If you want proof, look at Thomas Jefferson.

Picture Jefferson, late at night in the White House, razor in hand, cutting up his Bible. Every miracle, every resurrection, every claim that Jesus existed before Bethlehem—snip, snip, snip. What’s left? A slim book: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. No virgin birth, no walking on water, no “Before Abraham was, I am.” Just a wise man from Galilee. Jefferson was blunt—he called the Trinity “mere Abracadabra” and the Incarnation a stumbling block. He wanted Jesus safe for the Enlightenment: inspiring, moral, human.

We nod approvingly at Jefferson’s civic genius while forgetting that he could not stomach the heart of the story his era still assumed. Even the deists of the founding generation operated in a world where the Incarnation was at least plausible. They argued about its meaning, not its possibility. Today we are further down Jefferson’s road than he ever walked.

Next year, the republic turns 250. There will be parades, commemorative coins, breathless speeches about the Founders’ vision. We will quote the Declaration’s appeal to the “Creator” who endows rights, and few will pause to note the irony. The same culture, preparing to celebrate that birthday, increasingly treats the Creator’s entrance into His creation as optional folklore. We keep the ethics (or what we imagine the ethics to be), clip the miracles, and hum the carols because they sound nice.

But those carols are not nice. They are confrontational.

“O Come, All Ye Faithful” calls the infant “God of God, Light of Light… Very God, begotten, not created.” Isaac Watts, in “Joy to the World,” has the earth receiving her King who “rules the world with truth and grace / And makes the nations prove / The glories of His righteousness.” These are not vague seasonal sentiments. They are declarations that the baby in the feed trough is the eternal Word who spoke galaxies into being, who fulfilled prophecies from Genesis to Malachi, who came not merely to teach but to redeem, judge, and reign.

And yet, we sing them anyway. Every December, we belt them out, then pack them away with the lights and tinsel. The praise is seasonal. The submission? Optional.

This is the real half-believed Incarnation in action. We grant the historical manger scene because it’s harmless.

A baby poses no threat to our autonomy.

But the everlasting Lord who “late in time behold Him come, offspring of a virgin’s womb”? That claim disrupts everything. It means history has a direction. It means human nature is fallen enough to require rescue from the outside. It means the One who took on flesh will one day judge it. A full Incarnation is not decoration; it is invasion, grace breaking into ruin, demanding allegiance.

Jefferson got what he wanted: a nation of citizens aiming for virtue and reason, not kneeling before a divine King. In 2026, we’ll toast our founding with fireworks and nostalgia, built on beliefs we don’t really hold anymore. We’ll talk about inalienable rights from a Creator, but in practice, we’ve edited that Creator into a friendly life coach.

The cost isn’t abstract. A half-believed Incarnation gives us sentimental Decembers, shallow platitudes, and a spirituality that doesn’t cost us anything. It doesn’t give us forgiveness we don’t deserve, resurrection we can’t earn, or a King who will make all things new. It leaves us with Jefferson’s version, just good advice from a good man, nothing more.

But the carols keep coming back. Every December, they sneak in and proclaim what we train ourselves to forget the rest of the year. Maybe that’s their quiet mercy. A month-long reminder that the real story is bigger than our edits, older than our doubts, truer than our surveys.

So here’s the question as we hit 250 years: What kind of freedom are we really celebrating if we’ve tamed the very One who came to set captives free?

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