Scrooge Addresses The Ghost Of Christmas Present

Prominent former evangelical: 'Authoritarian Christianity' at the heart of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol https://t.co/UA0OLKklUT

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 5, 2022

Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead wrote for TIME that it's critical to remember the Christian nationalism on display Jan. 6, 2021 "because evidence is mounting that white Christian nationalism could provide the theological cover for more events like it."

From: A Christmas Carol:

"Spirit!" said Scrooge after a moment's thought. "I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all," said Scrooge; "wouldn't you?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day," said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."*

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

 

*Between 1832 and 1837 Sir Andrew Agnew had made repeated attempts to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in the House of Commons.  This Bill would not only have closed the bakeries on Sundays but would also have prohibited many of the people's recreations while leaving the various wealthier classes unaffected.  In June 1836, under the pseudonym of 'Timothy Sparks', Dickens had published a vigorous attack on Agnew titled Sunday under Three Heads.  As is is; As Sabbath Bills would make it; As it might be made.  In it he describes a working man emerging from a bakery on Sunday.

with the reeking dish, in which a diminutive joint of mutton simmers above a vast heap of half-browned potatoes...the dinner is borne into the house amidst a shouting of small voices, and jumping of fat legs, which would fill Sir Andrew Agnew with astonishment; as well it might, seeing that Baronets, generally speaking, eat pretty comfortable dinners all the week through, and cannot be expected to understand what people feel, who only have a meat dinner one day out of every seven.

 The Christmas Books by Charles Dickens, Vol. 1, ed. Michael Slater, Penguin, 1982, n. 25, p. 260.

The modern reader is reminded that only the wealthier classes had ovens in their homes in the 19th century.  And that England had its brush with Puritanism in the 17th century, and pretty much pushed it off on the colonies, who suffer from it to this day.