I am plenty sentimental about Christmas songs from the 20th century, songs like “White Christmas” and “Winter Wonderland” and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time,” but the Christmas songs that have sent chills down my spine, ever since I was a little boy, are the older carols like “We Three Kings,” “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and “O Holy Night.”
I was drawn to these songs when I was little because I sensed that they spoke to something truly awe-inspiring, something that really mattered, something that changed the world. I wasn’t spiritual as a child so I couldn’t have articulated that then; but I loved mythology and I loved great storytelling, and the story of Christ’s birth and the sea change that it represented checked all the right boxes. Those older songs resonated with me because they captured the emotional texture of a cosmic war that had been fought to “save us all from Satan’s power” and that the required response was to “fall on your knees” - by comparison, “in the meadow we can build a snowman” seemed pretty lame.
In some idle time I had over the weekend, I wondered - where did “O Holy Night” come from, anyway? It’s always been my favorite, but I had no idea who wrote it, or when, or why. I did some digging to find those answers, and what I found blew me away.
“O Holy Night” began life in France in 1847 as “Cantique de Noël,” with lyrics written by Placide Cappeau and music composed by Adolphe Adam. Notably, Cappeau was a wine merchant, and Catholic but highly skeptical of clerical authority (like many French people at the time), and Adam was a Jewish opera composer. The song is unique in that way, being so directly religious in nature but having come from true outsiders who were not devout Christians, let alone in the habit of composing hymns.
Even so, you can clearly see what the song’s authors meant to evoke. Here’s the first verse, translated from French:
Midnight, Christians, it is the solemn hour
When the God-Man descended to us
To erase the stain of original sin
And to halt the wrath of His Father.
The whole world trembles with hope
On this night that gives it a Savior.
People, on your knees, await your deliverance.
Christmas! Christmas! Here is the Redeemer!
Which, in English, is not terribly poetic but you can see what they're getting at. Here’s the second verse:
The Redeemer has broken every bond;
The earth is free and heaven is opened.
He sees a brother where there was only a slave;
Love unites those whom iron had bound.
Who will tell Him our gratitude?
It is for us all that He is born, that He suffers, that He dies.
People, rise! Sing your deliverance.
Christmas! Christmas! Sing of the Redeemer!
See where this is headed?
The lyrics carry an unmistakable message about human dignity and liberation - language that made some church authorities uneasy, like a good friend who tells off-color jokes at your party. Not explicitly unwelcome, but you kinda wish they would stop talking like that. The song tells us how Christ’s birth reordered the world, and in post-Revolution France, that made a lot of people uncomfortable but for different reasons.
The third verse:
May the ardent light of our faith guide us all
To the cradle of the Child, as once
A guiding star led the kings of the East.
The King of kings is born in a humble manger;
Powerful rulers, proud of your greatness,
It is to your pride that God preaches today:
Bow your heads before the Redeemer.
Bow your heads before the Redeemer!
Conservative Catholics recoiled at the idea that Christ’s birth equalized the playing field between the haves and have-nots, humiliating the powerful and ennobling the poor. The birth of the child of God in the lowly manger is depicted in the song as a harbinger of the collapse of existing hierarchies. It is a direct rebuke to the centuries-old idea of divine order justifying political power, of the idea that if someone had power and money and you did not, it was because God wanted it that way. In a country where the guillotines were just recently starting to collect dust, you can see how this would make church authorities itchy.
On the other side of the coin, secular liberals didn’t love hearing such a clear pronouncement that social justice and political freedom were downstream from religion, that the birth of Christ is what made “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” possible in the first place. A progressive society trying to define itself in opposition to the centralized and often oppressive power of the church found little comfort in these lyrics.
In France, “Cantique de Noël” made some people uneasy; but in America, “O Holy Night” dumped gasoline on a fire.
In 1855, in a nation already in complete crisis over the issue of slavery, a Boston-based Unitarian minister named John Sullivan Dwight spotted in “Cantique de Noël” a sublime piece of music paired with lyrics that aligned perfectly with one of his central beliefs: that Christianity demands the abolition of slavery.
He translated “Cantique de Noël” into English, keeping at its core the message that Christ’s birth reordered the world, bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice, and marked a clear turning point from which there was no turning back. That’s not controversial in and of itself; both abolitionists and pro-slavery Christians would affirm that Christ’s birth reordered the world and marked a decisive moral turning point. But there was real conflict in the church over what that turning point actually demanded of Americans in 1855, and Dwight went right for the jugular.
Here’s Dwight’s third verse:
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we;
Let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!
Abolitionist Christians were not satisfied to believe that justice was something that would just unfold naturally on God’s schedule; they believed it demanded disruption and sacrifice. Faith without works is dead! “O Holy Night” allowed abolitionists to argue (in a popular Christmas song!) that ending slavery was more than a political preference or an economic decision; it was a Christian obligation. The song was a sort of Trojan Horse that carried their anti-slavery message into spaces where direct political speech of that sort was not welcome. It made it impossible to separate the anti-slavery cause from the meaning of Christmas itself. That’s moral clarity.
The song caught fire in America, but churches had to decide whether to sing it as written, skip the third verse, or simply pretend it didn’t exist - obviously churches in the South did not struggle long with that choice. “O Holy Night” gave abolitionists a fast answer to one of the most common attacks leveled against them: that they were radicals undermining Christianity itself, that to go against slavery was to go against God. “O Holy Night” flipped that argument, suggesting that if Christ’s birth meant anything, it meant ending human bondage. Not tomorrow, not next week - right now, at any cost - even civil war.
If you’re ready for it, “O Holy Night,” when performed honestly, should move you to tears, both by the power of the message and Adolphe Adam’s operatic music. It is gorgeous, yes - and it is also muscular. It refuses to let Christmas be about spending money. It refuses to let Christianity be about comfort. “Fall on your knees” isn’t a call to prayer - it’s Ezekiel falling down when he sees the angel; it’s the correct bodily response to encountering something that changes what you think is possible, what you believe is real. From this position, perhaps you can find the strength and courage to tackle an impossible-seeming task - to move mountains and break chains.
Take another listen to the piece with that in mind. Now that I know all this about it, I love it even more, and it’s impossible to hear it any other way.