Who changed the Christmas carol songbook, anyway?

So you’re singing along at church with some traditional favorites and the long-familiar verses come joyfully off your lips until…..wait….you just sang something different than those around you in the pews. What was that…?

Here’s what we’re experiencing:

We’ve all noticed the “new” words, grimaced, tried to remember what the original lines were, shaken our heads in bemusement, and politely carried on singing. Theologically-modified carols will ring out everywhere this year. Innocents like king, man, son, virgin and Lord have been slaughtered to make carols more modern and inclusive. In some cases, entire verses have been re-written.

How did O come let us adore him become O come in adoration?

“…Is it too gender-specific? Jesus wasn’t hermaphrodite, neither was he a girl. I don’t see the problem.”

One really does have to search for offense or the (most unimaginable and remote) possibility of offense, no?

At a post-Christmas service a few years ago, shipmate Margaret encountered a massively-bowdlerised version of Joy to the World which began: Joy to the world, for peace shall come, let this be our refrain! “It continued for three verses,” she recalls, “avoiding all reference to Jesus but exhorting us to exult in the coming of a whole clutch of abstract nouns.”

The cultural engineers are performing their semantic gymnastics all the time, so of course they have hurtled into the Christmas carol songbooks. It has become ridiculous.

Readers here count the ways…

Mockingbird has problems with the re-working of Wesley’s classic, Hark the Herald Angels Sing. “The change of Born to raise the sons of earth to Born to raise us from the earth was presumably intended to make the line more inclusive,” says Mockingbird. “I think it has the opposite effect. Born to raise us could be taken to mean ‘born to raise us nice elect Christians only, and tough luck on all those reprobates’. Raise us from the earth sounds like neoplatonism, suggesting that the earth is some icky place we need to get away from, rather than a good work of God.”

See the contortions required, once you start twisting words into some shape acceptable to the intolerant few?

So….Joy to the world! Especially the crabby carol snatchers who would deny rest to merry gentlemen.