There would be battles between those who anchor their identity in the formularies and those who don’t (the Thirty-nine Articles, the Homilies, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer). The 1830’s Oxford Movement and the Broad Church Movement and its various iterations of progressivism have taken a shotgun to the traditional Anglican formularies and tried their hardest to relegate them to the basement where Aunt Hazel was kept when she visited.

Was the little town of Bethlehem really that still? And did the morning stars proclaim the holy birth while mortals slept, as Phillips Brooks wrote in his well-known hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”? Underlying the romanticized picture of the first Christmas morning is an empty theology that R.R. Reno describes as “a pallid Christian humanism.”