An INTP on the Mission Field: Not Being Understood

(This is Part 3 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1, Part 2)

The Overcommunication Problem

Do you ever suffer from facting-at-the-mouth? You're having a normal sort of conversation with someone, could be a long-time friend or a new acquaintance, and suddenly an issue comes up you're interested in and, often mostly unbeknownst to yourself, suddenly from your mouth begins to issue forth a rich and dense thunderhead of information regarding that topic, with possible lightning-strike tangents to related ideas.

This is perfectly acceptable to nearly any fellow INTP, as we love a good tempest of information (very different from "brainstorming," which is sometimes difficult to endure), but I have discovered that other people do not communicate in this way. Some of them even have a fairly strong aversion to it.

As I brought up in a previous post, people talk, and argue, for different reasons. Some of them find the process mildly stimulating regardless of whether the sounds coming out are actually conveying any thoughts or sentiments they'll remember 10 minutes later. For an INTP who has not created some kind of mental subprocess which can keep this going while their brain stays in a safe place, this kind of discussion can be like torture. Imagine someone cooking, not to make food anyone is going to eat, but just because they enjoy pouring things in bowls and mixing them around, and it's all going to be tossed out when they get tired of it, and that this requires at least two people and they can sort of drag other people into this process in such a way that it's rude to decline.

But INTPs can do a much more wearying version of this. We don't realize it, because speech for us is among other things a fairly efficient (given the options at our disposal) method of communicating ideas back and forth rapidly, and that's what we like to use it to do. If we could legibly write on sheets of paper much faster than we could speak, you would occasionally see two INTPs sitting beside each other with legal pads, scribbling furiously and nodding.

What we do is this: once a normal, unsuspecting person brings up a topic that interests us, we lock into the conversation with laser-like focus and begin trying to upload information verbally to their brain in order to have the necessary relevant data in each other's RAM to be able to analyze it productively. We expect the other person to be doing this too, of course, since it's possible they have picked up some info we managed to somehow overlook, and so their look of slight alarm and/or physically observable attempt to back out of the conversation is confusing because that's signalling the opposite of the intense exchange of ideas we're revving up for.


To reverse the cooking analogy earlier, imagine someone suggests making pizza and you enthusiastically agree, then begin clearing out a space beside the back door and hauling in bricks. When they ask you confusedly what you are doing, you also respond confusedly.
You: "Building a pizza oven, of course. Didn't we say we wanted to have pizza?"
Them: "Oh. Uh... we're just sending Rachel to the store for frozen pizza crust. Which brand of canned tomato sauce do you like?"
You (Frustrated at yourself for misreading the situation and at them for rejecting your idea which would have resulted in a superior outcome, in this case much tastier pizza, you speak too quickly and don't really mean it the way it comes across): "Oh sorry, I thought we were having real pizza. Well if not then it doesn't really matter which sauce you pick, anything's fine with me."
(Awkwardness ensues.)

When you're used to doing things very thoroughly, that's what feels rewarding and satisfying, but a lot of people find it "too much." That can be what conversations are like for INTPs. We want completeness and a comprehensive "theory of everything" approach, or at least a theory which fits into our personal theory of everything. Sometimes that comes out in how we talk about anything. Laying all the groundwork like that is practically a parenthetical statement for us, and one that is sometimes not even necessary if the other person is tracking with us, but it can be baffling and tiresome to someone who didn't intend to club the issue over the head and dissect it right there on the table beside the coffee machine. They were just making conversation until the coffee was ready. To them, the interaction might seem a little like this... (Bill Murray in this case actually muttering the things an INTP might uncharitably be thinking)

Bill Murray is being a jerk in that clip, and sometimes people do put down INTPs fact-vomit tendencies to negative motivations, thinking we want to show off, or impress them with how smart we are. It's a reaction with which I became quite familiar, growing up, and adults are sometimes no different. But while sinful people will have sinful motivations, mainly we talk like that because we think everything is really interesting. If your brain kept shooting off on tangents while other people were talking, and you thought all of them were really fascinating, you might talk similarly. It's like ADD of the mind's association matrix. In response to the idea of "tea," say, my brain might go down any of a number of paths:

Tea -> Drinking Tea -> Calmness -> Serenity -> Firefly -> Joss Whedon -> Whedon's ability to realistically portray characters with religion despite his own atheism
|
Green Tea -> Oolong Tea -> Taiwan High Mountain Tea -> Nantou -> '99 Earthquake -> That mountain with the whole side missing that I saw on my trip to visit my friend and we also went to this cool aviary
|
Matcha -> More caffeine than coffee -> coffee caffeine content -> espresso -> The time that I was in the airport in North Carolina and at Starbucks I ordered a Doppio Espresso and the guy pronounced it with an incredibly strong accent and it was funny but I was worried it might be pretentious to think so
|
Matcha Pocky -> Pocky -> That guy in Fast and the Furious 3 Tokyo Drift was holding a stick of Pocky in his mouth and not eating it -> I can never manage to do that for more than a few seconds -> I should be more disciplined -> I didn't do pushups today
|
Japanese Snacks -> Octopus balls -> Danshui Taiwan -> Bitan is at the opposite end of the Taipei metro from Danshui as I was saying to someone a couple days ago but it's rarely visited because fewer people know about it, but it would be a good place for short-termers to visit for a more relaxing experience of Taiwan

So my coworker might still be in the process of pouring some tea, and I have now decided I will see if our incoming short-termers this summer want to visit Bitan. I might introduce it as if it's a new topic I just remembered I wanted to mention. In particularly irritating INTP mode (one that I try to suppress or train myself out of, conversationally), my brain might insist it wants to discuss Joss Whedon's ability to write characters with religious beliefs well despite his own atheism, and if I don't stop myself I might automatically begin working the conversation down the path my brain took to get there from tea. Maybe that's not an INTP thing but my own particular weirdness, but it's something nowadays I can usually stop myself from doing. (harder to stop in Chinese, however, because I have less control over observing what I say, because most of my mental effort is going into saying it correctly)

This is why it was hard to pay attention in class. Or not fact-dump in conversations.
And it's especially hard not to do this when people are praying in my second language...

Now, occasionally someone does want more information on a certain topic, and they might actually seek INTPs out in that situation. We -like- to have our brains picked, and I suspect (it's true for me, at least) we don't care so much whether someone profits from using that information for their own purposes. We're not in it for the money, we're trying to construct a model of the universe in our heads, and by consulting us and then acting on that information you're basically buying into our model. This both validates us and our carefully constructed views, and also means we are influencing the world of ideas, which is the kind of influence that matters to us. Anyone can win the lottery and have money, but explaining a system to an interested person and seeing the light go on over their head, or overhearing someone telling someone else an idea that you originally told them, in a way that demonstrates it's already become part of their own world view, that's the sort of thing that gives us the warm fuzzies. (That no one else believes we are capable of experiencing)

Being Misunderstood

All this leads to a very common phenomenon among INTPs: feeling misunderstood.
I was once talking with a girl I was interested in, and the topic of pets came up. She said she couldn't imagine me having a pet unless it was a snake, or maybe a robot. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, things with her went nowhere, but did result in a pretty cool trip to Mexico)

I was a bit surprised at that response, in that I didn't think I came across to people that cold-bloodedly, but then I am surprised at least half the time I hear other people's descriptions of me, because none of it usually sounds like how I think of myself.

That in itself is probably quite common ("O, wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us!"), but INTPs may specifically suffer from the feeling of not being understood and the wish or desire that this could be different. The problem for us, I think, is twofold:

1. As described above, we don't communicate normally (whatever that means).

It's hard for other people to get to know us, a fact very commonly mentioned in descriptions of INTPs. I suppose that because it's hard for us to let them. We bring up abstract topics and give them a thorough scrutiny and talking-over, and that's conversation for us. I don't really know how to talk about "myself," and am not much more able to talk to other people about themselves either.

As an example: Though I think I've improved over the past few years, when someone tells me they are sad, there is always that temptation to begin talking about sadness, as a concept. Sometimes the best I can do instead is to approach the conversation as discussing the topic of "sadness as it relates to [other party in conversation]". Since this involves talking through it (being P and not J, we're less likely to offer any sort of direct or implied judgement regarding the cause or appropriateness of their sadness), sometimes the other person may even find the conversation helpful and feel better afterwards. If I can succeed in not actually saying all the stuff my brain is writing into the conversational prompt regarding all the ideas that branch forth from what the other person is saying, it's not unusual to be told I'm a good listener.

2. Our whole approach to life is centered around understanding.

For an INTP, understanding is an endless quest. We want to know everything and why it ticks, and how it relates to everything else. We want to understand other people too, and sometimes can do surprisingly well at this along certain lines, since knowing someone for a while lets us build a sort of behavioral model for them, and that information goes into how we do this for other people too, so we can get quicker and more accurate at it as we go along, if we keep training in the discipline of actively engaging with various kinds of people. I'm thinking that a wise, old INTP would be an excellent judge of human character, because he's had a lifetime of observing people and building a mental model of their behavior, what different sorts of people are like and what they tend to do and how they react to things.

Because of our deep desire to know, we also have a deeper than usual desire to be known. The unknowability of our personality then presents a big problem, since we find it hard to let people know us yet desire greatly that they should. Those people who are willing to put forth the effort to get past our barriers and know us well are often rewarded with our devotion and gratitude, though in their child-like intensity these can be burdensome as well, depending on the depth of relationship desired. It must be admitted that a sense of proportion is not really one of our strongest features...

In Cross-Cultural Ministry

Setting aside all the accusations that the Myers-Briggs types are invalid to begin with, which I don't find to be the case, as if nothing else it's a heuristical model of considerable value, there is the fascinating question of whether the Meyer-Briggs scale can be applied across very different cultures. Their own info on that is here, but it's minimal, and the question is one I'd like to revisit in a future post.

Since an INTP on the mission field is probably immersed in a different culture and different language, the chances of being understood are even less likely. And in terms of meeting like-minded people, God can bring anyone into our lives according to His timing (something that happens all the time here), but by default INTPs are probably not the local people you're going to run into, except possibly as your language instructor. And given their conversational propensities, if they don't already speak English you're going to need a lot of language ability to talk with them. Depending on their level of introversion, INTPs are not necessarily going to rush to meet a foreign face either, though they may proactively make your acquaintance if they have good English themselves and you're a chance to practice it.

There's also the issue of coworkers. Feeling your national coworkers or local ministry partners don't understand you is natural, given the cultural and language gaps that probably exist. I probably seem entirely rational half the time and totally inexplicable the other half, to them, though as my Chinese ability has increased I've been able to do some of the "looking at it from my perspective, it's similar to how a Taiwanese person would feel about X" explanations which have helped, or at least moved things a bit closer to the recognition that Westerners are not mysterious entities who do strange things for our own incomprehensible purposes and can only be reacted to, not understood.

But your Western coworkers are another matter, because we expect them to "get" us, since by comparison we all seem more like to each other than like our target culture. That expectation can lead to a whole range of problems, however, since even in the same national culture there are widely different regional cultures (it's likely that someone on a team from Maine and someone from Texas will have to be working across fairly significant cultural gaps), and also it doesn't account for personalities. I've been told repeatedly by experienced missionaries that some of the greatest difficulties encountered by missionaries are conflicts with fellow missionaries. It hasn't happened yet, but I am led to understand it probably will. (A bridge that can be crossed in as Christ-like a manner as possible when I come to it)

It's certainly possible you will have a team leader who is brisk, brusque, and who sees your objections or analytical comments as not contributing to the discussion or getting anything done, and shuts you down. Or, your team leader may be sensitive and empathetic, and resist the "negativity" that involves rejecting any ideas or making anyone feel left out of the conversation. Either one can be frustrating, but cross-cultural ministry offers even fewer opportunities to pick your own coworkers.

So it's important to realize at the outset that you are probably not going to be understood, and frankly it's likely that most people place a lower priority on the whole concept than you do. So a big part of INTPs coping with cross cultural missions is something I've mentioned before, simply growing thicker skin and dealing with it.

However...

It doesn't actually matter. People won't understand the weird way your brain works, or why you can talk for hours with some people and only have short, awkward exchanges with others. But your intense need to be understood is already fulfilled, by a God who created you, and understands you better than you understand yourself. It may sound like I suddenly shifted into Sunday school mode, but I haven't. Because within the realization that God knows you better than you know yourself lies a key to overcoming a significant weakness of the INTP personality.

Jesus did not say the greatest commandment is "Know Thyself." (That's not even from the Bible, in case anyone was confused, and it predates the Latin version -referenced for example in The Matrix- being from an ancient Greek sage whose precise identity is unknown. See! That's what we do. That's a miniature example of what I'm talking about at the beginning.)

Jesus did say, however, that we were to love God, love others, and make disciples of all nations. The Bible is essentially a primer, compiled across various authors, genres, and centuries, that tells you who God is, and what He wants us to do in this life. So:

A. God knows us better than we know ourselves
B. He commands us not first to know ourselves, but to know and love Him, and love others
C. In following His commands, we will in the process find the fulfillment we sought in wanting to be known.

This is true for a reason I mentioned in a previous post. INTPs often play by the rules of reasonableness and logic, but aren't aware that there are social rules which aren't in the guidebook that came with our personality. The same is true of Scripture: God doesn't answer us according to the varying ways we seek fulfillment (ways that differ by personality type, among other things), He commands us according to our nature, and as we follow Him we find our fulfillment.

In our tight circle of logic, we come to the end of ourselves. In following what seems natural and instinctive for our personality, we eventually run into a dead end, because Eastern philosophy is wrong, the answers are not inside us, the answers come in following the God who created us and knows how we "tick," and knows that what while we have X, and Y, and are naturally (and logically, but based on our limited information) seeking Z to fulfill ourselves, what we actually need is Blue, or 2, or Circle. We need something from outside ourselves, something we couldn't arrive at or guess through our own efforts, even the powerful analytical and intuitive efforts of which INTPs are so capable.

So when we stop trying to find fulfillment through being understood, and depend on God to love Himself and love people (not something we can succeed in doing by trying under our own power), we find several things happen:

1. We stop caring so much about being understood, about receiving the understanding of others, yet discover our drive to understand can aid us greatly in serving God. Our personality comes from God too, and is a gift from Him to serve Him in our particular way; it is only the defects that are from sin. Solving the defects cannot be done by means of the particularities of our personality but by turning to the God from whom our personality is derived.

And actually when under conviction, we find that being understood is terrifying: the truth is far worse than we feared. We wish God might not know us so closely, see weaknesses and evil we haven't even uncovered yet. The bad news is that we are perfectly known by infinite Goodness, and that damns us to hell because we are not Good. The good news is that there is one man, Christ, who is Good, because He is God who is Good, and if we ally ourselves with Him, His goodness will count for us too.

2. The trap of introspection grows weaker the more time we spend outwardly focused. The melancholia, self doubt, and recursively negative introspection that often accompany the INTP personality type are difficult to shake because they trap us into trying to get to the end of them, whereas they are actually endless. I tried for years; it ended in total despair, and damage to my psyche or whatever that part of me should be called which I'm still recovering from now. Simply having your mind fully occupied with something that doesn't leave you processing cycles to get sucked back into the Darkening Corridor may only be a temporary solution (sometimes temporary relief is enough), but the more you do it, the more you'll find your mind can stay in the sun.

3. When the black hole of nihilism is filled with God's infinity, it overflows. That God's love is infinite rolls off the tongue nicely in a praise song, but think about what we're saying. There is a black hole at the center of our being, that abyss into which unredeemed men dare not look, from which they distract themselves with everything from TV to building empires. When we surrender to God and enter His kingdom, that hole of endless Nothing becomes filled with Himself, and He is more Something than the Nothing is Nothing. He can overcome it, He can fill the black hole up, break back across the event horizon, and pour out into the universe unstoppably. That's what He does in our souls.

What is the opposite of a black hole?

The transformation can be even more obvious in an INTP because we feel the gravitational pull of that black hole very strongly. We construct our vast and sturdy array of logic to withstand it, and logic is very strong. It is the wisdom from which the world was created. But one tiny error, one imperfection, -inevitable, due to our humanity- and the weak link will begin a chain of failures, the girders of reason warping under the strain, and the whole thing comes crashing down like a house of cards. It can be rebuilt in our minds over and over; we are made in the image of God. But it is never sufficient.

Christ does not withstand the black hole's gravity with His strength, He fills it up. It stops sucking in the light and begins flowing forth with it, becomes an every-dimensional fountain, like our souls do when filled with Him. We are changed; the dry stubble of our souls becomes the bush in the desert- a vessel for the holy fire which though it burns does not consume, but brings life. Embrace God, and surrender to Him. If you struggle with the inner darkness, ask the Light of the World for help. And to those caught in the icy shroud of depression He can send His holy fire. He did it for me. The solution to the deepest and darkest problems of the INTP soul is not a perfect syllogism, but the very presence of God.

And so was the plight of man for generations.
Their souls remained frozen.
Enslaved in darkness.
Until the day that fire fell from Heaven.

"Fire Made Flesh" - Becoming the Archetype

Why the "Pagan Origins" of Christmas... Don't Matter

Disclaimer: This post is, naturally, entirely my own perspective. I say things which some raised in a fundamentalist background may take offense to, but having been raised in a semi-fundamentalist background myself, I submit that might be a little too natural of a reflex for us. Hear me out to the end first, then I'm happy to hear any objections.

Also, for those of you who say "but Christmas is over," the 12 days of Christmas are still very much underway. We're not even to the seven shrimp a swimming yet...

1. "Folk" Religious Practice

One of my favorite professors in seminary brought up an issue which I'd noticed but not had a good name for until then, the concept of "Folk Theology." Any major religion with established doctrines and practices can have a "folk" version, which is what happens when one gets far away from those who keep things orthodox, and superstitions and traditions begin creeping in, influence from the surrounding culture which rises from background culture to mix with religious conviction, etc.

Scripture is quite clear that we have a direct relationship to God. Because of Christ's atonement, we can boldly approach the throne of grace, a staggering concept that I am still trying to wrap my mind around. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He did so by speaking to the Father directly, not angels, His mother, or anyone else.

Folk theology happens when the natural ways of fallen human thinking start to mix with "theology proper," and people start doing what comes more naturally. Interposing saints or angels between oneself and God to get more "influence," would be one example, though sadly one that has become fairly established practice within large portions of the Roman Catholic Church. (I still pray that the divided church in the future may become one, as the body of Christ ought to be united)

Much of the Islamic world practices not "proper" Islam, but some version of Folk Islam, with local deities still worshipped in some form under Allah, or people wearing talismans to ward off the evil eye, etc. Many of the Islamic terror movements claim legitimacy as reformers, initially coming in to banish these non-acceptable practices and preach a more Qur'an-centric Islamic message, naturally with their own interpretation emphasizing Jihad, etc. (then start recruiting...)

Other milder examples might be putting a Jesus fish on your car, not just as an expression of belief, but because "I'm not saying it will keep me from having car wrecks, but it can't hurt," or carrying one of those angel pennies. Doing these things is not necessarily wrong, but when we start turning to any physical things, rituals, or routines for the blessing and protection that come from God alone, we are walking away from scripture, down the road of folk theology that leads eventually to heresy and superstition.

It's an easy and natural trap to fall into. It could start as people copying a respected and godly leader in their church regarding a particular practice and teaching others to do so, without a total understanding of why he chose that way or that he himself would say it's purely his preference. It could start with someone wanting a tangible expression of the blessing and protection God provides, then more and more identifying that tangible object or symbol with the blessing and protection itself.

It's not like a minefield to be avoided, it's more like rust: It's always gradually appearing, some environments are more conducive to it than others, and it can be prevented with maintenance and care, in this case by always using Scripture as our foundation. (Scripture doesn't say whether you should have a cross on the wall behind the pulpit or not, or even whether you should have a pulpit, but one can easily understand from Scriptural principles that people should not be going up and kneeling before the cross because they think they are more likely to receive God's forgiveness that way)

I saw a severe case of this problem in Mexico, where historical fusion and syncretism with local pagan religions has led to a muddled situation where Mary is worshipped as a goddess (with the moon behind her and all, just like the moon goddess she replaced), and superstition is totally rampant, with little understanding of actual scriptural doctrine in many cases. I appreciate the missionaries and local believers I have met there who labor against this infernal confusion; they need and deserve our prayers. (OMF has a good page on how something similar happened in the Philippines)

The question we need to answer in this blog is, is that what's happened to Christmas? Have we allowed superstitions, influences from pagan/pre-Christian European cultures, to mix together with a straightforward remembrance and celebration of Christ's incarnation? 

2. The Dangers of Witch-Hunting

At least this guy wasn't trying to say Santa is Satan with the letters re-arranged...

I grew up in a fairly fundamentalist evangelical setting. (Apologies to older readers; I recognize the term was not originally negative and the motives of the original movement were good, but I'm using it in the more recent sense) We didn't burn any books, but we did throw away some Disney movies, and we weren't allowed to listen to secular music, or Christian music that "sounded like" secular music (Christian pop rock danced on the margin). I confess that I did not always adhere to this rule (I wonder if my parents are reading this? Well, they didn't adhere to it 100% either, haha), but I did learn the important lesson that what we put into our minds is important. Discernment is strangely unpopular, but I'm a big fan, as you will see.

Growing up in that setting, I have experience with fundamentalism ranging from the cloistering reflex only partially influenced by a legalistic way of thinking to crazy, pharisaical demagoguery.

What I observed was this:

A culture can easily develop in which the Biblical concept of "the world" that is our field of ministry becomes eclipsed by the Biblical concept of "the world" that is this corrupt world system full of distractions and temptations, and instead of engaging it as salt and light, Christians began to withdraw from it.

Having circled the wagons (formed a outward-facing defensive perimeter protecting what's inside, if you're unfamiliar with the more colorful Old West expression), they then begin to "purge" worldly influences from their midst. This often begins as a genuine attempt to pursue godliness and remove sin, but sadly rarely stops there, becoming a sort of contest: who can find the devil where no one had noticed him before?

I can remember in my childhood, Christian magazines breathlessly explaining how non-Christians were making movies or TV shows that had values that undermined biblical principles, and that good parents should keep their children from watching those things (or to be safe, anything from the same company), lest they be unconsciously corrupted or tainted somehow.

Now, I don't blame the parents. It did sound pretty terrifying, and typically we kids agreed with our parents that if a show or movie was "bad," then we shouldn't watch it. And I think it's instinctive for a loving parent to shield their child from harmful influences if they can. In retrospect I also think it had a lot to do with movements within the Church in America of that decade, with the Moral Majority and other attempts to steer the moral climate of the nation from the top-down, away from the cliff towards which it was hurtling, since that still seemed possible at the time. (Despite the deplorable state of our culture as 2015 approaches, I am strangely optimistic; the Church has always done poorly when it dabbled in politics, but shone brightly when times are dark)

But my point is, a church, or portions of the Church, can sometimes get into a witch-hunting mindset, forgetting that from Eden onward the world has always been the world, fallen, and full of people who don't live by Biblical principles. Instead of going out to be salt and light, they become focused on avoiding and purging bad influences. This embattled mentality can turn into a kind of deep-seated fear, which leads to even more urgent searching to uncover hidden evil influences. (Soon everything is suspect, everything is guilty until proven innocent, not even explicitly conservative and evangelical sources cleave closely enough to whatever fine line is judged to be truly safe.) It's a fear which feeds on itself, and it can become like a prison that locks from the inside.

3. The Church Never Existed in a Culture-less Vacuum

Claims that the Church has been contaminated by the surrounding culture go all the way back to the Gospel writers, with some scholars accusing the Apostle John, for example, of having been too influenced by Greek philosophy. It's actually quite a common accusation that Greek thought and gnostic influences warped Christian doctrine from the very beginning of the Church. Does that mean we throw out all the early Church fathers as "tainted"? Of course not. For one, the Early Church Fathers are excellent sources for us, but we do not regard them as infallible to begin with. Two, it is they who wrestled with the heresies and hammered out doctrinal statements from which we benefit today. There is great value in studying them as wise and godly examples, not in subjecting them to an ideological litmus test. Three, "Biblical scholars" will think up every kind of possible accusation to throw at something that hasn't been tried yet. Not all of them actually believe the Bible, but they all need to write dissertations.

I love G.K.Chesterton's illustration of orthodoxy as a horse or chariot rider who can handle shocks and bumps without losing his balance precisely because he is always moving. And I think his picture is accurate.

The Church is not a delicate glass of water we strive to keep perfectly clear and undisturbed, it is the Body of Christ that reaches out to this world and lives in it, beset by strange circumstances and local confusions, always "in crisis" but never destroyed, always under attack but never defeated, always purifying itself from heresies and finding new ones popping up wherever the church spreads rapidly. It would be impossible if sustained by men, but it is sustained by God.

When the Church goes into a new culture, or develops and spreads in any culture, it can express unchanging, transcendent truths through each culture in contextually appropriate ways. This is a huge difference between a global religion like Christianity and a culture-bound one like Hinduism. Even with a massive number of adherents, due to India's population, and even with some principles of Hindu philosophy having spread around the world, very popular at various times, monkey temples and sacred cows never really caught on in a global context, and aren't going to. Those things can't really escape the culture they developed. If they exist outside of India, they do so directly in proportion to the prevalence of that culture in a specific area.

Christianity is unique among religions (it's not merely a religion, but I'm speaking in comparative terms) in being the least dependent on culture. Local religions, based on un-exportable cultural values or concepts, typically cannot ever hold out against global ones which are based on more universal principles and can thus cross cultures with varying degrees of success, and are often attractive to younger generations who have begun to lose their traditional values but recognize it as a link to a wider world, both geographically and conceptually.

But Christianity stands out clearly even among global religions..
Islam, the second-most exportable religion, is heavily influenced by Bedouin cultural values at its core, and tends to "Arabicize" cultures where it gains influence to bring them in line with Qur'anic principles. Hinduism, as mentioned above, has a very large number of adherents but I would argue it is not truly a global religion in the sense that it can traverse dissimilar cultures. Buddhism, with its roots in Hinduism, is more like a complex series of related world views, ranging from polytheistic/animist religion to atheistic philosophy, yet it is only in the philosophical realm, like Hinduism, that it has found a real following in the West. It's easy to find fans of Zen in America, but non-Asian Tibetan Buddhists are a bit sparser.

Christianity, by contrast, has an meta-cultural message (it is represented in many cultures but the message itself transcends culture and is distinct from any of the particular cultures in which it is represented). Certainly, one could claim that it has a close association with the West, but one then has to define "West." Tens of thousands of Korean missionaries certainly would not agree with you, and the Russian Orthodox church with over one hundred million members might object as well. The global Church has had a very Western feeling over the past two centuries because, for reasons of both church and secular/economic history, that's where the vast majority of missionaries had been coming from. That is changing in the 21st century, to the extent that there may come a day when the Church in Europe and even America is revitalized by African, Asian, and South America missionaries. The process has already begun. A dear sister from Ghana I met at seminary considers herself a missionary to America, to bring God's truth back to the land which blessed so many nations with the gospel but is now itself in dire need of revival.

When people repeat the oft-quoted phrase "it's not a religion, it's a relationship," though it is a bit hyperbolic (Christianity certainly is a religion, but one which is founded on a relationship to God not found or attempted in any other religion) they are getting at this truth: Christianity is a belief in God as He has revealed Himself to us through Scripture (comprising the Bible), and faith that Jesus Christ is God, as He claimed to be, and that we can have a relationship with God, through Christ, that allows us to receive a different kind of life from Him, an eternal life which is holy and can be lived in His presence both on earth and in heaven. That message may be more readily received or more easily communicated in certain cultures, but it's all on a higher level of abstraction than any particular culture. Any cultural clashes will occur in the attempted working out of these truths in reality. Then indeed, there may be clashes all the way to martyrdom, but one then finds local groups of believers rapidly follow.

And from the 1st Century AD until now, all those believers have come from a particular culture or another, and have not magically been transported out of it when they believed. They have had to express the truths of Christianity in their own culture, either by adapting existing cultural practices and ways of thinking, creating new practices and ways of thinking to express Christian truth within the context of their culture, or borrowing practices and ways of thinking from outside their own culture.

Nearly any Christian in the 21st century who has been trained to work in a cross-cultural context would agree that the first two are superior, and I agree both in the abstract and from experience. The last thing you want is for your local church to be copying foreign ways of doing things which confuse and repel locals and train them to think Christianity is therefore a foreign religion which has nothing to do with them. Sadly, this did occur in Taiwan to some extent, though often it happened despite the missionaries' best efforts to avoid it.

4. What's All This Got to Do with Christmas?

So far I've set out a few points:
1. We must be careful to avoid folk religious ways of thinking.
2. We must remember we are to be light to the world, and not fall into an embattled mentality of fear-based "witch-hunting," choosing to disqualify instead of using discernment
3. Christianity is neither culture-bound nor culture-less, but is meta-cultural, and finds its best and most authentic expression when believers live out Christian truth in ways that make sense within their own culture.

Those are important to our discussion because they all have to do with how many people perceive Christmas to be a pagan holiday.

Europe has a long history of Christianity, the "Christendom" of times gone by, where for centuries a European Church both changed Europe and was changed by it. The particular expression of Christianity in Europe looked very different in different places, of course, but in much of Europe it first clashed with, then supplanted, local pagan religions. We don't have a lot of accurate information about these (neopagan practices are almost totally made up, based on guesses of how people might have done things), but we have enough information to know that some Christmas traditions may have some roots in what were originally pagan practices. Plus, the date itself seems to coincide with various pagan festivals centered around the Winter Solstice. A quick google search will reveal all you ever wanted to know about those associations, with many facts both legitimate and worthy of consideration and hilariously wrong. But it doesn't matter.

Here's why:

The Bible, and the history of God's dealings with men that we read in it, is a beautiful expression of God's truth in reality. Reality echoes this divine truth in innumerable ways, and therefore so does human culture. Pagan religions from Egypt to Scandinavia have the story of a dying and rising god, some long before Jesus came to earth. It would be foolish at best to suggest that those stories in any way taint or diminish the story of the Resurrection. They are merely faint and confused echoes of a grand eternal truth. For some, such as the former atheist C.S.Lewis, God used them to point the way towards that truth.

More pointedly, does the fact that the cross was a brutal piece of execution equipment used by the pagan, polytheistic Romans, a symbol of the consequences of rebellion against supposedly all-powerful Rome, make the cross a pagan symbol?

I imagine (and hope) you are saying to yourself "of course not," but I encourage you to follow that logic. Why not? What transformed the cross into an acceptable symbol for the church to use, from early in its history until today, and even by which to identify itself? The answer is, what happened on it; an event that forever changed the meaning of that symbol. A symbol of suffering and shame became a symbol of hope and faith and God's love. So symbols and images can be repurposed; they can be transformed from whatever their original meaning was into something else, including something charged with gospel significance.

Of course it's not something one can do randomly; the transformational event must totally dominate the original meaning so that the symbol is now instinctively understood to refer now to this new meaning. A notable negative example: the swastika. Once a symbol of peace (still a common Buddhist symbol here in Asia), cannot now to Westerner's minds convey anything other than nazism, violent racism, and the holocaust.

Now we arrive at my point about folk religion. We know, as scripturally-educated believers, that it is not religious symbols and pictures that have power (in the spiritual sense). They are nothing in themselves; all authority on heaven and earth has been given to Christ, and He does not lend that authority to an idol of any kind. Therefore an idol is nothing, as Paul said. An empty symbol, an image of supposed authority that cannot reference any true authority. Some measure of power, yes, while darkness still remains on this earth, but even that darkness is subject to the authority of Christ, and soon will be put under His feet. (and ours, with and through Him)

Therefore, while obviously we do not and should not wish to associate ourselves with darkness, we need not fear pagan symbols as pagans do, because we know they are empty, and the darkness they point to has been defeated, even mocked, by Christ on the cross.

So we need not irrationally fear a pagan symbol as something that can hurt us somehow, give us "bad mojo," or somehow remove authority from Christ. That is a folk religious way of thinking, like people in medieval Europe who supposedly said "God bless you" when you sneezed, for fear part of your soul had escaped temporarily and you were in spiritual danger.

But this means if a Christmas tree, for example, is not now a symbol of paganism, it doesn't matter if it was one 500 years ago. The original meaning has been lost, beyond anything but guesses and conjectures, and it is now irrevocably globally identified with a celebration of Christ's birth. And that Christ's birth is celebrated on a date close to the Winter Solstice doesn't matter, because God made the winter solstice. Through Christ all things were created. It's His, not theirs.

Light cancels out darkness, not the other way around. God wins. That is the most fundamental thing I can say about this entire topic, Christmas, Easter, etc. Finding a tenuous or potential historical link back to something pagan does not cancel out that symbol, that event, that celebration. It means the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness is not overcoming it. God is winning. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light... for unto us a child is born. The symbols of that former darkness are stripped from the enemy one at a time, and they are laid at Christ's feet. The Winter Solstice may have recently passed, but we marked it by joyfully celebrating the birth of our Lord, our Savior, and our King.
And soon it shall be Spring.

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
    and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
    there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
    to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
    from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
(Isaiah 9:6-7)