It tends to be the same every year: Soon after the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers is consumed, I sit down at the piano to plunk through an archaic collection of Christmas carols. Without fail, “O Holy Night” has long been one of my favorites, both to play and sing, the simple diatonic chords and rich lyrics a reminder of “the power of love and the healing virtues of peace that we share in our common humanity.”
The history of the hymn is fairly complicated, however. Its origin includes both bans and willful omittance, here in the U.S. and also in Europe. But for nearly two centuries, this is the Christmas carol that won’t stop singing a subversive song of hope.
Cara Meredith
The tale starts in 1843, when a Catholic parish in Roquemaure, a small town in the Gard department of Southern France, hired Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant and poet to pen the lyrics. The parish was in the midst of renovations — some say for the renovation of stained-glass windows, others for the restoration of an organ — and desired a song to accompany the eventual changes.
According to America magazine, a Jesuit publication, “Minuit, Chrétiens” (or “Midnight, Christians”) was the result, with Cappeau’s poem one that “begins didactically, as if lecturing a crowd: ‘Midnight, Christians’ is the solemn hour when the human God descended to us, to erase original sin and cease the wrath of his Father.’”
In the original version, the powerful are addressed and ordered to humble themselves before God, but then, similar to a popular left-wing anthem of the time, kneeled listeners were instructed to rise once again.
By the time Adolphe Adam, a composer and music critic, set the accompanying lyrics to music a couple of years later, “many elements in ‘Minuit, Chrétiens’ did not sit well with church authorities. Soon after it was written, the 1848 Revolution broke out in France, and Adam worried some observers by calling ‘O Holy Night’ a ‘religious Marseillaise,’ referring to the 1792 song adopted as the Gallic national anthem.”
“Ecclesiastical concern grew when authorities found out that neither the poet nor the composer were Catholic.”
When the song debuted during Midnight Mass that year, it soon exploded in popularity across the entire country and, soon, much of Europe. However, ecclesiastical concern grew when authorities found out that neither the poet nor the composer were Catholic, let alone churchgoers, and the song was banned for nearly two decades.
An 1864 journal of Catholic liturgical music opined the following about the song: “It might be a good thing to discard this piece whose popularity is becoming unhealthy. It is sung in the streets, social gatherings and at bars with live entertainment. It becomes debased and degenerated. The best would be to let it go its own way, far from houses of religion, which can do very well without it.”
Although the “Cantique de Noel” (as it had become called) had been declared “unfit for church services because of its lack of musical taste and total absence of the spirit of religion” in Europe, the song already had made its way across the pond. There, it was translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, a former Unitarian minister and founder of Dwight’s Journal of Music.
As Zach Lambert writes in Better Ways to Read the Bible, when Dwight discovered the song in 1855, the “united” states were already on the brink of civil war. As any good history student knows, “America was divided into slave states, where enslaving people was legal, and free states, where enslaving people was illegal. Over the next six years, 11 Southern states would secede from the United States in an attempt to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, this bringing about the start of the Civil War.”
But Dwight himself was a staunch abolitionist from the North, and at a time when more than “half of the published arguments in favor of slavery were being written by Christian pastors, the ex-clergyman was publishing what would become an abolitionist anthem.” After the war ended, the song continued to explode in popularity, even when many churches in the South (particularly in the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 “for the sole purpose of allowing clergy and missionaries to continue enslaving Black people”) banned the song entirely or simply refused to sing the third verse.
After all, the third verse became a subversive anthem of hope — particularly for those who called themselves abolitionists, but also for those who had been enslaved:
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; O praise his name forever!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!
Even though a number of churches and musical artists still omit the third verse or call it hyperbolic at best today, when I croon out the song every December, I can’t help but be reminded of its continued relevance.
To wait in hope for the one who is to come is to embrace an embodied, messy, fleshy kind of spirituality that cares for the whole of humanity — including for 65,735 of our neighbors who are being held in ICE detention centers across the country, for the 327 people who become victims of gun violence in the U.S. every day, and for more than a quarter million Americans who have died from fentanyl overdoses in the last five years.
For these neighbors who continue to be chained and enslaved by the realities of calling this country home, let all within us loudly sing this subversive song of hope.
Cara Meredith was raised in the American Baptist Churches in the USA but currently worships as an Episcopalian. She is a freelance author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.