Away from home, an unexpected encounter with a 'Red' Christmas in Beijing

Never before have I walked past a church in the Western world and seen crowds of young people shoving and screaming outside as though a concert were taking place inside. This was the sight that welcomed me to Beijing on Christmas Eve in 2002, my first Christmas away from family, and my first real experience in Mao's City.

My friend Stephanie, who was visiting over the holidays from America, and I walked past in awe, questioning whether perhaps the church had been renovated and turned into a disco, similar to New York's popular club "Limelight."

It was not until several hours later, around 10 p.m. when we ventured past the church again. By this time not only had the crowds grown, but the people pushing their way into the church were being held back by guards armed with clubs and donning Communist Red armbands. As the guards were low in numbers and had obviously not taken the crash course in crowd control, about every five minutes a different group of people rushed the guards trying to push their way into the church. Most of these attempts were unsuccessful and merely made the crowd more aggressive and the guards angrier. Just as things seemed to be getting out of control, Stephanie and I could no longer resist playing spectator.

We linked arms and plunged into the crowd, making it our mission for the evening to get into that church. We questioned each other, "What''s the worst that could happen?" and quickly dropped the question after remembering we were in China and realizing that the consequences could be harsher than we were interested in imagining. We started asking the people around us what was going on, what or who was in the church, and why couldn't we get in.

We soon learned that one had to have a ticket to enter the church and that the tickets were sold out. There was no concert inside, no movie star waiting to sign autographs, and Mao Ze Dong had not come back to life inside the structure: It was merely a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.

As I watched the crowds around me, Joseph Nye, a professor of public policy, and his theory on the role American movies and popular culture play as different forms of Soft Power came to mind. Nye said, "Soft Power is your ability to attract others to get the outcomes that you want." Had Western religion become a new form of Soft Power?

All those young Chinese waiting outside the church could not possibly just be eager Christians impatiently waiting for the start of Midnight Mass. The feeling outside the church on that cold Christmas Eve night was different. Christianity embodied a Western idea and image, and like Western styles, Western brand names, Western movies, Western languages, Western modernization and Western songs, Christianity was cool. It was cool to celebrate Christmas. This had nothing to do with Jesus, nothing to do with God, or the Holy Trinity: This was pure popular culture.

Having participated in church services fewer than 10 times in my life, I felt somewhat guilty for wanting to go to the service, but the guilt was overcome with the feeling that I was entitled to it. Perhaps one of the greatest criticisms of Americans by other nations is precisely that, the feeling of entitlement, but it was there nevertheless and it empowered me.

We had one dilemma: We didn't have any tickets. We decided finally that we were getting into that church no matter what. We eventually jumped into the middle of a crowd as they rushed past three helpless guards screaming, "Get back!" and we found ourselves on the red armband side of the barricade, and one step closer to God.

Delighted in our grand victory we were under no circumstances giving up now. After ignoring several demands to get back behind the guards, we again linked our arms tightly together and demanded why we, as Christians on Christmas Eve in a foreign country, could not enter the church.

Eventually, after bypassing several more restricted areas and yelling guards, a young guy who was also working on crowd control, possibly a church volunteer, slipped us two tickets and let us go in. I must admit that the level of religiosity I felt at that moment outdid all 19 years of previous Christmases combined. Even though the inside of the church was tacky, the service interrupted numerous times by eager "Christians" documenting the occasion with photos, I felt more wholly Western and even more Christian than ever before, and I was in China!

Stephanie and I left the church on what was at that time Christmas Day, and as we walked away from the crowds filing out of the church, all I could think to myself was that the experience would definitely be best described as a truly Red Christmas.