In response to the inevitable and sometimes angry pushback of drawing political implications from the Christmas story, Stanley Hauerwas in his theological commentary on Matthew says, Too often the political significance of Jesus’s birth, a significance that Herod understood all too well, is lost because the church, particularly the church in America, reads the birth as confirmation of the assumed position that religion has within the larger framework of politics. That is, the birth of Jesus is not seen as a threat to thrones and empires because religion concerns the private. Such a view does
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