In a manger in front of Lake Street Church in Evanston, Illinois, the baby Jesus’ hands are bound with plastic zip ties. Roman centurions in sunglasses and camo jackets stand menacingly over him, while Joseph lies in the snow at their feet. The nativity scene is meant to evoke the onslaught of ICE deportations that have torn apart families and communities all over the Chicago area this year. Close to my own home, St. Susanna’s Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, put up a nativity scene without the Holy Family at all. Where the family should be was a simple sign: ICE WAS HERE.
For Fox News host Sean Hannity, the Lake Street Church nativity scene was “horrifying” and “blasphemous.” The ICE director himself called the St. Susanna’s scene a “dangerous” incitement to violence. St. Susanna’s was even denounced by its own archdiocese, which condemned the “divisive political messaging” and pleaded for nativity scenes to be used “solely to foster faith and devotion.”
Nativity scenes tend to be anodyne kitsch. They rarely inflame any kind of passion at all, let alone fear. Back in 2023, the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem put up a nativity scene that was also condemned as dangerous. Called “Christ in the rubble,” it displayed a plastic baby Jesus wrapped in a kaffiyeh, buried in rubble and tangled barbed wire while Mary and Joseph search for him in vain. Christianity Today called the scene “an obscenity” and The Times of Israel compared it to Nazi-era efforts to construct an “Aryan Jesus.”
