If you need any further proof that the world has gone topsy-turvy, look no further than the theft of an icon of the baby Jesus from a nativity scene in Grand Place in the Brussels city center in late November. The nativity scene is the work of German-born artist and designer Victoria-Maria Geyer, who constructed the figures in the scene of Christ’s birth not out of wood, as is traditionally done, but out of recycled textiles with faces consisting only of black and brown patchwork with no identifiable features. Geyer wrote in her original proposal for the installation that her aim with the design of the city-commissioned installation, entitled “Fabrics of the Nativity,” was to create a scene in which “every Catholic, regardless of their background or origins can identify themselves.”
Commissioned as a replacement for the former wooden nativity that had stood in Grand Place for 25 years, the committee that selected Geyer’s work included Father Benoît Lobet, the dean of the Sts. Michael and Gudula Cathedral, the central church of Brussels. Despite the fact that one of the city’s highest-ranking Catholic clerics was involved in its selection, “Fabrics of the Nativity” drew controversy almost immediately upon its installation on November 28, largely from political and religious conservatives in Belgium and around the world. Georges Dallemagne of the conservative Christian Democrats party called it “a zombie exhibition.” Others, including Ghent University professor Wouter Duyck, suggested the faceless figures were not an artistic statement, but so-called “wokeness” once again run amok, a hamfisted attempt to appease the sensibilities of the city’s large Muslim population. In the wake of the criticism, Father Lobet defended the nativity and told CathoBel that “when there are no faces, it forces the viewer to help create the nativity scene, to be present themselves,” referencing the Holy Family as refugees and noting that the story of Christ’s birth should turn our minds to vulnerable communities around us.
Father Lobet is not alone in his assessment that nativity scenes, which are nearly omnipresent in many parts of the world this time of year, provide an opportunity to reflect on our current moment. This Christmas season — defined by political division, xenophobic and draconian immigration policies, and displacement and genocides — the nativity scene has once again become an unlikely ground zero for dissent.
Geyer constructed the figures in the scene of Christ’s birth not out of wood, but out of recycled textiles with faces consisting only of black and brown patchwork. (photo by Nicolas TUCAT / AFP via Getty Images)
As religious scholar Emma Cieslik has noted, anti-ICE nativity scenes have spread across the United States this year. For example, at St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, the nativity scene contains the traditional shepherds, wise men, and animals, but the central characters, St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and, of course, the baby Jesus, are missing. Instead, where the Holy Family should be rests a sign that reads, “ICE WAS HERE” in bold blue letters alongside a smaller note that reads, “The Holy Family is safe in the Sanctuary of our Church … If you see ICE please call LUCE,” a reference to an immigration justice network and the raids that have been terrorizing America’s immigrant communities for nearly a year now. At Lakeside Church in Evanston, Illinois, the Holy Family stands surrounded by centurions donning immigration vests. And in Dallas, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church displayed Mary and Joseph behind barbed wire with the lyrics to Hannah C. Brown’s 2023 hymn, “Holy is the Refugee,” on posters around the scene.
Unlike the Belgian nativity, which is the work of an artist commissioned for a civic installation, American progressive nativity scenes are explicitly didactic. They deliver clear religious and political messages and, for that reason, tell us comparatively little about the societies that produce them; they simply reflect the worldview of the congregations that stage them. “Fabric of the Nativity,” by contrast, raises a different set of questions — ones the American examples never quite force. Ironically, these are the very questions prompted by the diversity, pluralism, and shifting cultural norms that anti-immigration voices fear most. At the center is a much more difficult issue: Should explicitly Christian imagery continue to be a part of Europe’s civic space, and if so, who has the authority to define what shape it takes?
Figures in Geyer’s nativity (image courtesy the artist)
Nearly 560 miles (~900 kilometers) south of Brussels, the small French town of Béziers’s centre-right mayor, Robert Ménard, has all but gone to war with the French government over his insistence on putting a Christmas display, complete with a nativity scene, in the town hall. The installation is a clear violation of French law, which has forbidden religious displays in public buildings since 1908, part of the country’s tradition of strident secularism, known as laïcité. Ménard’s nativity is the inverse image of Brussels’s “Fabric of the Nativity”: Instead of reimagining Christian imagery in a pluralistic direction, he deploys the most traditional form of the crèche as an assertion of cultural and political identity. In both cases, the real dispute is not about the mere presence of Christian imagery, but about who has the right to define it and what version of “Christian Europe” it is meant to endorse.
Christmas and nativity scenes are not the only sites of cultural controversy. A 2024 poster depicting a handsome Jesus, commissioned by the Council of Brotherhoods, a group composed of both laity and clergy that organizes the Easter week events in Seville, Spain, by celebrated Spanish artist Salustiano García, drew harsh criticism from conservatives. This time, the backlash was not, as in the case of “Fabrics of the Nativity,” that Jesus seemed too “foreign,” but rather that he was now too queer. The far-right think tank Instituto de Política Social declared the image “sexualized and effeminate.”
Father Lobet defended Geyer’s nativity, saying that “when there are no faces, it forces the viewer to help create the nativity scene, to be present themselves.” (image courtesy the artist)
The furor over Geyer’s work and the backlash against García’s aren’t only linked by their status as unpopular reinterpretations of sacred imagery. More importantly, both controversies share the same source: The objection arises whenever traditional religious figures are reimagined in ways that reflect the diversity of contemporary European society — or, perhaps more provocatively, when artists attempt to reclaim these normative images for people whom the far right would prefer to render invisible in Europe’s cultural life. Both works bring the margins into the very center of the Western artistic and religious tradition, and right-wing factions see the very fact that this can be done as a threat.
Yet, that fact — that in the image of the Christ Child we might see the refugee newly arrived from Gaza or Sudan or Ukraine, that Christ’s broken body at Holy Week might also be that of a queer man — highlights how wrong those who predict the end of Christianity in Europe’s public spaces truly are. The debate raging is not about whether such imagery should exist, but where and how it ought to exist, and most importantly, whether Europe’s new creators of Christian imagery, inheritors of a long artistic tradition, might be allowed to push the boundaries of what Christian art can represent and to whom it might speak. These nativity scenes bring into focus two defining questions of our time: who belongs, and how far belonging can stretch.
