western

Every December, much of the Christian world enters a familiar cycle of celebration: carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy and the warm imagery of a snowy night. In the United States and Europe, public discourse often speaks of “Western Christian values”, or even the vague notion of “Judeo-Christian civilisation”. These phrases have become so common that many assume, almost automatically, that Christianity is inherently a Western religion — an expression of European culture, history and identity.

It is not.

Christianity is, and has always been, a West Asian / Middle Eastern religion. Its geography, culture, worldview and founding stories are rooted in this land — among peoples, languages and social structures that look far more like those in today’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than anything imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked in the term “Judeo-Christian values”, is itself a thoroughly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity — it certainly did not give birth to it.

And perhaps nothing reveals the distance between Christianity’s origins and its contemporary Western expression more starkly than Christmas — the birth story of a Palestinian Jew, a child of this land who was born long before modern borders and identities emerged.

What the West made of Christmas

In the West, Christmas is a cultural marketplace. It is commercialised, romanticised and wrapped in layers of sentimentality. Lavish gift-giving overshadows any concern for the poor. The season has become a performance of abundance, nostalgia, and consumerism — a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core.

Even the familiar lines of the Christmas song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval.

He was born under military occupation, to a family displaced by an imperial decree, in a region living under the shadow of violence. The holy family were forced to flee as refugees because the infants of Bethlehem, according to the Gospel narrative, were massacred by a fearful tyrant determined to preserve his reign. Sound familiar?

Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.

Bethlehem: Imagination vs reality

For many in the West, Bethlehem – the birthplace of Jesus – is a place of imagination — a postcard from antiquity, frozen in time. The “little town” is remembered as a quaint village from scripture rather than a living, breathing city with actual people, with a distinct history and culture.

Bethlehem today is surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by an occupier. Its residents live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many feel cut off, not only from Jerusalem – which the occupier does not allow them to visit – but also from the global Christian imagination that venerates Bethlehem’s past while often ignoring its present.

This sentiment also explains why so many in the West, while celebrating Christmas, care little about the Christians of Bethlehem. Even worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or dismiss our presence entirely in order to support Israel, the empire of today.

In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred idea, but modern Bethlehem — with its Palestinian Christians suffering and struggling to survive — is an inconvenient reality that needs to be ignored.

This disconnect matters. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they disconnect from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget that the story of Christmas is real.

They forget that it unfolded among a people who lived under empire, who faced displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not distant but among them.

What Christmas means for Bethlehem

So what does Christmas look like when told from the perspective of the people who still live where it all began — the Palestinian Christians? What meaning does it hold for a tiny community that has preserved its faith for two millennia?

At its heart, Christmas is the story of the solidarity of God.

It is the story of God who does not rule from afar, but is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation — the belief that God took on flesh — is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a radical statement about where God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the occupied, among those with no power except the power of hope.

In the Bethlehem story, God identifies not with emperors but with those suffering under empire — its victims. God comes not as a warrior but as an infant. God is present not in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most striking form: God joins the most vulnerable part of humanity.

Christmas, then, is the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.

For Palestinians today, this is not merely theology — it is lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we recognise our own world: the census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel resembles the permits, checkpoints and bureaucratic controls that shape our daily lives today. The holy family’s flight resonates with the millions of refugees who have fled wars across our region. Herod’s violence echoes in the violence we see around us.

Christmas is a Palestinian story par excellence.

A message to the world

Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful yet necessary for us to cancel our celebrations; we had no choice.

A genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and as people who still live in the homeland of Christmas, we could not pretend otherwise. We could not celebrate the birth of Jesus while children his age were being pulled dead from the rubble.

Celebrating this season does not mean the war, the genocide, or the structures of apartheid have ended. People are still being killed. We are still besieged.

Instead, our celebration is an act of resilience — a declaration that we are still here, that Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this town tells must continue.

At a time when Western political discourse increasingly weaponises Christianity as a marker of cultural identity — often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born — it is vital to return to the roots of this story.

This Christmas, our invitation to the global church — and to Western Christians in particular — is to remember where the story began. To remember that Bethlehem is not a myth but a place where people still live. If the Christian world is to honour the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace.

To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed — and that the followers of Jesus are called to do the same.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Netflix’s American Primeval launched in January 2025, but BBC’s 2022 western series The English starring Emily Blunt is being hailed as the superior show

Three recent TV western series tower above the rest. The latest arrival is American Primeval, which landed on Netflix at the start of this year. The series delivers an unflinchingly realistic and brutal portrayal of existence on Utah’s lawless frontier, following a mother and child fighting for survival.

Their trek brings them face-to-face with settlers living by their own code, indigenous peoples protecting their territories, and Brigham Young’s Mormon militia. The unrelenting brutality stands in sharp opposition to the sanitised portrayals of the Wild West seen in 1990s pictures such as Tombstone and Dances With Wolves.

Yet it isn’t simply violence for its own sake. It features outstanding performances and centres its narrative on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a grotesque and shameful chapter in American history that was probably unfamiliar to most viewers before this series.

Audiences have hailed the programme as “absolutely phenomenal” and “raw and unflinching”, whilst Empire magazine characterised it as “a raw, bloody odyssey that will pierce your skull like a hatchet flung face-first”, noting: “Nostalgia has been stripped away completely, scalped in favour of a grimy, far more authentic journey that takes us back to how the so-called land of the free really came to be.”

The Guardian offered a more critical view, branding it a “samey western that’s far less clever than it thinks it is”. I dispute that verdict.

Godless

If you were gripped by American Primeval, there’s another Western miniseries that many reckon is even better. Godless, a Netflix original released in 2017, shares the Old West setting and intense violence of American Primeval, but offers a unique twist. Godless spins a classic tale of revenge. Jeff Daniels portrays crime boss Frank Griffin, who, along with his band of outlaws, is on the hunt for Roy Goode, a former member who betrayed them.

As Roy flees from his past, he ends up in a secluded New Mexico mining town predominantly inhabited by women. His arrival lures Griffin’s deadly gang to the town, forcing the residents to stand their ground.

The series was lauded as a “work of confident artistry”, an “unrelentingly brilliant” and “clandestinely old-fashioned mash-up of all the great Westerns you ever knew and loved”. It also bagged three Primetime Emmy Awards.

The English

But there’s another modern western TV series that trumps them both. The English, a BBC production that flew somewhat under the radar upon its 2022 release, stars Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer, and Rafe Spall. Set in 1890, it follows Lady Cornelia Locke (Blunt) who journeys from England to the American west seeking vengeance against the man she holds responsible for her son’s death.

Whilst it rivals both American Primeval and Godless in terms of its grim portrayal of the Old West, the series also shines a light on another disturbing element of 19th-century existence that seldom appears on our screens: syphilis and the devastating toll it takes on the body. The show also presents one of the most chilling figures in recent memory: Black-Eyed Mog, a bonnet-clad, spectacle-wearing Welsh matriarch who presides over a brutal clan controlling the plains from their fortified stronghold.

Critics awarded it five stars, praising a script “as gorgeous as the landscape”, which “evokes the pitilessness of the old west” and poses the question of “how many of us would remain sane, and morally sound, in a lawless land where – for hundreds of miles at a time – no one could hear you, or anyone who got in your way, scream”.

Yellowstone actress Hassie Harrison will star alongside 1923’s Brandon Sklenar in upcoming Western thriller The Rescue, marking their first time working together despite both appearing in the Yellowstone universe

Yellowstone stars Hassie Harrison and Brandon Sklenar are set to finally share the screen in the forthcoming Western thriller, The Rescue.

Despite both actors playing key roles in the television sensation crafted by Taylor Sheridan, their characters are a century apart.

Harrison is renowned for her role as rodeo girl Laramie in the main drama, while rising star Sklenar portrays Spencer Dutton in the popular prequel series, 1923.

Both have since secured successful roles in other recent projects, with Harrison leading the critically acclaimed thriller film Dangerous Animals and Sklenar featuring in major films such as Drop and The Housemaid.

Details about their joint project remain hush-hush after Deadline announced last week that Harrison would be joining the Sklenar-led Western thriller The Rescue, reports the Express.

However, it’s been confirmed that the film will centre on a modern-day rodeo cowboy whose skills are challenged outside the arena.

The director of Old Henry, Potsy Ponciroli, is at the helm of the flick, penned by John Fusco.

Reports also confirm that the film is slated to start production this coming summer.

It has reportedly been a top priority title since its initial development by Skydance before merging with Paramount. The Rescue is now one of the first films greenlit by the newly formed studio regime.

Harrison is slated to feature in the forthcoming thriller Raven, which boasts a star-studded cast including Anthony Mackie, Pablo Schreiber, Ben Foster, and Ron Livingston.

As for her return to the Yellowstone universe, it remains a mystery. The franchise is set to grow with several spin-offs and sequel series on the horizon.

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Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser are confirmed to reprise their roles as Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler, respectively, in the upcoming sequel tentatively titled The Dutton Ranch.

Additionally, another spin-off currently under development, The Madison, will narrate the tale of a different ranching family and stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Suits’ Patrick J. Adams and Kurt Russell.

On the other hand, actor Sklenar is lined up to star in the Sheridan-scripted military thriller F. A. S. T., where he’ll play a former special forces commando recruited by the DEA to lead a raid on a major drug dealer.

The ensemble cast also features Juliana Canfield, LaKeith Stanfield, Jason Clarke, Sam Claflin, and Trevante Rhodes, with direction by Ben Richardson, who has directed several episodes of Sheridan-created dramas.

Yellowstone is available for streaming on Paramount+.