Of all the beautiful, soul-stirring music associated with the Christmas season, perhaps the most haunting melody, and easily the most unsettling lyrics, belong to the “Coventry Carol.” Far from a joyous celebration of Jesus’s birth, the carol commemorates the nightmare that followed, the so-called “slaughter of the innocents” in which, according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, King Herod ordered the execution of male Jewish children ages 2 and younger in Bethlehem. Jesus escaped their fate, the story goes, because his parents were warned and fled to Egypt.
The account is most likely apocryphal. Matthew’s is the only Gospel that recounts the slaughter, and it is not mentioned in any other contemporary Roman or Jewish source. But the slaughter of the innocents is commemorated every Dec. 28 in the Christian tradition, and the medieval song was revived in 1940 during World War II when the Germans bombed Coventry on Nov. 14. It was the single most concentrated bombing of a British city in the Second World War, destroying the cathedral and many factories and killing over 500 people: “Children were seen trying to burrow their way through solid brick walls to escape the noise.”
That Christmas, the slaughter of the innocents having preceded Christmas, a choir sang the Coventry Carol over the BBC from the ruins of the Coventry Cathedral. According to David Stone, the canon precentor at Coventry, in a 2013 interview with the BBC, “The theme of redemption following suffering is part of the Coventry story.” The carol “connects with people’s lives as they really are.” It “strike[s] a chord with people today and express[es] what Christmas is for us, both its bright shining side and its shadowy side.”
As such, it is the perfect carol for our time; this year, as in 1940, the slaughter of the innocents has preceded the holiday that commemorates hope. The leading causes of death among American children and adolescents are no longer accidents or disease, but gunshot wounds and poisonings. One’s views of the Second Amendment shouldn’t distract from the stark reality that, as a nation, our arguments have paralyzed us into simply allowing the slaughter to continue.
Elsewhere, the world’s collective indifference to the suffering and dying of children shocks the conscience. A child dies from starvation every 10 seconds, a yearly total of 3.1 million. Over 1,000 children have been sacrificed in Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s megalomaniacal ambitions. Worldwide, a 2020 report from Save The Children estimated that 25 children die in war zones every day. A World Health Organization study from 2019 found that over 5 million children under 5 died that year from “preventable and treatable causes.” On and on, an infinite regression of ineffable loss.
We’ve become a culture that looks away from intractable realities, that talks past the thousands of murdered kids, that just doesn’t care to see the million+ victims of a pandemic response that has been the worst among the world’s wealthy nations. As the new year approaches, we have been crushed with commercialism this holiday season, encouraged to feel a joy as fake as a crypto ad.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
As in 1940, an acknowledgment of all we have lost in the past year need not negate the hope and joy that Christmas commemorates; it is, rather, a precondition to a genuine rebirth of hope. So, let us allow the Coventry Carol to “connect with our lives as they really are,” so that the story of the hope to be found in the humblest birth can regain its relevance to our lives.
Coventry Carol is a lullaby for the lost, sung by mothers to the sons they will lose, to “This poor youngling for whom we sing/Bye bye lully, lully.” May we resolve to do better by our children and our most vulnerable populations, and may that resolve be grounded in our wish that, in their silent night, those we have lost, like those born to save us, will “sleep in heavenly peace.”
So we pray this year, as always, for the slaughter of the innocents to cease, knowing that redemption, when it comes, will come not from among the powerful elites, but from among the most vulnerable, from among the innocents themselves.
John Farmer Jr. is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney, counsel to the governor of New Jersey, New Jersey attorney general, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, dean of Rutgers Law School, and executive vice president and general counsel of Rutgers University. His book, “Way Too Fast,” has been named a Notable Book in the 2022 Best Indie Book awards.