Amazon is touting a new children’s book narrating the birth of Jesus Christ as its “#1 New Release in Children’s Christian Holiday Fiction.”
The book The First Christmas, by Breitbart Rome Bureau Chief Thomas D. Williams, is an illustrated children’s poem describing the nativity of Jesus in anapestic tetrameter, the same poetic meter used in Clement Clarke Moore’s classic Christmas poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas.
Unlike A Visit from Saint Nicholas and other “holiday” poems, however, Williams’s book actually tells the Nativity story exactly as recounted in the gospels of Saints Luke and Matthew, without the addition of fictional embellishments.
By calling the work “Holiday Fiction,” therefore, Amazon would seem to suggest it believes that the birth of Jesus as recounted in the Christian Bible is simply an imaginative fabrication.
If this is the case, Amazon is decidedly out of touch with its American constituency.
According to a 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center, a striking 66 percent of U.S. adults believe that Jesus was miraculously born to the Virgin Mary on Christmas.
Pew found that a full three quarters (75 percent) of Americans still believe that the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger and 68 percent believe that three Magi from the East brought Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
More than two-thirds (67 percent) believe the biblical count of an angel appearing to shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus, roughly the same percentage as those who believe in the virgin birth.
Even among millennials, belief in each of the four components of the Nativity account exceeds 50 percent.
Pew found that 55 percent of millennials believe in the virgin birth, 54 percent believe that an angel announced Jesus’ birth to shepherds, 57 percent believe that the three magi came bringing him gifts, and 65 percent believe that the infant Jesus was laid in a manger.
According to the study, 90 percent of the U.S. population still celebrates Christmas as a holiday, and a slight majority (51%) say they plan to attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.