Christmas not only involves decorating, organizing family gatherings and engaging in the mad rush to buy gifts. It also involves listening to songs that aren’t played for roughly 48 of any given year’s 52 weeks.

One such song makes a simple yet poignant connection between an anonymous baby resting in a feeding trough and a well-known adult destined to redeem humanity through his death. It also issues a subtle yet powerful challenge to anyone listening to it.

Sadly, that same song generates controversy.

“Mary, Did You Know?” was first released on an album in 1991. Since then, a variety of performers — ranging from Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Wynonna Judd to CeeLo Green, Natalie Cole and Kathleen Battle — have sung it.

From Infant to Savior

Mark Lowry, who belonged to the Gaither Vocal Band, a Gospel vocal group, wrote the lyrics in 1984 for a Christmas program at his evangelical church. They speak for themselves:

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will someday walk on water?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?

Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?

This child that you’ve delivered, will soon deliver you?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand?

Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?

And when you kiss your little baby, you have kissed the face of God?

Oh, Mary, did you know?

The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again?

The lame will leap, the dumb will speak the praises of the Lamb?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?

Did you know that your baby boy is Heaven’s perfect Lamb?

This sleeping child you’re holding is the great I Am?

Who would be offended by such lyrics? You’d be surprised. Then again, you might not be.

The Pointy-Headed Brigade

“Woke” Christians deride “Mary, Did You Know?” as condescending, even sexist. Michael Frost, an Australian Baptist minister and academic, called it “the least biblical, most sexist Christmas song ever written.”

Beyond the idea that Mary knew, given Gabriel’s proclamation to her and her own song of praise for being chosen to carry the messianic infant, Frost argues that the song demeans her and renders her as second class.

“One of the most common expressions of everyday sexism is the infantilization of women,” he wrote. “That is, the treating of grown women as though they’re children. Infantilization is a means of controlling women and perpetuating the myth that without a man, they are incapable of caring for themselves or exercising autonomy.”

“And that’s … what this song does to Mary. It treats her like a clueless child. Could you imagine a song asking Abraham 17 times if he knew he’d be the father of a great nation? Would we sing ‘David, did you know you’d rule the kingdom of Israel?’”

Jennifer Henry, a Canadian theologian and self-proclaimed feminist who identifies as “queer,” as she stated on her website, rewrote the lyrics to focus exclusively on Mary, without any reference to her baby or his eventual role. “Woke” churches use them and Mary as testimonials for their own calls for “justice and liberation.”

The Brigade’s Catholic Wing

Catholics, meanwhile, feel offended by the idea that Mary would be delivered by the child she delivered. That lyric contradicts the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which asserts that God protected Mary from sin since her conception, so her baby wouldn’t need to redeem her.

The Rev. Robert McTeigue, a Jesuit academic, explained the rationale.

“But if Mary is a sinner in need of a savior, then she cannot be the worthy vessel in whom the All-Holy God takes on human nature as the Word-Made-Flesh,” McTeigue wrote. “In other words, the lyrics depend upon the dogma of the Immaculate Conception being false. If Mary needs a Savior, then she cannot be the vessel of the Incarnation. And ‘No-Incarnation’ = ‘No-Christmas.’”

“How ironic that a song sung with so much gusto as a Christmas hymn logically precludes what it claims to celebrate!”

Deacon Steven Greydanus, former film critic for the National Catholic Register, even went so far as to deconstruct the lyrics.

The Real Message

But all these objections miss the point. The song’s questions really aren’t directed at Mary. They’re directed at us.

In the midst of perhaps the most hectic, frantic season of the year, do we really take time to contemplate the astonishing work of divine intervention that Mary’s baby represents? Do we fully comprehend that the creator of the universe inserted himself into the totality of human experience?

Can we cut ourselves away from a lot of the sentimentality surrounding the nativity story — let alone our own biases — to see that this special baby would grow up to face profound personal sorrows, create powerful enemies and allow himself to die in a bloody, excruciating manner for a crime he didn’t commit, all to serve as the ultimate atonement for sin?

Lowry elegantly summarized the essence of his lyrics.

“As my mind went back to the manger scene, I began to think about the power, authority and majesty she cradled in her arms,” he said. “Those little lips were the same lips that had spoken worlds into existence. All of those things were contained in the young child lying quietly on her bosom. Even now, he was the very one who had given life to his mother, Mary.”

 

Joseph D’Hippolito has written commentaries for such outlets as the Jerusalem Post, the Wall Street Journal, Human Events, American Thinker and Front Page Magazine. He works as a freelance writer.