In this season we are encouraged to express our reverences. Not as specifically as on the Fourth of July, or on the birthdays of national leaders passed on. It is something of the human disposition, if not exactly to doubt, at least to be patient of doubt. Skepticism, it is sometimes called, and we are urged to reflect that skepticism brings on curiosity; curiosity, an alteration of accepted ways and of accepted solutions. It was dissatisfaction with the heavy traction of sled over ground that brought the wheel.

Continued impatience with physical actualities harnesses man’s efforts to overcome them. We accepted the immutability of the laws of gravity even when we discovered means of defying them in flight. But we do not attempt to repeal gravity, to which – this being the lesson of the season – we liken patriotism. The love of country. Patriotism can attenuate, and defective patriotism isn’t instantly punished. But we can, and should, detect it when it rises to the level of a challenge to the great moorings of life, as when one hesitates, on our country’s holy days, to pay obeisance to what we have.

A recent issue of Time magazine speaks of iconoclasm on the subject of Joseph of Nazareth. What do we “know” about him, never mind that we revere him as the husband of Mary and the custodian of the Christ child? Not much, is the answer to that question. Columnist Bill Toland plays it out further: “Joseph’s appearance in the New Testament was practically a cameo walk-on: His death was never recorded, his age was never certain, and John’s gospel barely mentions him. Our knowledge of the carpenter father is so limited that we are not certain whether he even attended the birth of Jesus or, as some artists have imagined it, whether he napped through the whole event.”

The language here betrays the lure of impiety. And it is a cognate temptation, in dealing with figures in the secular world. Sometimes there are cameras on hand to egg skepticism on.

No one can ever question the truth of it, that sometimes President Reagan’s eyes closed at high theatrical moments in history. We cannot doubt that Thomas Jefferson wrote the great pieties expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and died owning slaves.

What irks, and even grieves, is when the motives of the commentator are detectable as agents of greater designs than merely to touch on amiable eccentricities. The writer who wonders out loud whether Joseph slept through the birth of Christ is fondling a skepticism that seeks not so much humanizing, as desanctification. Time magazine reports on the shifting views of Joseph over time. He was initially seen as “the chaste caretaker,” but it was not long before he was portrayed as “the alienated cuckold.” In the late Middle Ages he became “the adoring protector … the paternal model for what would eventually be called the nuclear family,” and now he is the “modern-day evangel,” a “lunch-pail hero not born to holiness but who, by his hard-won and steadfast belief, finds a role in salvation.”

It has to be true that reverence discourages trivializations, and that to consent to such as have recently been traded about Joseph encourages an exploration of the meaning of impiety. In some societies, impiety was punishable by death. The thinking, most directly expressed, was that the society’s gods would take offense at slights and punish them by corporate displeasure, for instance the visitation of a plague.

Socrates was condemned to death for impiety, for putatively disregarding or offending the Athenian gods, whose displeasure the judges would not tolerate, let alone court. It is rather a pity that Socrates gave impiety a good name, Socrates being Socrates, his accusers being philistines. (A respectable case can be made justifying the sentence given to Socrates.)

But impiety is not merely the violation of the command against taking in vain the name of our Lord. It is also the denigration of holy things, and not only those which are housed with altars and organs. To mention the saints of modern liberty without any sign of appreciation is an impiety that casts doubt on one’s care about freedom, and the deference owed to man because he is God’s creature.

A retreat from the lure of doctrinal skepticism tells us about the long, effective reach of human grace. The scholar Howard Edington, who is also a Presbyterian minister, is quoted at the end of Time’s feature on Joseph. Edington wrote, “Joseph took God’s son into his heart, thus discovering a purpose for his own life within the greater purposes of God.” Then Edington concludes, in words many Christians might echo, “My prayer is that you will do the same.”