LOS ANGELES

DEAR PASTOR: I know you’d like me, and everyone else, to have a black-and-white Christmas. But give me a gray Christmas any day, one characterized by mystery rather than dogmatism.

You may have seen the new Harris Interactive poll indicating that three in five Americans believe a virgin teen gave birth to an incarnate deity 2,000 years ago. This statistic may seem high to the average atheist, but you would decry the figure as far too low, yet another sign of America’s decline.

It’s odd to imagine that a god would have passively watched his massive cosmos unfold for 13.7 billion years, then would suddenly become hyperactive, going so far as to hop onto one privileged planet in order to fix it. To minimize cognitive dissonance, three in five Americans also happen to reject Darwinism, with its assumption of a slowly evolving universe. A generation that has witnessed science perform irrefutable miracles chooses to ignore science’s core findings, preferring faith in miracles that can’t be proved.

You have attempted to preach in recent days to any holdouts in your pews, telling them that a literal view of a virgin birth is essential to the belief that God broke into our world in a tangible rather than a symbolic way. You tell them to avoid the usual mainstream media stories debunking the virgin birth each new Christmas and the resurrection each new Easter. You ask people to view natural science and reason as Ivy League cults that require as much “blind faith” as supernatural doctrines do.

But allow me to praise those men and women who can balance an updated view of reality with an appreciation for the Christmas story as a sign of new hope.

Having traipsed through various religious fields — including Islam, new age, evangelical Christianity and secular humanism — I am finally convinced that orthodoxy and dogma kill more easily than they cure.

Average Joes who are most zealous about affirming virgin births or resurrections or Biblical inerrancy seem most likely to rationalize away the distinctive aspects of Jesus’ messages — the calls to love enemies, to forgive injuries, and to reject worldly power and materialism. Average Janes who take Biblical doctrines literally are the ones who are most likely to tell you that taking Jesus’ ethical lessons too seriously will only get a person crushed. With your support, Joe and Jane strain out gnats while inhaling camels.

I once found sweetness in the notion that Jesus was born humbly of a virgin, and that this signaled that he was a god who lifted the small and weak over the mighty. I told many Middle Easterners and South Asians that this illustrated a divine call to peacemaking that confounded the usual standards of justice.

After 9/11 I watched with dismay as evangelicals emerged as the American constituency that was most charged up about war — and most enthusiastic about demonizing people in the Middle East. Virgin births and supernatural doctrines no longer seemed relevant.

Looking back at a rich irony, the many “heretical,” new-age gurus whom I followed long ago — Marianne Williamson and the like — were more faithful than evangelicals to the radical character of Jesus’s teachings.

Yet rather than take on your congregants wherever they may deviate from Jesus’ teachings, even when you know they are wrong, you rationalize that, although evangelical doctrines are perfect, humans are not.

You say that Christendom does deserve credit for birthing modern science. Then you turn around and claim that science is a fool’s errand that cannot address the important issues, like virgin births. Then you make me dizzy by using science to argue that rival religions are lying when they claim that they had nice miracles too. You prove in all this that it is impossible to argue with a godly man such as yourself, who rests on facts whenever possible and on faith when facts fail.

Yet I am exhausted by the arguments and the mental gymnastics. And I will be bold enough to wager that, if there is a Jesus who is the reason for the season, he is tired of all this too.

I suspect he would be too busy blessing peacemakers (even the heretical ones) to fuss over which persons have the best command of his personal history, and that he is more concerned with who gets the point of his Christmas story than with who gets the literal details of that story. So, dear preacher, color my Christmas gray, with all its impressive mystery. And please keep your black and white.

Rob Asghar is a writer in Los Angeles ( robasghar@gmail.com).