Christmas is like the NHS. Most of us have some local contact with it, and most of us like what we get. But most of us remain convinced that the institution is endangered, pushed to the point of extinction by politically-correct town-hall councillors or the health-and-safety mafia.
Every year we read about a council that has banned Christmas lights in the local swimming pool because they pose a fire hazard or about a school that has replaced its Nativity play with a dramatisation of The Tao of Piglet for fear of offending the local Zoroastrian community.
Whilst there probably are one or two fires underneath all this smoke, they are fiendishly difficult to find. Most people know about the council or school in question but they have never seen it themselves.
The interesting thing about these annual stories lies not so much in their veracity (or lack of it) as in the unanimity and vehemence of the public’s reaction to them. For a nation of discreet theists, nominal Christians and occasional churchgoers, we seem to be fiercely protective of our Christmas. Why?
A recent Theos survey suggested that, whilst few Britons (churchgoers included) know the Christmas story well, its outline remains firmly in our cultural bloodstream. The majority of people (73%) know where Jesus was born and who told Mary she should expect a child, and nearly half know that John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin.
Knowledge does not, of course, denote belief, let alone commitment but nor should it be dismissed. Christian stories have underwritten the nation’s history, constitution, culture and symbols for over a thousand years. The British people, as the philosopher Julian Baggini recently noted in Prospect magazine, are inherently communitarian, seeing freedom and rights as a function of belonging to a particular community. Christmas assumes a role, albeit a minor one, alongside all the other phenomena that denote what that community is: who we are, what we value and how we should live. We defend it because, even if we don’t actually believe it, it is still part of who we are. Like Magna Carta, we may only have a rough idea of what it is about or when it was made, but we still think it should be on public display.
This strength of public reaction is liable to console Christians who live in iconoclastic times, when the sacred (particularly, it seems, the Christian sacred) appears to exist simply in order to be defaced. But drawing consolation from the public’s angry defence of Christmas can serve, somewhat ironically, to disfigure the festival itself.The Christmas story is not and was never meant to be a social prop, reassuring a historically contingent national community about its culture and identity. If anything, it sets out to confront such preconceptions and prejudices, with a tale that is as discomforting as it is improbable.
The narrative, in the two gospels that offer it, forces upon us an awareness of the homeless, the refugee, the persecuted, the vulnerable, just when we would shut them out of our contented visions of peace and order. It reminds us of the need for unreserved trust and faithfulness, at a time when contract and exchange are our dominant models for relationship. It orients us beyond the here and now, towards the transcendent, the eternal, when we might otherwise seek simply to satisfy our most immediate cravings. Altogether, it does, in microcosm, what the Christian religion attempts to do in full – draw us out of ourselves and into an awareness and love of the other.
You need not be a believer for it to work. The poet Carol Ann Duffy recently collaborated with composer Sasha Johnson Manning in writing 16 new carols that were premiered at the Royal Northern College of Music in December. Duffy, a self-professed atheist, said that she was drawn to the project “because of the relevance the themes of the Christmas story still have for a modern audience, such as refugees, displacement, poverty and the joy of birth.” The supernatural (not, in any case, a concept the original gospel writers would have had much truck with) is absent from The Manchester Carols but Christmas is still very much there.
The strength of the public’s reaction against the prospect, however illusory, that Christmas should be renegotiated broadcasts to us the same message as 100,000 full-to-bursting Christmas church services. The British public’s nominal Christianity is not quite as devoid of content as some claim. The challenge is to ensure that that content turns us not in on ourselves but out towards others.
