It’s that time of year again – the sparkly trees are in people’s windows, stockings hanging, holly on the doors, mistletoe dangling like a potential rape charge above unsuspecting heads, the morass of heads bobbing through our shopping centres, tripping over their bags of shopping, shoving each other with their bags of shopping, telling each other to sod off with their bags of shopping. And then there’s television – all those vapid entertainments like Eastenders and Desperate Housewives – and cinema and pantomimes and turkeys and mince pies and mulled wine and beer and an armageddon of parties.
So far it’s just Winterval, as they called it, with characteristically obscene banality, in Birmingham, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian cocktail of traditions. Yet so much of what we enjoy at this time of year draws its force from this nation’s Christian heritage. I’m thinking about the Christ in Christmas: Christmas carols – when the idiotic PC lobby in the CofE isn’t de-gendering and de-poeticising them, as Magnus Linklater points out in The Times today – and all the stuff about Bethlehem (where Palestinians have just kicked out the Christians) and the manger and the adoration of the magi, & c.
Few choose to have a puritan Christmas, without presents, without a tree, because both from the Christian and the atheist perspectives there has been what Salman Rushdie calls the chutneyfication of cultures, a blending and mixing and enriching. So the idea that we should try to cut out, in some politically correct way, the Christian bits, apart from being nasty, is patently absurd. Yet there are those who, wrongly believing themselves to be representing the sensitivities of a minority in Britain that is alleged to be offended by the Christianity of our Christmas, want to do just that.
To lose, not only Christmas, but also the KJV, Prayer Book, Order of Service, which are essential to an understanding of our literature, art, music, philosophy and architecture, would leave us noticeably impoverished. The majority, such as those who are flocking to churches for their weddings, and those who love to visit our historic churches and ruins, and those who cram into churches at this time of year, clearly don’t want to see our Christian heritage erased. Even if they are themselves atheists.
Indeed, an understanding of this great world religion can, at a time when Britain as a nation is seeking a corporate and unifying identity, help us to work out what we can call ‘ours’. Shared identity is a combination of the old and the new: as ethnic groups become more and more established and influential, they already enrich and add to our nation’s narrative, and will continue to do so; but Christianity, too, is integral to the old as well as the new. This is not the place to examine all of the issues, but Simon Heffer considers a few more in today’s Daily Telegraph.