In England, complaining about the Post Office’s commemorative stamps is almost as important a Christmas tradition as the sending of cards. This year’s stamps seem particularly innocuous: slightly abstracted illustrations of the traditional nativity story characters.
Nowadays we have Big Stamps and Small Stamps to go on Big Letters and Small Letters: so the big second class is an angel and the small second class is Mary and Joseph; the first class stamps have Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds, respectively, on them. The Wise Men get a £3.40 stamp to themselves. That’s the flat rate for sending cards air-mail anywhere in the world, apparently. It’s all a bit irrelevant because everyone uses Amazon and Moon-Pig.
I think the pictures are intended to suggest a kind of collage: Mary’s robe is a single, two-dimensional block of patterned fabric or paper. Mary and Joseph are riding a donkey; one of the three shepherds is bringing a lamb as a gift; and there are specifically three wise men, who seem to be wearing crowns. Those details owe more to Victorian carols than to the actual gospels, but then so does the whole popular nativity tradition. All of the pictures have a starry, starry background, and there is one big yonder star for we three kings to follow. Mary and the Baby have halos.
So far, so nice. But all eleven figures have dark skins. And Mary is wearing some sort of head-covering. So naturally the usual suspects have crawled out of the woodwork to say that the stamps are anti-white propaganda, the most Muslim Christmas stamps ever, and to chant about the halo looking like a crescent moon. Which it does, a bit, if you squint.
Well: Bethlehem was in modern Palestine and Nazareth was in modern Israel. The Maguses came “from the East”, which would be modern Iraq, and the idea that they were Persians or Babylonians fits the story pretty well. None of these people were white Europeans. Unless you are going with the legendary Wee Three Kings: then I suppose there is a quite well established tradition that one was European, one was Asian and one was African. That probably represents the idea that the rulers of the whole world came to pay their respects to Jesus.
But I don’t think the Post Office’s artist was shooting for historical accuracy: the clothes certainly aren’t based on first century garb. I think—at any rate, I hope—that he drew them that way specifically in order to annoy the sorts of people who are, in fact, annoyed that he drew them in that way. We are living at a time when a resurgent Christian Nationalist sect is systematically othering brown-skinned people, and celebrating a shield-bearing crusader Christ. So of course every piece of artwork, every carol service and every nativity play should make the point—be it ever so subtly—that in the story, Jesus was not one of us: he was one of them.
Yes: Christians have always localised the story. Art galleries are full of paintings of renaissance noble women giving birth in rather clean fifteenth century sheds. The Mystery Plays showed Caesar ordering the whole world to attend a census—even if they live as far away as Barnsley or Rotherham! Whisper it softly: African churches sometimes imagine African Jesuses, and black children sometimes hang their stockings out for a Black Santa. In any other year, a white baby would have been quite unobjectionable.
But if you are living in 1930s Germany, it is incumbent on you to make the point that, as a matter of historical fact, Mary and Joseph were Jewish.
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Roderick Spode’s Christmas-themed rally is, in the grand scheme of things, merely absurd. A thousand black-shorts singing Away in a Manger at an open air carol service should scarcely register as a news item. Every city in England has a thousand-seater cathedral and every one of those cathedrals will be standing room only for multiple iterations of Christmas carols during the festive period. It is all very well to want to demonstrate your commitment to faith and homeland, or, indeed, to be a shining beacon of light against the fading of our cultural identity. It is slightly odd to do so by doing exactly what nearly everyone up and down the country was going to be doing in any case.
But I found some of the discussion around the non-event rather interesting.
If you were a very devout vegetarian, you might, I suppose, refuse to acknowledge the distinction between chicken, pork, and beef and refer to them all as “meat”. Or, indeed, “dead animals”. But it might prove problematic to fry beef in Col Sanders eleven spices, or to make a chicken wellington. Words usually mean things, and definitions usually include some things and exclude others.
In 1979, the Monty Python team released a highly successful mind-virus which causes carriers to believe that all disagreements about religion or politics are intrinsically ridiculous. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn't some truth in it. In any political movement or church or fandom there really will sometimes be bitter disagreements about matters which seem trivial to anyone outside the cult. Or in some cases, matters which are really genuinely trivial. But as a result of the mind virus, whenever anyone asserts a point of principle on any subject, there will invariably be a wiseacre on hand to mutter “popular front of Judea” as if that terminated the discussion.
If we ask whether or not Spode is "really" a "Christian" are we indulging in that kind of sectarian hair-splitting? We have, I think, a perfect right to be skeptical about any sudden conversion. The man in the pew, and indeed in the pulpit, could be forgiven for asking if the man who has knelt down with a thousand other people in a crowded football stadium (while Cliff Richard is belting out Blessed Assurance with a Pentecostal choir) had in any meaningful sense "turned to Jesus". Billy Graham himself used to play down claims that so-many-thousands of people had been “saved” at one of his evangelistic meetings. They came forward, he would say: only God knows if they were saved.
But in this case there is a more specific skepticism because of a perceived mis-match between Spode’s new-found faith and his political beliefs. Someone suggested that he was “about as Christlike as a traffic cone full of angry wasps.”
Possibly. But if the criteria for genuine conversion is Christosimilitude then I should say we are looking at roughly two thousand years of false conversions, with Spode falling only slightly shorter than everyone else. All the popular candidates for "Christlikeness"—Mother Theresa, say, or Saint Francis, or Desmond Tutu, or John Paul the Second—have their detractors. The Catholic Church maintains a list of around ten thousand people who it thinks quite definitely went to heaven, but there are some odd people on it. Actually having existed has not always been an essential criteria for canonisation.
Our good friend CS Lewis was once asked if there was such a thing as a non-practicing Christian. He said yes, in fact nearly all Christians were non-practicing. The only person who ever practiced Christianity perfectly was Jesus himself. Lewis's definition of “practice” was quite specific:
“It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything… and saying ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’”
Which is a pretty high bar to clear.
A nice sounding Anglican clergyman (a part time comedian and former Satanist, apparently) wrote in the Guardian that:
"Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone 'not a real Christian'".
Which is very charitable of him. But he goes on to say that “care for the most vulnerable in society” has always been the core Christian value, and that Spode’s followers might have an issue with (for example) the passages in Exodus which exhort Jews to be nice to foreigners and immigrants because they were foreigners and immigrants in Egypt. Perfectly good point, that. But it does rather make it sound as if Christianity is a social movement and that there is a suspicion that Spode is not fully on board with the programme. The headline to the opinion column, presumably added by a sub, stated that there is no sense in which someone like Spode could be considered a genuine Christian. None.
The same paper carried an extended essay by an American, Bill McKibben, bewailing the way in which, in his country, the far-Right has co-opted Christianity.
According to this essay, in the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of American Christians believed in a broadly liberal Jesus. As the decades wore on, a re-branded fundamentalism which conflated Christianity with a narrow range of conservative causes came to dominate the protestant church, to the point where opposing abortion and homosexuality had become almost the whole of the faith.
At the end of the 1950s, he writes:
“a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible….”
The mainline Jesus was “a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”:
“The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor—and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek—not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.”
"Not as an act of passive acceptance" is an interpretation of the text, incidentally: not what it literally says. Jesus's parents were "homeless" in so far as they were not in their home town and couldn't find a hotel: they weren't destitute.
McKibben seems to take it for granted that sweater-sharing and cheek-turning would naturally be expected to get a person crucified. I don't buy this. It is a good joke to say that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, but it doesn't make much historical sense. Bart Ehrman has written that any convincing reconstruction of Jesus has to be able to answer the question "Why did he get the death penalty?" I don't think "For being nice" is a plausible answer.
McKibben goes on to say that it is “entirely fine” to believe in a Jesus-story shorn of its supernatural elements: it's all about the message. Any talk of "resurrection" seems to be a round-about way of saying that the preaching wasn't forgotten when the preacher died:
“This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.”
It was Jesus' message—not any faith the he had literally come back to life—that the Church preserved: it was Jesus behaviour that they sought to emulate. When workin' folk are out on strike, that's where you'll find Joe Hill.
“The idea that personal salvation—as opposed to concern for others—was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical…”
Really? Did mainline Methodists and Lutherans in the 1950s really believe that Wesley and Luther—not to mention St John and St Paul—were borderline heretics? I find it hard to believe that this could literally have been the case. A hymn-book full of far away green hills and rugged old crosses says differently.
But let’s take him at his word. For the first half of the 20th century, the American church had substantially abandoned the New Testament’s divine saviour in favour of a humble rabbi. America may have been colonised by puritan extremists, but its civil system was created by skeptical deists. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson go through the Bible and tear out all the religious bits? So perhaps the proposition isn't as absurd as all that.
If the liberal consensus only arrived at their ethical Jesus by denouncing the Christ of the New Testament, then the evangelicals have done nothing worse than restore the church's historic faith. They have literally put the Christ back into Christianity. But their restored Christ is a macho culture warrior with a gun in one hand and a spanking paddle in the other.
How should we understand this? Should we say "In the 21st century, a large cohort of Americans rejected the purely ethical Jesus and restored the theological Christ: and it just so happened that most of them were hard-line political conservatives?"
Or are we obliged to say that "the Christ of Christianity and the ideology of the far-Right go together like a horse and carriage?"
Plenty of anti-theists would gleefully go along with the second option. Once you overwrite the humble rabbi with God’s supernatural offspring, you have already committed yourself to a whole complex of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas. If you replace the jobbing carpenter with a divine world-saviour, you have opened the door to some very unhealthy ideas about divine retribution. Have you ever seen Passion of the Christ? In a church which preaches that version of the Atonement, James Dobson and John Smyth are features rather than bugs.
CS Lewis, again, argued rather cogently that you couldn’t and shouldn’t have a “Christian” political party—let alone a “Christian” government—because Christians don’t necessarily agree about all the nitty-gritty bread-and-butter political questions. What would be desirable would be a strong Christian presence in all the parties.
He thinks that you could perfectly well have a sincere Christian fascist and an equally sincere Christian communist—or at any rate, sincere Christians prepared to make common cause with the British Union of Fascists and equally sincere Christians willing to ally with the British Communist Party. The hypothetical Christian fascist might think that humans were so sinful that they need to be governed by a theocratic dictatorship. The hypothetical Christian communist might believe Jesus was primarily a social reformer and that the church departed at a very early stage from his teachings. That is, the Christian fascist misapplied and exaggerated doctrines which Lewis thought were sound; but the Christian communist worked from premises that Lewis utterly rejected.
So, it seems we have a consensus. All parties are agreed that if you believe in the Christ of theology, you are more or less bound to be a conservative; and that if you are a liberal, you are more or less bound to believe in a non-theological Jesus. Your only options are to embrace the Republican Christ, or else assert that since Saul of Tarsus tripped over his shoelace on the way to Damascus, there have been hardly any True Christians.
In order to test my hypothesis, I turned to an online magazine called Christian Today. I think it would be fair to describe this publication as a bit on the socially conservative side. A representative sample runs thus:
“The judgement of God has finally come upon the United Kingdom. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief in the night. It came in the form of an irrational, emotive and Godless parliament who this week voted to permit the killing of babies in the womb up until birth, and has now introduced the National Suicide Service, with its vote to permit assisted suicide. God has given us what we voted for.”
The magazine tries to navigate a "both sides" critique of Spode and his opponents. A sub-headline directs our attention to the parable of the mote and the beam. Aren't both sides, the far-Right and the anti-fascist, guilty of co-opting the Christian message to their political beliefs? Aren't both sides equally prone to demonise their opponents? When the liberals speak of Spode as if he was some kind of anti-Christ, aren't they guilty of the very same divisiveness they accuse him of?
The essay acknowledges that there are valid criticisms of the Unite the Kingdom rally: that it illegitimately shoe-horns politics into Christmas. But they note that an anti-fascist counter meeting depicted Mary and Joseph in a refugee boat. Surely that is also political? And therefore just as bad? The Left should not demonise the Right over what is, after all, a mere difference of political opinion. (This approach does not, of course, apply to questions about assisted dying and legalised abortion: it is perfectly okay to demonise people who disagree with you about that.)
But the Left are far more culpable than the Right in this regard. The Right may have introduced politics into religion; but the Left have replaced religion with politics. The established church has been reduced to a party political mouthpiece:
"It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Now it seems more accurate to describe it as the Green/Labour/Progressive party at politics."
Well: when people said that the Church was the Tory party at prayer, I think they meant that Conservatives generally worshipped at their parish church, where Labour voters were more likely to attend one of the non-conformist denominations. The Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. No-one, I think, ever claimed that the Church of England consistently supported Conservative party policy.
The Guardian writer said directly that there was a consensus in liberal churches that a gospel of salvation was heretical. The Christian Today article accuses church leaders of being unable to tell their flock "what God says about salvation", preferring instead to claim divine authority for their personal beliefs about "the EU, immigration, climate change and Donald Trump!"
The Guardian writer said that Christmas is about "a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”. Which rather reminds one of Geraldine Granger telling the good folk of Dibley that the Christmas story was about a baby born in a stable ("the poorest of the poor") who "says things that are so astonishing that millions of people are still living their lives by them today." So Christian Today is being perfectly fair when it hauls liberals over the coals for reducing the meaning of Christmas to "let's all be nice to each other because a cute baby was born to a teenage mum and became a refugee."
So perhaps Christmas does belong to the Conservative Christ much more than to the liberal Jesus. The baby in the Nativity story is not a humble carpenter with some new-age theories about love. Like Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker, he's the Chosen One. As a baby, he is celebrated by a whole army of supernatural beings. As a young child he is venerated by all the Kings of the world. The Right can validly claim that by abolishing the liberal Jesus, they have put the Christ back in Christmas.
The Christian Today essay ends with another attempt to be even-handed—offering prayers for both the Right and the Left, the Spodests and the liberal Church Leaders. But the writer
“prays that Christ will really be exalted in [the Unite the Kingdom] carol service in London on Saturday”
adding that
“I suspect that I would be more likely to hear the actual gospel of Christ at the rally on Saturday, than I will in some churches on Sunday.”
Whereas he prays that the Left
“will stop using their own personal Jesus for their own personal politics and instead come to know and proclaim the Christ who really is there.”
Is this where we are? The Far-Right have the wrong politics, but the correct Jesus? The Liberals have only politics; they don't have Jesus at all? It sounds depressingly like the English Civil War, in which one side was Romantic But Wrong, and the other side were Rotten But Right.
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In the 1980s, a rumour occasionally went round campus that the GaySoc had decreed that on such-and-such a day; homosexual students would identify themselves by wearing blue jeans to lectures and straight students by wearing something else. I don’t suppose it was actually true: but it was quite a clever thought experiment. Everybody wore blue jeans all the time. So the question was "If I wear my Levis tomorrow, will everyone assume I am gay? And if they do, does that matter, particularly?"
If everyone agreed that wearing red baseball caps represented my support for Roderick Spode then I would not wear a red base ball cap ever again. Not that I was planning to do so in any case. If I watch the new TV show about the kid with the magic wand, it will be widely taken as signifying my assent to the proposition that my trans friends shouldn’t be allowed to go to the lavatory. So I won't: although I probably wouldn't have done anyway.
I accept that we may have to cede the Union Jack to the far-Right. I will be quite sad if Christmas goes the same way: but I expect that it will. The more people tell me that I must say Happy Christmas and that saying Happy Christmas signifies my opposition to the Woke war on Christmas, the more inclined I am to say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays.
This year, it is one rather ludicrous man saying that we should all get together and sing Away in a Manger in order to assert our national identity and resist cultural erosion. Next year, the thought may creep into actual churches. Five years down the line, there may be general agreement that singing Away in a Manger is what we do to stick it to the brown folk. In which case, all us non-fascists will have to stop singing it. Which would be a shame. But we managed without the song from the first year of the Christian era through to, I think, the one thousand eight hundred and seventy eighth. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you'd find people struggling through December the twenty-fifth without Silent Night, turkey, Santa Claus or the Muppet Christmas Carol. I think we’ll cope.
But what happens when Spodist converts start to attend ordinary services? What is the Rev. to do?
Perhaps he will say “We welcome everyone—money-lenders, pedophiles, Nazis, people who saw Monty Python's, Life of Brian….” and continue preaching whatever message he was going to preach in any case. In which case I suppose the Spodists would say that the Vicar, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King and the Pope were Woke. Liberals may be reluctant to say that people who don't agree with them are Not True Christians; the Right have no such compunctions.
So what is Rev. to do? Stick to his pacifist guns, watch the Christian Nationalists drift away and lament his pews returning to their previous bum-free status?
Or experience a sudden revelation that the core of Jesus message was always white-ethno-nationalist-anti-Islamiscism?
In 2015, it would not have been possible to imagine a British Conservative leader using the language that Badenoch does—and completely impossible to imagine a Labour leader talking like Starmer. Who knows where the Overton stained glass window might be in 2030?
I take it for granted that, by then, either Spode or someone more extreme will have kissed King Charles's ring. And the church, like the schools and the museums, will have to choose between bending the knee to the Party or being disestablished or abolished.
At which point, carol services will be the least of our worries
