And the Word became tinsel -Dec 24, 2004

One of the ironies of life in Britain today is that while we have great difficulty getting people to take politics seriously (judging by the decline in voting and general cynicism towards politicians), politics – power play – has no difficulty at all in working us up (judging by media arguments about everything from speed cameras to paternity suits).

Take Christmas, for example. Once-upon-a-time it was a straightforward matter of over-spending, over-indulgence, red-suited men with dodgy beards and some kid in a manger being pestered by asses. But now the simple pleasures of blatant hedonism and cloying religiosity have been overtaken by those ritual, political arguments about who owns the franchise.

You know the kind of thing. Irate bishops start whingeing because fewer and fewer people know or care about the difference between Jesus and Santa. Militant secularists complain that Christians are hijacking a good old pagan festival. And the Sun ‘newspaper’ runs a campaign to stop atheists, Buddhists and local authority lefties spoiling ‘a great British tradition’ by turning Xmas into Winterval or a one-size-fits-all multi-faith shindig.

It’s hard not to snigger when confronted with a pantomime horse made up of a cleric, a curmudgeon and a tabloid hack, of course. But there’s a serious point in all this. And it starts with the way in which both faith and civic life are the new battlegrounds for political control within a society where the traditional means of handling power (parliament, parties, elections) are losing their hold.

For the hard-line secularists, the ‘battle for Christmas’ is a matter of breaking what they see as the stranglehold of popular religious imagination in everyday life. Anxious to believe that faith and spirituality can be made to whither away, or at least that religion can be rendered superstitious to the point where it auto-destructs, they run an annual campaign to ‘get back to the real meaning of it all’ – people having fun without the need to bow the knee to some deity or other.

The tabloid agenda, on the other hand, is about national identity. For the Sun the meaning of Christmas is a British kith-and-kin thing. Be nice to your granny, give God a nod, pull a Christmas cracker (geddit?) – and above all else, the not-so-subtle subtext goes, stop those wretched Johnny foreigners messing up ‘our’ way of life. And while you’re about it get the Archbishop back to mouthing pious platitudes rather than ‘meddling with politics’ by (say) standing up for asylum seekers.

For church leaders, too, Christmas is an opportunity to show that Christendom isn’t dead yet. People may be more inclined to believe in crystals than the incarnation these days, and far less inclined to go to church than the local shopping mall. But underneath it all, so the traditional ecclesiastical logic goes, we are still a residual ‘Christian nation’. Well, we turn up tipsy to midnight mass, anyway. So all is not lost.

In theory these different viewpoints clash irresolvably. The secularists dislike both tabloid nationalism and Christian nation-ism. The tabloids despise secular liberalism and churchly accommodationism. And the Christians? Well they just seem to think that if they shout loud enough (or close their eyes and hum hard enough) people will ‘come back to church’. If only they knew.

In practice, however, all three perspectives share common ground too. They do this by being equally and tragically out of touch with the Gospel’s account of the way Christ is born into the flux of the world, and with the life-giving dynamic this creates.

Think for a moment. Jesus, the icon of God, is born of obscure parentage in a backwater of empire with little fuss and bother. That layers of religious and consumer tradition over the years have largely obscured this astonishing reality is not the point. The truth is that Word became flesh, not tinsel; vulnerable humanity, not conquering ideology.

Jesus is born among us in a way that does not colonise our space, but instead invites us to share it – with him, and with all those for whom there is ‘no room at the inn’ – including the Muslims, gypsies and homosexuals whom some secularists, some tabloid newspapers and some churches are prepared to write off (according to some of the most prominent news stories in 2004).

Jesus’s stirring is God’s gentle movement of love, justice and peace in a world where we are forgetful and brutal towards one another.

He is not born to lord it over people, to establish a religion of power, to privilege a particular nation or race, to claim press coverage, to put bums on pews, or to buttress an argument between people of different religious or anti-religious persuasions. Far from it.

Of course, there are elements of Christmas (the festival adopted by Christianity when it became a majority religion) that do chime with this Jesus, the one who will not be co-opted by our political or ecclesiastical ploys. Gift exchange, for example – when it is a sign of genuine non-possessiveness and mutuality, rather than obligation or manipulation.

Mostly, however, the stranger from Bethlehem is homeless at Christmastide; as the Gospel puts it, he has nowhere to lay his head. Our politics do not share his identification with the dispossessed and marginalized. Our festivities reek of selfishness rather than communion. Our religion is about piety not radical transformation. Out telling of his story is confused and self-interested.

Better, far better, for us to acknowledge that in order for Jesus to be born anew in our hearts, our relationships and our institutions, he has to be freed from all the trappings that the Season now emblemises. So let’s take Christ out of Christmas – or, rather, seek him were he is, which is not with the religious and political rat race.

By that I don’t mean ‘let’s pour cold water on people having fun’. I mean, let’s consider what it might be like to un-mortgage our happiness from the addictions of consumption, tribalism and power – to have some fun that doesn’t depend upon desiring what the advertisers want to sell; doesn’t rejoice in ‘getting one over’ those secularists (read Christians, read foreigners, read Muslims, etc.); doesn’t reduce the Word-made-flesh into a religious bauble.

How could we do that? In many painfully simple ways. By committing sensible acts of random kindness, maybe. By opening our homes and churches to those left out in the cold. By sharing food with enemies. By embracing loved ones. Even by stretching our political imaginations towards an agenda of sharing rather than an agenda of grabbing – and not just ‘at Christmas’.

And above all, perhaps, we could rekindle genuine hope in the face of joyless consumption by giving serious heart-room to the counter-story of God’s abandonment in our midst. We could seek the Jesus we barely recognise, and discover in him the gift of divine love that comes from beyond our expectations, manipulations, doctrines and desires.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.