Once upon a time we knew how to deal with the joyless lot who sought to eliminate Christmas. We overthrew the Commonwealth and booted the rest of their sorry lot over to America. These were the people who tried to ban the Anglican celebration of Christmas and took offence at the eating of mince pies.
One would have thought that such folly would have been confined to the scrapheap of history after the Restoration. Not so, it seems, for over at City Hall the Grinches considered the following acceptable regulations for a Christmas tree :
Usual rules, no Christian symbols, colours or fairies! We cannot have any political colours for the decorations e.g. red, blue, green, yellow, so white and silver is best. Any decorations must be from a recycled, eco friendly source. No star or fairy please.”
The behaviour of such people deserves nothing short of ridicule and contempt. Rather than demonstrating some multi-cultural awareness of the sensitivities of other religions, it simply demonstrates the narrow-minded bigotry of those involved in the decision. The underlying logic is that Jews, Muslims and other religious believers are so thin-skinned or volatile that any whiff of a predominantly Christian country celebrating possibly the most positive and inoffensive festival it has in its calendar would result in us all feeling dreadfully excluded and therefore get upset and possibly blow something up in an orgy of violence. You can almost bet that the policy was proposed by some mindless white middle-class twenty-or-thirtysomething.
The reality of course is utterly detached from the mindless bien pensant and patronisng view that holds non-Christians to be po-faced and intolerant of the established religion. Like many of these PC measures, they are neither suggested, or wanted, by the minorities in question, but are steamrollered through by some over-employed joyless Grinch. No suicide bomber has ever declared in his “martyrdom video” that he was motivated by anger at the celebration of Christmas. Indeed, browsing the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir website, the only objection I could find to Christmas from them was the increasing commercialisation. No mass riots, no fatwa imposed on Santa, likening him to Salman Rushdie. Jewish and Muslim communities have felt under greater threat since 2001, but banning Christmas is the resort of those who would like to be seen to be caring, rather than actually bothering to inform themselves about the concerns of minorities.
Send anything other than this and you're a racist.
The greater danger with these policies is that we lose something far greater in the process. If our cultural insitutions are unwilling to celebrate Christmas in a Christian context, we will concede it entirely to a crass commercialisation and kill off the very spirit that makes it such a wonderful time of year. Burke’s Corner warns that “The result of such Puritanism would be a mere celebration of consumerism and materialism, a season without a soul.” Tom Harris too has hit the nail on the head in pointing out that the culture of Britain, a culture that spawned the very rights that allow me to practice a religion different to that of the majority, is inherentl Christian. That should be cherished and defended.
As a final point, should public policy be kowtowing to the sort of Scrooge who takes offence at people celebrating religious festivals?
This year, let’s all stick two fingers up to the po-faced latter-day Puritans and celebrate Christmas and its rich religious-cultural heritage.
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