The West is in denial about its religious roots
While other religions — especially Islam — celebrate their resilience, writes Jonathan Clark, Christianity has become muffled by secular embarrassment and cultural confusion Christmas, we agree, must be the same each year: the same decorations (no plastic trees, thank you), the same carols (not too many new ones, please, King’s), the same turkey and pudding at lunch (no nouvelle cuisine here). So always, each year, we complain that Christmas isn’t what it used to be, a powerful plea which largely ensures that it goes on being comfortably and reassuringly the same.
The British Christmas has, after all, become a folk festival, like Guy Fawkes Night (and equally disapproved of by right-thinking people). The children round the bonfires have no idea what Fawkes was trying to do, but that’s not the point. The point is the annual repetition of an unchanging ceremony, reassuring, reliable, related somehow to nostalgia and to collective identity but having precious little to do with metaphysics.
On this level, all was well with Christmas for years and years. The cultural politics surrounding Christmas became the art of the lowest common denominator. The object was to negotiate one’s way through the family gathering without mentioning God. People became rather good at this. They enjoyed themselves; it was slightly excessive, but all rather harmless. To protest was to be a Scrooge (or, in the US, a Grinch). Until now — because this time, the wider setting within which Christmas is celebrated has fundamentally changed, and Christmas’s routine jollity looks peculiarly different.
As so often, big changes of perspective sneak up on us, and we wake up to a new landscape. Before, the West’s substantial indifference to the theological meaning of Christmas was generally taken as a mark of maturity: the West had merely travelled further along the road of tolerance, pluralism and indifference. Secularisation was held to be a process, occurring everywhere for similar reasons, leaving behind a few pockets of faith (but not for long). A vast body of academic theory grew up to celebrate a circular argument: secularisation meant modernisation; modernisation meant secularisation.
This year it is the West that appears as the odd man out. Other religions now look like ... well, like religions. Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists all seem to believe what they say and to act on it, even at times dying for their faiths. Above all, Muslims do just that. The results are not always agreeable but that, too, is not the point. The point is we have just realised that Western secularism is no longer the yardstick; instead Western Christianity now seems to be failing a test set by others.
In comparison with other religions, it now seems odd rather than normal that Christianity should be so complicit in its exclusion from the public sphere, so eager to embrace the separation of church and state, so content to be excluded from the media, so willing to be removed from the classroom.
When Christians try to counter this marginalisation, they so often fumble the issue — as over intelligent design in the US and look like frenzied fundamentalists locked in conflict with sensible secularists. Yet when the argument is reduced to whether the object annually erected on Boston Common should be called a Christmas tree or a holiday tree, and whether the window displays in Oxford Street should feature shepherds and cribs, both sides have failed to grasp what is at stake. And if that is the best that Christians can do, no wonder Richard Dawkins is an attractive alternative.
Such trivial culture wars now look not amusing but deadly earnest. What has changed is that the balance of opinion in Britain and the US has tipped decisively against the Iraq war; and this has meant that wider, unspoken assumptions about the issues that underlie that conflict have changed too.
What the challenge of Islam now shows is that ‘the West’ was never as secular as it thought it was. It becomes more plausible to see it as a civilisation shaped by a dominant religion, like China, India or Israel. Nor is this a secret: the ways in which Western ideas of law, democracy and race relations have been derived from Christianity have been written about by historians for years. But they wrote largely in vain, for whenever a religious conflict arose, the West’s dominant wisdom, sustained by political scientists, sociologists, economists and the policymaker who drew on them, announced that religion was the last thing at issue. Wars of religion brought the routine response, first parodied in Beyond the Fringe as the official reply to worries about nuclear holocaust: it cannot happen!
Until this year. What we now see is that the West was all along not so much secularised as ‘in denial’, refusing to accept some basic truths about itself.
Yet if the West is not secular, a plausible alternative is to see it as hollowed out, drained of the religious substance that created it, able only to haul down the flag while affirming ideals of pluralism, and to argue about whether the materialism of the Christmas season detracts from the message. But this is a trivial question: all religions are expressed in material terms. What matters is the content of what is expressed, and how a civilisation understands itself.
In the case of the West, the official content of ‘peace and goodwill’ — essentially the rhetoric of 1941–45 — now looks sadly threadbare. Democracy, liberalism, tolerance: who can argue against this trinity? But what to its advocates in the White House still look like self-evident truths, look to other religions like particular cultural formations, no longer to be understood in their own terms. Democracy, liberalism, tolerance, say the critics, are means to ends — but what ends? What ultimate values do they promote?
This means that the main question has changed. No longer is it: how did the West achieve the secular society first? Now the question is: why has ‘the West’ abandoned its historic identity, Christendom? And, in consequence: why does this now matter, as it has not mattered for a very long time? And why do I now look forward not with amused tolerance but with sickening anticipation to my liberal parish priest’s sermon on Christmas morning, in which I know he will discuss anything, anything, rather than the doctrine of the Incarnation?
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