The revolutionary meaning of Christmas |
As stale as it is flawed, the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee’s view of Christmas nonetheless encapsulates secularist scepticism in revealing ways. Published three years ago, her broadside is a variation on complaints voiced every December in allied quarters for many decades. ‘Much as I dislike most Christian belief, the iconography of star, stable, manger, kings and shepherds to greet a new baby is a universal emblem of humanity . . . But the rest of it, I find loathsome. Why wear the symbol of a barbaric torture? Martyrdom is a repugnant virtue, so too the imposition of perpetual guilt.’
The Christian conviction is that God remakes human nature by defenceless love, rather than by producing a banner in the heavens inscribed ‘I’M HERE, YOU IDIOTS’
Toynbee then produced some heroic myth-making of her own about ‘fanatical early Christians, who permitted no heresy, hacked down temples, and burned ancient classical texts’. Almost every one of these claims is either misconceived, one-eyed, or flatly untrue. Yet the narrative prospers all the same.
How can thoughtful believers reply in a context admittedly marked by schmalz as well as ill-informed polemics? First, by considering historical and spiritual claims in parts. Toynbee judges the Church’s overall record to be abysmal. Read experts in the field such as Tom Holland or David Bentley Hart or Lucy Beckett, by contrast, and you can see how Jesus’s followers made the world a far better place. Pre-Christian religion regularly mandated self-mutilation and human sacrifice. The weak were despised. Christianity’s stress on the radical equality of all, and the founding of hospitals, schools and........