As we near Christmas this year I am deeply disturbed by the secular / woke ideology that is seeking to shut down the Christian message behind Christmas. This year, more than ever before, I am reading of Christmas nativity plays being banned from schools and pre-schools, Christmas carols with a strong Christian message being scrubbed from end of year celebrations and any references to the actual Christmas story being edited out of official programs and celebrations.
Recently, I read that a church choir in a small town in Indonesia was ordered by local community leaders to cease rehearsing Christmas carols for the upcoming Christmas service. The town has a strong Christian population, yet the local leadership shut them down and banned the singing of any Christmas hymns, claiming that it would be insensitive and intolerant to people of other faiths.
As disturbing as this is, we might consider it to be somewhat unsurprising in a Muslim country such as Indonesia. But when we see the same censorship being applied to Christian activities in western nations such as our own, alarm bells must surely start to ring, along with the Christmas bells! In my own local area, the annual Christmas lights display at the Hunter Valley Gardens has, in recent years, removed all scenes with a traditional Christmas scene. There are no displays depicting the nativity scene or any other Christian message. Instead, the displays focus on Santa, elves, reindeer, various cute animals, gingerbread houses and even bizarre things such as toadstools. End of year school events and community carols services are increasingly devoid of any overt Christian message, and even some so-called Christian schools are now deliberately omitting references to Jesus’ birth in their celebrations. Similarly, many businesses and shops are now ensuring that any Christmas displays are devoid of any references to the true Christmas story. Major department stores which have traditionally always included nativity scenes in their Christmas displays now studiously avoid them for fear of ‘offending’ people of other faiths.
Symptomatic of this de-Christianising of Christmas is Netflix’s animated Christmas movie, “That Christmas”, released a couple of years ago, which has a scene which openly mocks the nativity story.
And, of course, these seasonal issues are on top of the more general trend in society throughout the whole year to shut down prayer in public, remove prayer from official governmental bodies and generally censor the church’s right to express its beliefs and values openly.
And all this is in the supposed cause of tolerance and inclusion.
But as I’ve been arguing for years, society seems to have missed the whole point of tolerance. Tolerance is not served by shutting down diverse expressions of belief. Tolerance is not enforcing a bland, ‘harmless’ secular message upon everyone. That is not tolerance; it is a form of totalitarianism. It is an enforced monoculture that outlaws all other expressions of diverse belief. It is completely intolerant – the very opposite of tolerance. It is non-inclusive – the very opposite of inclusive.
True tolerance embraces and encourages a diversity of beliefs and viewpoints. True inclusivity welcomes the respectful expression of varying beliefs and encourages people to accept people whose beliefs differ from their own.
As a tolerant Christian, I respect the right of Muslim schools to openly express and celebrate their beliefs in their ceremonies and festivals throughout the year. I respect the right of Jewish communities, and communities of Hindus and Bahai to freely express their own beliefs in their own annual festivals and ceremonies. I am not offended by any of this, even though I do not acsribe to their beliefs. This is what it means to live peacefully and respectfully in a free and democratic society.
But when businesses and organisations start de-Christianising our own long-standing annual celebrations and instead, promote a bland, ‘inoffensive’ and essentially meaningless message in its place, we must ask some serious questions. Is this really about not offending people of other faiths? Or is it a more sinister and subtle agenda that seeks to remove the Christian message from the public arena altogether? Is this really about tolerance, or is it, in fact, an insidious campaign of intolerance, aimed at erasing religious expression and producing a secular monoculture. There have been (and still are) societies which have done this. We call them totalitarian regimes.
This Christmas season, the bells are ringing. But increasingly, they are alarm bells rather than Christmas bells.