Fundamentalists miss true Christmas message

Published on Saturday 24 December 2005 00:05

IN PENNSYLVANIA this week, a judge who is himself a strong Christian believer delivered a stinging judgment against those - in this case a school board in the town of Dover - who seek to teach American schoolchildren the idea of "intelligent design" as part of the science curriculum, and as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

The growing "intelligent design" lobby, however, was neither dismayed nor deterred by the ruling, so strong is their belief that the idea of Darwinian evolution is incompatible with Christian faith, and must no longer be taught without alternatives. Of course, there are plenty of people who believe in the theory of evolution, and also believe in God; they simply see God as a being who exists on a spiritual plane, beyond the imperatives of the physical universe, and who reveals Himself through the beauty of the world and its natural processes in ways too mysterious for us fully to understand.

But the fundamentalists of the Christian right want nothing to do with such spiritual talk. For them, the Bible is either historically true, or absolutely false and God is either as real as Charles Darwin, or non-existent. They are, in other words, living proof of something that I have suspected for years: that the problem with religious fundamentalists of all faiths is not an excess of spirituality, but too little of it. They seem, on the whole, to be people who just can't tell the difference between knowledge and faith, fact and fable, science and poetry, and their world is, therefore, a ghastly, flat place of unmagical absolutes and grimly competing factual certainties.

Which is perhaps why the religious right fails to get the point when it comes to the rich, mixed pudding of meanings that is Christmas, this greatest western festival of the year. Only this week, for example, I heard a Christian campaigner in New York complaining about the newish American custom of wishing people "Happy Holidays" instead of Merry Christmas.

Now, there are good aesthetic reasons for objecting to this bland little greeting and I certainly hope that it never spreads here. But the one argument against it that clearly holds no water at all is the one that the Christian spokesperson chose to use: that if it hadn't been for the birth of Christ, the whole festival would not exist.

This is such a profound misconception that it's difficult to see how it could ever have arisen. To begin with, there is no evidence that Jesus Christ was born at midwinter; very probably he was not. What we do know, though, is that almost every people on earth who live at any distance from the equator have evolved some kind of winter solstice festival of light, in which people mark the darkest moment of the year, and the beginning of the sun's slow return, by celebrating the triumph of light over darkness, hope over despair and often - by extension - good over evil.

We also know that when the early fathers of the church were seeking a date in the year to celebrate the great Mass of Christ's birth, it seemed natural to attach this key Christian feast to the annual celebration that north Europeans called Yule, a midwinter holiday marked from time immemorial by rituals involving lights and lanterns, by much eating of preserved foods and by the hauling indoors of magical and evergreen plants, including holly, ivy, yule logs and the great Druidic totem: the mistletoe.

And the crucial point to make about this deliberate collision of pagan and Christian festivals is that the early church leaders were not cynical in what they did, but intuitively right; that the meanings of the Christian and pre-Christian festivals do not necessarily conflict, but - as Charles Dickens observed in his great midwinter story A Christmas Carol - can often fit together perfectly, at the deepest spiritual level. Of course, the ugly materialistic excesses of our modern consumer Christmas have no place in any feast that would nourish the spirit. But think of a child's concept of Christmas and consider how, for little children raised in the Christian tradition, the image of the nativity, and of the bright Christ-child in the manger, takes its place at the heart of a whole constellation of glowing Christmas images, from the lights on the dark fir tree, to the bright wrapping on the presents brought by that strange spirit of midwinter jollity, Santa Claus.

At the level of poetry, symbolism and faith, in other words, we all know what this festival means, if we can retain enough child-like hope and wonder to rediscover it each year. It means the sudden sparkle of light in the darkest hour of the year, the rebirth of hope, the promise that darkness and death will not have the final word, either in our spiritual lives, or in the natural world from which we draw such strength.

When we wish people a Happy Christmas, we invite them not only to rejoice at the birth of Christ, but to celebrate an ancient and profound midwinter feast, full of meanings that embrace Christianity, but also speak for many other faiths.

And as a Church of Scotland girl born and bred, that is good enough for me. Because, unlike those gloomy fundamentalists, I believe in the things of the spirit, which express themselves in many different ways, but which finally unite us across time and space; in the celebration of what it is to be human on this magical earth and what it is to keep searching for the divine.