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It can be hard to find an Advent calendar with a religious theme.
It can be hard to find an Advent calendar with a religious theme. Photograph: That Boutique-y Gin Company
It can be hard to find an Advent calendar with a religious theme. Photograph: That Boutique-y Gin Company

In losing religion we lose touch with each other

This article is more than 6 years old
Nick Cohen

The disappearance of Christian imagery from Christmas reflects a wider dumbing down of society

Hallmark is the most traditional of British greeting card makers. It produces the pictures the elderly buy for their grandchildren and vice versa. There’s no nudity or jokes about sex and alcohol, just old-fashioned images of robins, Santas, snowmen and ice skaters. The most traditional images of all, however, have virtually vanished.

Hallmark is offering 376 Christmas cards this year. By my count, only five are religious: three featuring Mary and Joseph in the stable and two Madonnas with child. Admittedly, Hallmark’s best-seller is called “little angels”, but they are simpering cherubs in a picture that carries no reference to the Christian story.

In November, the peak time for buying Advent calendars, I checked the stock on Amazon. Once again, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and wise men had disappeared to the margins. There were more Star Wars than religious calendars – apparently, the Force is more powerful than the Holy Spirit today. If you were prepared to spend hundreds of pounds, you could buy calendars with doors which open to reveal gin miniatures, jewellery, make-up, sex toys … Everything and anything except a nativity scene.

We document the decline of religion with statistics. Attendance at the Church of England is down to 780,000 and is falling by 20,000 a year. The percentage of the population describing itself as having no religion in the broadest sense rose from 31.4% to 50.6% between 1983 and 2013.

A few religious apologists try to duck the decline in faith by saying immigrants and ethnic minority communities are noticeably more religious than the rest of the population. Given that last week the chief inspector of schools, from a state bureaucracy which has been indifferent to the point of negligence about bigotry in minority communities, warned that Muslim, Jewish and Christian private schools were encouraging the subjugation of women and hatred of homosexuals, that is not a defence any moral person can rely on. In any case, there is no guarantee that minorities won’t abandon the observance of their faith. British Jews have been doing so for years.

Blocked from that avenue of escape, apologists then say Britain and the wider west is still culturally Christian, whatever the church attendance figures show. This is true in a vague way. You won’t understand your country’s past and a part of yourself unless you understand Christian history. But as Christian culture is now collapsing, a good guide to the past has become a hopeless guide to the future. In truth, cultural Christianity in Britain is going the way of the Greek myths. A writer or artist could once assume that readers grasped classical references. In 1821, Byron began his protest against the Ottoman occupation of Greece with:

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

Byron was not only writing for the elite. His poetry was so loved by Europe’s worker and radical movements in the 19th century Friedrich Engels could say “Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes”. Today, how many from the educated elite understand his references to Delos and Phoebus, or even Sappho?

Classical culture survives in a few phrases yanked from their moorings: Herculean task, Trojan horse, Pandora’s box. Little else remains. Christian culture is close to becoming as obscure. Writers can use Judas, 30 pieces of silver, prodigal son, and David and Goliath, and still expect to be understood. But most editors I know wouldn’t allow you to mention the parable of the talents or of the wise and foolish virgins without a long explanation previous generations would have found patronising. It’s not just that the National Gallery has to run courses on how to decipher “puzzling” Christian art or that few modern readers can tackle Paradise Lost, ordinary writing from the recent past has, quite suddenly, become difficult to navigate.

Here is George Orwell from 1944: “Throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic – political, moral, religious, or aesthetic – was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn: “Dare to be a Daniel/Dare to stand alone.”

Modern readers might remember something about Daniel being in a lion’s den. Only a few will know the Biblical story of his defiance or understand the differences between Protestant and Catholic culture.

Revolutions that change the world are rarely just political. Set against the advance of secularism and the emancipation of women, Brexit and the Trump presidency are trivial events. As a private atheist – who believes all gods are inventions from humanity’s childhood – and a public secularist – who insists that religious freedom does not allow the religious to use coercive power to impose their views – I ought to be delighted.

But all revolutions have costs. In publishing, broadcasting and journalism, a limited range of acceptable references and sparse, literal language have become the norm. Conservatives blame political correctness and multiculturalism. While it is true the BBC engages in dreary circumlocutions to avoid the faintest risk of causing offence, the charge that PC is the sole cause of the cramping of language does not work. Most people in the majority culture have never shown the smallest interest in learning about Islam, Hinduism or Judaism, and carry on talking and writing as if they don’t exist.

You can’t blame teachers, either. The decline in the most elementary knowledge of Christianity has come despite the number of faith schools growing to 37% of all primaries and 16% of all secondaries. If they can’t interest their captive audience in religion, it is hard to see how teachers in secular schools can do better, even if the notion of schools creating a common culture were not an impossibility when the web has smashed the national audience into thousands of fragments.

People now write for and talk to each other with rich variety when they are in their niches. But a paradox of diversity is that they communicate with an insulting simplicity when they try to address a general audience. They fear that anything more complicated or colourful, more sweeping in its range of allusions or bolder in its use of metaphor, will not be understood. The disappearance of Christian imagery tells you they are right.

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