Without transcendence, it’s just tinsel

The Chinese authorities that banned Christmas grasp its power better than many in the West.

In the end, without its core religious message, everything else about Christmas is just decoration.

The decision by the Chinese city of Langfang to abolish Christmas this year, to make decorations and celebrations for the feast illegal, suggests the Chinese Communist Party may understand Christmas and its significance better than many people in the West.

For Christmas is a symbol of a movement — Christianity — that Beijing cannot control and that contradicts communist metaphysics by proposing a higher authority than the party.

Mostly, Chinese authorities, like Western secularism, try to keep the tinsel, the decorations and especially the increased spen­ding at hotels and restaurants but ignore or suppress the religious significance of Christmas.

The increasing crackdown on Christianity in China is a further sign that the Communist Party understands, and will viciously fight, the superior claims of religion on the ultimate loyalties of the human soul.

Christmas certainly is a powerful season of joy, a time of happiness without parallel in any calendar. But without its religious message, without the transcendent reality that animates it, it is nothing more than a nice version of Game of Thrones.

We all have our childhood memories of Christmas, often among the most sustained elements of our personal iconography. Each of us, in our own life’s drama, if we have been lucky to have anything nice in childhood, has a special place for Christmas.

I remember as a kid our family of six leaving our little upstairs, two-bedroom flat at Lewisham in Sydney’s inner west to walk across to midnight mass at St Thomas’s church. There the Christmas hymns — Silent Night, Adeste Fideles, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen — and the beauty of the liturgy mixed with the Christmas good cheer of everyone present, friends and neighbours, visitors and strays, and always, of course, lots and lots of kids. Back home, after midnight mass, we would eat ham on toast as the first instalment of the feast.

Then off to bed, presents in pillowslips the next morning, too much food, lots of friends and relatives in and out all day.

And the glamour of the American movies we’d watch in black-and-white every year — Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, sometimes How Green was My Valley, typically also one of the Spencer Tracy Boys Town movies. That we’d seen them before didn’t dim our enjoyment. They were part of the season’s ritual, and as we watched them it was as though we were spending time with very old friends whom we got to see only on special occasions.

Of course, too much food and too much sun could easily lead to some crossness on Christmas after­noons, but a sense of celebration underlay everything. And there was always much more church to come. The Christmas carols have survived, living through the savage iconoclasm and aesthetic vandalism that even the mainstream churches have been ravaged by during the past 50 years, still bringing their message of hope and fellowship, of the divine piercing the physical world, to children today, whose Christmas experience is vastly different from that of my childhood.

But in the end, without its core religious message, everything else about Christmas is just tinsel. There is a world of difference between tinsel with a purpose and tinsel just there to distract. The question of purpose lies at the heart of our present discontents.

As I write in my book God is Good for You, the West, or huge parts of it, is saying goodbye to Christianity. At last the terrible crisis of unbelief is beginning to unfold. This strange abandonment of belief is only really at play in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

There is a deep civilisational question here — what fills this vacuum, where do we go, untethered from everything that has underpinned us for 2000 years?

You cannot come to any meaningful encounter with Christmas without comprehending its revolutionary, supernatural, transcendent, religious claims. The ration­alist rejection of Christianity often chooses to wage war over the story of the physical resurrection of Jesus and the doctrine that all human beings will rise in their flesh to face judgment and to enter eternity. Like almost all doctrine in all religious traditions, it defies the narrow materialism and blinkered naturalism of the predominant contemporary mindset.

But really every part of the Christian gospels is as transcendent of, or in a sense contradictory of, narrow materialism as the resurrection. Certainly this is true of Christmas. The gospel accounts of the conception and birth of Jesus are uncompromising. Mary was a virgin and Jesus is the Son of God.

In Luke, Mary asks the angel Gabriel how she can give birth, given that she is a virgin. Gabriel replies: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Gabriel told Mary that her son would be king and his kingdom would have no end. The good, happy sentimentality of Christmas, which only the most spectacular grinch could disavow, nonetheless tends to obscure just how radical and revolutionary this account is.

The gospels themselves, and the whole experience and proclamation of the early Christians, do not allow the interpretation that Jesus was really a moral and perhaps political teacher but did not make any supernatural claims, nor wish to bring a new religious message, nor saw himself as God.

The gospels, and the rest of the New Testament, are full of the claims of divinity and eternity. In John, Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

The drama of the gospels is magnificent and they deserve to be read as literature and for history, but their chief message is divine, transcendent — in short, religious and revolutionary, not in a narrowly political sense but in the understanding of what it is to be human.

Jesus himself asserts his identity as God. In John, he says: “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” These are the words God spoke to Moses to describe himself: “I Am!”

At times Jesus was personal and dramatic in describing his identity: “I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

All the other writers in the New Testament were equally clear that Jesus is God. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Straight after his resurrection, the first Christians proclaimed the resurrection and the promise of eternal life. Jesus was very explicit about this promise himself, saying to the good thief on the cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

All of this is important because it reinforces the revolutionary nature of the Christmas story. The living and eternal God decided to become a human being. And in that incarnation he was both fully human and fully God.

The sheer outrageousness of this claim is so breathtaking that there are really only three ways to respond: deny it altogether, accept it with all its mystery, or ignore it.

From some point in the 1960s onwards there was a movement, happily self-defeating, within mainline Christianity itself to more or less abolish God. This is where the secular world would like Christianity to go — maintain good works, maintain the sense of community, inculcate good habits, but forget about these strange, ­unsettling claims of metaphysical realities, transcendent destiny and higher loyalty.

Like the Chinese Communist Party, the secular world finds this very unsettling.

I have been very grateful for the thoughtful, critical, understanding reactions to my book. I have received mail and engaged in discussions with many different shades of opinion, including many Christians who agree with parts of the book but not others, and also from generous-hearted atheists who make a serious effort to engage with the long human experience of God and the rational sense that people have of God.

I am grateful to anyone who has bothered to read any part of the book.

One line of reaction has particularly intrigued me and it has come mostly from older men. These are mainly people who would think of themselves privately as atheists or agnostics but who come from a Christian or Jewish background. They honour their background, appreciate what it gave them, understand something of what motivated their parents in bringing them up in a particular tradition, but no longer believe themselves.

Their question, and it is a good one, is this: can we not emphasise all the social goods that came from this, but leave out the theology? Could we not advise young people that this is a good way to live, but doesn’t require belief in God?

This is a good question to ponder, but my answer to friends who make this inquiry is: no, that’s not really possible.

For a start, Western society, though visibly going mad before our eyes, still uses the moral categories and embodies the moral assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When you finally cut ­society off from the animating spirit of those assumptions, the assumptions themselves will wither and die.

Of course, all human beings have a natural virtue within them, and a natural sense of right and wrong, so the moral categories won’t die completely. But they will be ever harder to sustain. For every human being also has a tendency to evil, and without a universal basis for goodness there can be no absolute sense of rejecting evil.

Everything we like about ­modern liberalism — human rights, feminism, secular government — grows organically out of Christianity and the long Christian discourse on what constitutes the good life, on the nature of the purpose and meaning of life.

But then, more importantly, the social utilitarian view of religion can only appeal, and I say this politely as part of the category myself, to older men. You cannot inspire young people on the basis that this story is untrue and false, but it’s full of merit. If it’s untrue then, literally, it is nothing more than Game of Thrones. It has no claim on anyone’s loyalty.

Young people respond to passionate conviction, integrity and idealism.

In my travels for my book I found successful Christian movements across all denominations combine three qualities: clear and radical belief, strong leadership and worship that by its aesthetic beauty signals the moral beauty of the teachings.

The starting point is belief. Once the ineffable mystery of Christmas was embraced by our culture. The tinsel served the truth. The truth cannot be reshaped merely to serve the tinsel.

Greg Sheridan’s book God is Good for You is published by Allen & Unwin.