The piece critiques contemporary church responses to Christmas, politics, and immigration. It argues that Archbishop-designate Sarah Mullally’s appeal to Jesus as refugee and servant is clichéd and theologically thin, ignoring the fuller, often offensive, New Testament narrative. The author contrasts this with Lord Glasman’s historically grounded argument that England’s “civic peace” arose from Christian renunciation of violence, though rejecting his call to restore Christendom. While dismissing nostalgic civilisational renewal, the author values Glasman’s narrative framing. The essay concludes that neither platitudes nor restoration suffice; instead, the church needs a renewed prophetic vision shaped by historical wreckage and oriented toward a different future.
The debate about Christmas and politics goes on. Reflecting on Tommy Robinson’s campaign to “put Christ back into Christmas,” soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, is quoted in an interview. She says that the use of Christian symbols to oppress—in this case the migrant and refugee—and to cause offence is “absolutely wrong.”
This should not happen. If you look at the symbols Jesus used, it’s foot-washing, sitting alongside the outcast and the stranger. He was a refugee at birth, born in a place because of the generosity and hospitality of others.
Two things bother me about this.
First, it feels like a rather glib and clichéd response to what is the product or symptom of some massively complex destabilising forces. Apart from the belated and condescending acknowledgment that native communities are finding it difficult to adapt, the church seems stuck in a moral rut. It’s not, on the face of it, a bad moral rut, but it’s a rut.
Secondly, Mullally’s appeal to the symbols Jesus used doesn’t tell even half the New Testament story. The circumstances of the nativity were difficult but only because Joseph saw fit to have the family registered in the city of David. The family fled to Egypt, but they were not “refugees,” they were not “asylum seekers,” they were not there for very long. Jesus sat alongside Israel’s outcasts and was reluctant to allow strangers to eat the crumbs that fell from the table. Foot-washing was an intra-communal action.
And of course, the symbols Jesus used caused great offence: eating with the lost sheep of the house of Israel; taking a whip to the merchants and money-changers in the temple; telling vivid parables of crisis and judgment; cursing a fruitless fig tree; identifying himself with Daniel’s suffering “son of man” figure; and more.
We find a much better sense of narrative context in a comment piece by the British Labour peer Lord Glasman, who is an Orthodox Jew. His argument is that Jews in this country have benefited from a “civic peace” which has been a “civilisational achievement led and shaped by the English church over a millennium.”
Whereas for Israel “Violence is now the mode of coexistence between its peoples,” in England the “church door was the gate of asylum from the mob.”
Glasman does not believe that Jesus was the messiah—he does not expect any sort of apocalyptic solution to the world’s problems. But he does believe that we have a political inheritance that has the “renunciation of civic violence” at its heart, and that this is what is meant by “The Kingdom.” Therefore, he can say, as an Orthodox Jew, that “in politics, Christ is King, that in honouring God we honour his creation, incarnated.”
It’s a much better definition of the kingdom of God than we find in much of what passes for Christian theology.
He then goes on to complain that the Church of England has lost its voice, that it has become a “ghost, haunting its own churches” (very nice!), that it has renounced its vocation, that it has become estranged from its own people—and that this has been a major reason for the current social disorder and instability.
Therefore, in Glasman’s view, “the restoration of the body of Christ into the body politic of our nation is a vital aspect of our revival.”
I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that the mission of the church in the West is the renewal of a bygone civilisation. At least, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
The Jews hoped for the restoration of a glorious Davidic nationhood after the return from exile, and what ensued was five hundred inglorious years of political-religious chaos, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Rome.
But Glasman has at least framed the problem in a narrative-historical fashion.
The “civilisational achievement” that he celebrates had its origins in the apocalyptic conviction of the followers of Jesus that this crucified messiah would judge and rule over the nations of the Greek-Roman world in righteousness. Out of the catastrophic failure of the post-exilic order—condemned with such symbolic violence by Jesus in the temple—emerged something radically new.
And now that something new has disintegrated, and the church has been driven into a voiceless exile.
So what comes next? What is needed is not well-intentioned but short-sighted platitudes. What is needed is the renewal of a prophetic vision that must always draw on the past but must imagine a very different future. That will be because of the wreckage, not despite the wreckage.
Happy Christmas!
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