Christ among refugees and migrants at Christmas, part 1

There has been a lot of scrambling for the moral high ground in response to the “far right activist” Tommy Robinson’s campaign to put “Christ back into Christmas.”

One UK based network of churches states: “Christ is self-sacrificial love. Christmas is a celebration of the moment that love entered into the world as a vulnerable human child.”

This is a sentimentalisation of the stories in Matthew and Luke. The birth of Jesus has no doubt been co-opted by the hard right as part of a strategy of resistance to what the Trump administration has called “civilisational erasure.” But it has also been co-opted by the soft religious left in support of a moral agenda that fails to grasp the complexity and seriousness of the crisis.

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