It’s this ugly locution that says more about modernity than anything else.
Our mandated – and mendacious – loathing of offending anybody has taken Christ out of Christmas and Christmas out of the seasonal best wishes. While Christians are welcome to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the lie goes, everyone else would be mortally offended at any reference to Jesus.
What bunkum. I number among my friends Jews, both observing and secular, agnostics, atheists and even the odd Buddhist – and not a single one has ever been offended by my wishing him a Merry Christmas.
They know that one doesn’t have to be a Christian to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ because it was also the birthdate of Christendom, otherwise known as our civilisation.
Objecting to the word Christmas is therefore a symptom of the anaemic anomie of modernity, that terrible disease for which only Christianity could be an effective antidote. Only Christianity could re-inject red plasma into the exsanguinated pallor of the West, but the West would rather die than accept the life-saving medicine.
This isn’t to say that some people aren’t genuinely offended by the sound of the words ‘Merry Christmas’. But they aren’t typically those who espouse some other religion or none.
They are those who pray at the altar of our crypto-totalitarian, life-stifling modernity – those who realise that for their evil, brainless superstition to live, what’s left of Christianity has to die.
The worst among them are those who still feel they can suck the remaining life juices out of Christianity and transfer them into their own cult, thereby giving it some historical credibility.
For example earlier this year Russia’s KGB patriarch Kirill (codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’) consecrated a temple to his KGB colleagues who had lost their lives in the line of duty. As part of their duties, they murdered 60 million people, and normally a Christian prelate would be blessing the victims, not their murderers.
To top it all, the temple will be erected in the Moscow suburb of Butovo, the place where mass executions and burials took place. Tens of thousands lie in the ground on which the temple celebrating their murderers will be erected. So far 20,761 victims have been identified by name, almost 1,000 clergymen among them.
If in Russia the church serves the interests of blood-sucking ghouls, here too our peerless leaders feel they have to co-opt Christianity into their employ.
Hence David Cameron – he who made the destruction of traditional marriage the main thrust of his domestic policy – delivered a nauseating message of pseudo-Christian piety, somehow portraying the pounding of Syria as an act of Christian mercy.
More than a million lives, many of them Christian lives, have already been lost in the Middle East specifically because of the US-inspired policy supported from the start by Blair and faithfully continued by Cameron. Justifying this criminal folly in Christian terms doesn’t quite come up to the standards of ghoulish cynicism displayed by the Russian KGB church, but it’s typologically close.
We are witnessing the death throes of a great civilisation. But, as Christ taught, even as there is death in life, there is life in death.
Our civilisation is being turned to cinders, but we all pray – nay, we know – that one day it will rise again, Phoenix-like, to a new glory, defeating its foes in the name of Christ. At that time, ‘Merry Christmas’ will reacquire its deep meaning, and every 25 December the words will drown the ugly hissing of the surviving modern cult.
A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! God bless you all.