Opinion & Commentary
It wouldn't be Christmas without Christianity
One has to be especially sensitive at this time of year. Emotions run high, feelings run deep and our cultural skin gets to be about as thin as it can in the run-up to the summer solstice.
Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st-Century Australia, a report prepared earlier this year for the Australian Human Rights Commission, found a strongly held view that Australia is historically and currently a Christian country, and that Christian values lie deep in the Australian psyche. But the report also identified a strongly emerging secularist voice, a voice that calls not just for freedom of religion in Australia but, more emphatically, for freedom from religion.
The secularists feel oppressed by religious believers.
Not only do they face the pressing challenge of repeatedly deploying empirical methodologies to disprove the numinous; they must also contend with what they tell us is the abusive political tyranny of the Christian Right and all that religious bigotry spilling out in the gay marriage debate.
It's enough to make you want to burrow deep into the grotto and take comfort on Santa's knee - that is, once you've made sure the old man has passed his NSW Working with Children Check.
The self-designated guardians of our culture are hard at work on Christmas. Peace on earth? Goodwill to all? Watch out! Public recognition of this sectarian holiday is an affront, we are told, to the vulnerable non-celebrants in our midst. The vulnerable - or those deemed to be vulnerable - must be protected from exposure to any irradiated whiff of religious sentiment or practice.
Who knows what psychic injury or harm may be inflicted by a voice - any voice - recalling us to the Christian meaning of Christmas?
We must be protected from the risk of emotional injury that can cause lifelong harm. A Christian Christmas is simply dangerous dogma that threatens to undermine our hard-won right to make our own choices.
So once we've drained all the religious toxin from Christmas, what's left? What is the point of Christmas? People often say to me in December, "Of course, this must be your busy time." What they mean is that with all those months of idling around since Easter coming to an end, they assume I must be gearing up for a couple of weeks of frantic church work again.
But even if they were right - which they are not - they have still largely missed the point of Christmas. It's not just the clergy who are busy. We're all busy in the run-up to Christmas. December is a frantic time.
The church's year is just beginning, of course, with the season of Advent. But everything else is coming to an end: it's the end of the legal year, the academic year, the political year, the school year and the calendar year.
It is frantic. Thank goodness there is something to aim for.
Christmas is the goal, the target, the finishing line across which we stumble, exhausted.
It's the essential pressure valve cleverly built into the Aussie calendar that prevents us bursting apart like a boiler. When dusk falls on December 24, we know that time's up. The working year is done and we can kick back.
OK, so we've spent money we don't have on people we don't like, eaten food we don't need and drunk more alcohol than the NSW Department of Health says is good for us. But who cares? It's Christmas Day tomorrow. Summer's here!
A spot of rellie-bashing during the next few days, a few more beers, then maybe a round of golf with mates.
Christmas. We'd go mad without it.
Happy holidays. And seasons greetings to you all.
Peter Kurti is a visiting fellow with the religion and the free society program at the Centre for Independent Studies.
