O HOLY NIGHT, INJUNCTIONS FLY THROUGHOUT YOU

Leave Christmas alone, say Muslims (Jonathan Petre, The Telegraph, November 16th, 2006)

Muslim leaders joined their Christian counterparts yesterday to launch a powerful attack on politicians and town halls that play down Christmas.

They warned that attempts to remove religion from the festival were fuelling Right-wing extremism.

A number of town halls have tried to excise references to Christianity from Christmas, in one case by renaming their municipal celebrations "Winterval".

They have often justified their actions by saying Britain is now a multi-faith society and they are anxious to avoid offending minority groups.

But the Muslim leaders said they honoured Christmas and that local authorities were playing into the hands of extremists who were able to blame Muslim communities for undermining Britain's Christian culture.

The unprecedented broadside was delivered by the Christian Muslim Forum, which was launched this year by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, with the support of Tony Blair.

The forum's reaction reflects growing anger among Christians and other faiths about the efforts of secularists to push religion to the margins of public life.

More: Christians pre-empt secularists in Christmas light fight

But to some in the Church, the annual row over Christmas masks a far more sinister development.

To judge by some of the language they employ, they suspect that a conspiracy of militant atheists is using the smoke-screen of the multi-faith society in a fiendish plot to oust all religion from the nation.

It is a convenient view, but does it stand up to scrutiny? Given the decline in churchgoing, is it not natural that Christianity will lose some of the footholds it has historically taken for granted in national life?

That is true, but political correctness drives more than religion out of the public sphere - it also begins to purge British culture and history. Millions who are not religious are nevertheless deeply affectionate towards Christianity, not least because of the central role it has played in the nation’s past. At a time of uncertainty, people find great comfort in familiar symbols, and I would not be surprised if churches and carol services are fuller than ever this Christmas.

But could these examples of municipal and bureaucratic political correctness gone mad be no more than isolated incidents rather than a more widespread shift in society as a whole? I used to think so until I spotted a diary item suggesting that Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television, hardly a bastion of hand-wringing liberalism, had changed the name of its annual Christmas knees-up this year to the “winter party” to avoid offending staff.

I telephoned to check whether this was true, and was assured by a spokesman that it was. “This is very common nowadays,” he explained. “I have an invitation here from another well-known private company inviting me to its festive celebrations.” I felt a shiver go up my spine, and it wasn’t the cold.

Christmas is no time for innovation--I remember being upset at age forty-five when my mother changed the vegetables--so as the sky darkens and the first frosts appear, we look forward once again to Christmas trees, Christmas parties and Christmas greetings being attacked by secularists in the name of tolerance and religious pluralism, followed by the traditional letters to the editor from Jewish and Muslim leaders asking why we have become so anal.