The Christ-less-mas Spirit
December 14, 2004
Christmas comes but once a year, and this year it brings with it Europe's most brazen attempts to prove its multiculturalist mettle.
The most publicized secularization of the season this year may be the manger makeover unveiled at Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London. Standing in for Joseph and Mary are soccer star David Beckham and his pop-singer wife, Victoria, hardly a beatific couple.
It's also Christ-menos in Barcelona, where the city council approved a modernized crèche dreamed up by local art students. Even the baby Jesus is missing in this setup, which replaces the holy family with a businessman on a mobile phone, a delivery man with a gas bottle and a blind man -- figures the students somehow found "more emblematic" of the city known for the soaring towers of Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia cathedral.
We might chalk up these revisionist crèches to commercialism and (bad) avant-gardism if they didn't reflect a broader movement in Europe. It wasn't that long ago that Rocco Buttiglione submarined his European Commission candidacy by admitting his religious beliefs, and that filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's murder was taken as a sign that the famously tolerant Dutch must bend even further.
This philosophy is as misplaced as it is ineffectual. As Muslim attorney Waleed Aly recently wrote in the newspaper the Australian, responding to a controversy over Christmas decorations in Sydney: "Denying the Christianity in Christmas or, worse, doing away with it altogether, helps no one. This is not multiculturalism. It is anticulturalism."
Perhaps the lesson lies in a third example of multiculturalism gone wild. A teacher in Como, Italy, tried to accommodate her non-Christian students by allowing them to substitute "this is the day of virtue" for "this is the day of Jesus" in a carol. The change sparked outrage throughout the town -- except among the students, who chose simply to sing the original lyrics and move on.
December 14, 2004
Christmas comes but once a year, and this year it brings with it Europe's most brazen attempts to prove its multiculturalist mettle.
The most publicized secularization of the season this year may be the manger makeover unveiled at Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London. Standing in for Joseph and Mary are soccer star David Beckham and his pop-singer wife, Victoria, hardly a beatific couple.
It's also Christ-menos in Barcelona, where the city council approved a modernized crèche dreamed up by local art students. Even the baby Jesus is missing in this setup, which replaces the holy family with a businessman on a mobile phone, a delivery man with a gas bottle and a blind man -- figures the students somehow found "more emblematic" of the city known for the soaring towers of Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia cathedral.
We might chalk up these revisionist crèches to commercialism and (bad) avant-gardism if they didn't reflect a broader movement in Europe. It wasn't that long ago that Rocco Buttiglione submarined his European Commission candidacy by admitting his religious beliefs, and that filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's murder was taken as a sign that the famously tolerant Dutch must bend even further.
This philosophy is as misplaced as it is ineffectual. As Muslim attorney Waleed Aly recently wrote in the newspaper the Australian, responding to a controversy over Christmas decorations in Sydney: "Denying the Christianity in Christmas or, worse, doing away with it altogether, helps no one. This is not multiculturalism. It is anticulturalism."
Perhaps the lesson lies in a third example of multiculturalism gone wild. A teacher in Como, Italy, tried to accommodate her non-Christian students by allowing them to substitute "this is the day of virtue" for "this is the day of Jesus" in a carol. The change sparked outrage throughout the town -- except among the students, who chose simply to sing the original lyrics and move on.
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