We should be keeping the baby at the centre
MY OLD photo albums contain quite a few Santa photos. Even during the years when there’s hardly any photographs of us kids, there’s usually a good snapshot of my family with a shopping centre Santa.
Sometimes the excitement would be too much and one of my baby brothers would burst into tears upon seeing him.
But mostly it was pure excitement: talk of toys, checking out the Christmas tree and nativity scenes.
“There’s the little baby Jesus,” my mum would say, in reverential tones.
It was the baby in the humble manger, attended by family, shepherds and wise men, that had the special lighting. He was the most important element.
These days, there’s not too many nativity scenes left.
At one shopping centre, where I used to be taken as a child, they’ve got a kaleidoscope-like room of colour and light. The promo has a woman taking a sparkling selfie. Eye candy but not much to do with Christmas.
One council has banned the traditional foyer nativity scene, causing an uproar. Children who were set to participate in the traditional “Blessing of the Crib” also had their annual performance cancelled.
Each year the war on Christianity advances. Yet when social demographer Mark Mccrindle did a special poll about Christmas a few years back, he found nine out of 10 Australians supported nativity scenes in public places.
But our captured institutions and corporates now seem to be ashamed of anything too closely connected to
Christianity. Particularly, the traditional family and baby at the heart of the story.
Objectively, you don’t have to be a Christian to see the tremendous value it has brought to humanity.
Even things we take for granted — the right to own property, free speech, free thought, free association and the welfare system — flow from it. Particularly the idea that all life has equal value, including the most humble baby born to the poorest parents.
And as journalist and author Greg Sheridan argues, part of the Christian revolution was to make marriage, for the first time, an institution of mutual love and respect, where women weren’t just property. Women were regarded as equal by Jesus, as many historical scholars have noted, quite a revolutionary change.
So, what happens when the woke replaces so much of the Christian heritage? As former Nationals leader John Anderson noted recently in the wake of Census results showing a fall in religions, we have “unparalleled levels of anxiety, depression and self harm amongst our young people”.
“Increasingly our society looks frankly more fractured, less trustworthy, more broken up, more divided along identity politics lines, less coherent than ever.”
What comes next when that breaking up includes the family unit? Is it the polycule?
That was a new word I learned last week, in the wake of the spectacular collapse of US crypto exchange FTX and its shambolic founder Sam Bankman-fried.
He and his bizarre child-like
Harry Potter-loving girlfriend who also happens to be the boss of his hedge fund, Caroline Ellison, were reported to be part of a 10-person bed-hopping network of friends and executives living in a Caribbean penthouse, described as a woke “polycule”.
For a while now, nutty Tik Tokkers have been posting these strange relationships explainers with videos and Venn diagrams.
One recent “queer polycule” explainer goes like this: “Me and Kyle have been together for eight years. We’re poly the whole time. Me and Kyle are in a triad with Kit. We have been together for three years. We have one child together. I started dating Sam and Kit started dating Katy around the same time.”
It goes on and on and you can’t get your head around it. No baby would be at the centre of that.
Yet polycules are being rebranded as “ethical non-monogamy” in the clinical psychology world.
They’re not ethical for the little children, that’s for sure.
Alarmingly, their woke proponents are pushing for them here. The Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia includes serious papers from local clinicians arguing in favour of polycules, saying they are unfairly “marginalised” and couples are “privileged”.
One psychotherapist, a “community activist living on the sovereign lands of the Boon Wurrung people in the Kulin Nations” — in other words somewhere in Melbourne — says: “The paradigm shift from couple-centric bias toward polycule-centred practice is already under way.” I sincerely hope not.
There won’t be much joy left to sing about in a post-christian polycule world of broken children and sidelined couples.