The double meaning of Christmas

ily-related. From the first story (of an ill-fated family, Adam, Eve and their two sons) down to the central story (of another ill-fated: the Holy Family), the family is the recurrent theme of Christianity. The most important prayer is directed toward a Heavenly Father, as humanity is His family.

The rules for the proper management of the family are laid down in Christian tradition and lore: tolerance and forgiveness for the wayward wife; zero tolerance for child abuse; ‘No’ to divorce (except in the case of a wrongly-tied matrimonial bond).

God – depicted as almighty and the beginning and end of everything – respects the will of a 14-year-old virgin, when his messenger asks for her consent to become the mother of God’s son. She could clearly have said “No”, and God, despite his omnipotence, would have had to accept the girl’s expression of her free will.

Over the centuries, Christian ideology promoted the emancipation of girls from prostitution. Men were urged to marry girls who had resorted to the oldest profession out of poverty, and to this end the Church pushed forward the cult of the Magdalene, to buttress its policy of redeeming girls from selling their bodies in order to survive.

When it was Christianising the heathen – for instance, in Ireland – the Church imposed the ideology of monogamy, thereby helping children avoid the psychological hardship endured in polygamous family. And so on and so on. Christianity is indeed the Religion of the Family, with all the good and bad (and ugly) that that implies. It is thus an important landmark on the landscape of Christian ideological symbolism. It represents not just the theologically fundamental moment of the birth of the Saviour who will rectify the errors of the first the Revolutionaries and all their misguided idealism, carry much of the blame, together with the ‘psychoanalyst’ Wilhelm Reich in the 20th century.

But things do not happen in a vacuum.

Ideas shape the economy and, in turn, the economy shapes ideas, in an osmotic process which is, by definition, bi-directional.

And so it came to happen that Christians also fell prey to the new socio-economic formation, and God the Father – who sent His Son into the world to correct the errors of the first human family – was now replaced by capital. Another father appeared, the ‘Coca-Cola Father Christmas’, whose sole commandment is to buy more and more presents.

The father figure, possibly abused in former times by the political class and others to justify monarchy and paternal authority in the family-run farm, was ousted by Father Christmas, who exercises his authority – fuelled by economic goals – to boost yearend sales, to coincide with the production and accounting cycles.

This new economy, in which capital needs more capital to create new capital, at first needed the family unit, to solidify the new wealth. Just look at the laws of the 19th century which forbad illegitimate children from seeking out their natural fathers. The economy then evolved into a family-averse system, because the family now became a useless obstacle. The idealism of the French Revolution, which had been rejected in the 19th century, finally found fertile soil in which to grow and blossom.

Late capitalism – the system in which we are living – needs cosmopolitanism. It needs individuals to forgo their ties to their family and spend their lives as atoms, floating about in perpetual adolescence looking for the new product to buy and new jobs to apply for anywhere in the globalised world, uprooted from any social context, constantly taking selfies which are carried away by the currents of one big cosmopolitan, multi-cultural ocean.

The sacred tie between mother and child is torn. It is her body, and her unborn child has no constitutional right, it is not a ‘person’.

The bond between a man and a woman as the basis of the child-rearing unit is dissolved in favour of a fluid union about which, if one were really to believe in Darwinian evolution, one would ask why did we not evolve in that way if that is really how things should be.

The loyalty toward one’s kin and the binding nature of one’s word are constantly undermined in favour of the notso-novel idea that the individual is free to do as he or she pleases, as long as he or she pays taxes and obeys the rules.

Little does it matter that the ultra-rich, whose wealth derives from the system enabling these social changes and ‘novelties’, flout fiscal morality by opening secret companies in non-cooperative jurisdictions.

But then you see them – all of those politicians who promote anti-family measures – kissing the Bishop’s ring or visiting the Pope, their wives’ heads covered by black veils.

You see them – those politicians who promote social models which are diametrically opposed to the original message of Christmas – wishing all their constituents and friends a Merry Christmas, with every Christmas card they write.

But at the end of the day, it’s not their fault. We are like fish swimming in a bowl, and we cannot escape the system in which we live. We can only hope that, one day, earthly reality mimics heavenly ideals.

Until then, may we all have a meaningful Christmas.