Guy Fawkes night today! But nowadays nobody believes in Guy Fawkes any more. However, yesterday my daughter related an incident in her village that casts great light on the religious beliefs of the modern British public.
It seems there is a retired female Anglican clergy-person who, as is often the case, assists the parish church in an unpaid capacity. Among her activities is visiting the local primary school, which though not a church school appears to have, according to my daughter, a Christian head teacher. Hence the children get more biblical input than is common in these times.
One day, it seems, this lady was invited to come in and tell the children the Easter story. As she did so, one of the eight and nine year olds in the class asked why she hadn’t mentioned the Easter Bunny. She replied, “He isn’t in this particular story,” which was both factually correct (if you check out the gospel accounts) and non-controversial.
However, the child, it seems, reported to his mother that he was upset that the Easter Bunny had been marginalised in this way, and so she made a complaint to the school that the nasty vicar had deliberately undermined the child’s faith in the existence of this figure so clearly central to his credo. Now even my daughter, much closer generationally to popular English religion than I, was unaware that the Easter Bunny is ever regarded as a divine manifestation, but such is the case in the wider population far beyond infancy.
For the other parents were equally triggered, and many of them joined in the demonisation of the reverend story-teller, discussing her cruelty and insensitivity at great length on the school WhatsApp page and, in effect, cancelling her. The ironic thing is that it is these same parents who grumble to my daughter at the school gate about the Bible being used in the school, which they see as pushing religion down their children’s throats. This being a small village, the incident became the talk of the community. My daughter informs me that the lady in question is moving away, though she is unsure whether that was something already planned rather than caused by upset over this religious scandal.
Now, this puts me in mind of how, for far too long, religious education in schools, if it mentions religion at all (which is increasingly rarely), does so under the banner of “comparative religion.” In other words, depending on the educational stage, it deals in the different types of “service” in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues. It describes how the various religious holidays are celebrated and, in a limited way, why (“Diwali celebrates the victory of light, Dharma, over darkness, Adharma, rather like the Jewish Hannukah, Christian Christmas, which also marks the birth of the Bebbyjesus with lights, and Eid at which Muslims celebrate the end of their admirably pious Ramadan fast with lights. Do you see how the theme of light is shared by them all?”). It encourages kids to visit the local mosque, to chant a mantra to a Hindu god, to try on a hijab or screw up their faces at some Passover bitter herbs.
But comparative religion glosses over the core differences between the religions that, in fact, justify their existence. It won’t question the historicity of Krishna, mention the dhimmi status of Jews or Christians in Islam, or explain the Protestant Reformation. As a result, it encourages agnosticism rather than enabling faith, by seeming to sit above the actual religions with a deceptively objective “view from nowhere.” It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere. The most sincere of all take it all with a pinch of salt, as the syllabus intended.
Not only does it seem to me that this is an anti-religious exercise, but it ignores the fact that these traditional religions have little to do with the actual religious beliefs of Middle England, that is to say those communities that have not yet built up their Muslim populations to the level of our cities. The anecdote with which I started shows that educational policies have entirely sidelined belief in the Easter Bunny, and in all likelihood much more. So perhaps it is time to do a comparative religion of the vernacular faiths of Britain, which I will now attempt on a preliminary scale.
So to begin with the Bunny, it has proven quite difficult to elicit the theology of what appears to be quite a young faith, though deeply held, as we have seen, by both adults and children. All I have really been able to discover it that he appears at around the time of the Jewish Passover to give presents to all the children, and especially chocolate figures representing both the deity himself, and the eggs he appears to lay. Judging by the evolution of other faiths, these presents will in future years be rendered progressively more diverse and generous by commercial interests, so that we may expect parents to ask their children, in around January, what they want the Easter Bunny to bring them this year, whether that be an AI doll for them or an electric scooter for zher.
Continuing our comparative theme, I note that such commercial enhancement has already occurred in our next religion, that is to say Halloween. This festival is now worth an astonishing £775 million annually in Britain alone, having barely existed outside American comics in my childhood. The new faith has largely superceded the primitive November death-cult of Guy Fawkes, not before time, by honouring the cheerful spirit realm by dressing children up as corpses or demons. Through the ritual of “Trick or Treat” these spiritual entities give presents to all the children through the agency of neighbours, who playfully pay up to prevent their car-tyres being let down or their greenhouse windows being broken.
It is worth briefly mentioning here, as a demonstration that religions are not monotonously uniform, the variant sect of Halloween celebrated by Linus in the Peanuts strip. Linus believes that at Halloween, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world to give presents to all the children. Since the ubiquity of pumpkins remains unexplained in the mainstream Halloween faith, some scholars have suggested that Great Pumpkinism may indeed reflect the earliest, now lost, stage of the religion.
That brings us to the dominant faith of Britain, which is of course the ancient belief system of Xmas, centred around Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, who comes on his sleigh in midwinter to give presents to all the children. The dominance of this faith is shown by its annual UK value of some £85 billion. I need not go into detail on the essential rituals of the religion, for they are well known to all. They include watching especially expensive TV ads repetitively through The Sound of Music, typing long e-mails to acquaintances describing the mundane activities of your extended family, longer periods in the kitchen to cook meals for bad-tempered relatives to supplement the chocolate, nuts, and alcohol they have already consumed since awakening – these are the celebrations honouring that jovial deity and his reindeer.
There is also still an older religion called “Christianity” clinging on in certain parts of the land, believed by some to be the primitive form of Xmas. However, this is really an exception to the universally agreed principles of religion in that its God, Jesus Christ, does not come to give presents to all the children, but instead a rather austere concept called “forgiveness” more redolent of the dark ages. Christianity’s unimportance is shown by the fact that, although it is anathema to induce children to doubt the importance of the Easter Bunny or (blessed be he) Father Christmas, it is quite in order to teach them to reject the very existence of Jesus Christ, and to attribute to the faith he founded every evil in the world today that wasn’t perpetrated by other Jews.
The truth of this is demonstrated by a song I wrote for the youth group in a church eighteen years ago, which was censored by the assistant pastor – not because it expressed doubt about the Gospel narrative, but because it questioned the existence of Santa Claus. Here is that very song.
