The magazine of the Church of Scotland tells it all in the title. Life and Work sums up a chilly northern Protestant ethic better than 1,000 theses, and, in a recent article, the moderator (another giveaway title) of the General Assembly did not disappoint his buttoned-up readership. The Right Reverend John Cairns attacked the cheap consumerism of Christmas and, in particular, the giant Ferris wheel by the side of the Thames. He goes on: “The funfair is, of course, archetypically, a place of sideshows, illusion, cheap thrills, tawdry entertainment and a passing escape from reality. I have a suspicion that for many the dawning of the millennium will have similar characteristics.”
“Bah! Humbug!” is what this seems most to resemble. Many argue that Christmas is really only a pagan midwinter festival dressed up with angels and wise men, and that therefore the Ferris wheel, the funfair and the cheap (where?) consumerism are what we all need to light the short days and long nights.
Even though this is historical nonsense (the pre-Christian Celtic peoples of Britain held their fire festivals at Samhain at the end of October and Imbolc at the beginning of February), the British are happy to accept it as an excuse for a week or two’s feasting and drinking. And they ignore the stark misfit between all that indulgence, and the story of a baby born in a stable in Bethlehem and the message he would ultimately preach. That is why Life and Work plays such a discordant note on the merry organ.
And yet the overwhelming reaction in Scotland to the moderator’s disapproval was to ignore it. As the world’s midnight prepares to chime, one of the most radical changes in this country – in the past 100 years, at least – is the collapse in the power and influence of the Kirk. In Tom Nairn’s famous phrase, the last minister will not have to be strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post for Scotland to change. No one will be able to find a minister and it won’t matter. Within a generation, the Kirk will simply fade away into a pursuit for the elderly, the eccentric and those with a sentimental interest in parish history.
This collapse represents a huge cultural loss to Scotland. The Kirk galvanised the people to change our country again and again – often violently and misguidedly – but its influence penetrated to the foundations of the modern society that was built here. When the great reformer Andrew Melville accosted King James VI at Falkland Palace in 1596 and told his royal highness that in Christ’s kingdom of Scotland “he was not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but only a member”, he set a political tone that is markedly different from England’s and which contributed to the flowering of a civic democracy that did much good in Scotland.
But the times seem to be agin the Kirk – and with a vengeance. OnDigital, the television consortium, polled 500 adults across the United Kingdom asking what they would do on Christmas Day if they were given only one option. Five per cent said they would go to church. This trend can only worsen. Britain’s schools no longer teach religious education, and in the same poll two-thirds did not know that Mary and Joseph had gone to Bethlehem for a census, and half could not name King Herod. More generally, this extraordinarily widespread ignorance will begin to close down European art and literature to ordinary people. When they look at a famous Renaissance painting by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, they might like it, but in most cases they will have no idea who is depicted or what is going on.
The flight from the Christian religion has been so precipitate in Scotland, and the changes in our culture potentially so profound, that it is difficult to visualise what the society will be like, when those who were even nominally involved with the Kirk have finally died out and all residual connections have gone. History has little to say about how overwhelmingly secular societies work.
And yet we have in Tony Blair the first enthusiastically Christian Prime Minister for generations, and at his side a son of the manse in Gordon Brown, who has imbibed the substance of his father’s values, if not their formality. Perhaps the seeds of the Kirk’s regeneration lie outside it. And maybe Life and Work is not such a bad title after all.
Alistair Moffat
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