'War on Christmas' Nonsense is a War on Secularists

My thanks to the kind reader who sent me the program from this year's Christmas carol service at the Old Royal Naval College chapel in Greenwich. It was written by the Rev Jules Gomes, chaplain of the college, and of Trinity College of Music, and also of the University of Greenwich.

Here is the good chaplain's Christmas message: "More Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other period of church history. Yesterday's Herod is today's Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee, seeking the total extermination of all forms of Christianity. The great irony is that the greatest opposition to Christ comes from so-called broad-minded people who seek to ban Christmas so that people of other faiths are not offended."

Yes, it is that time of year when secularists, atheists and humanists become the Grinches who stole Christmas. As an honorary associate of the National Secular Society and president of the British Humanist Association, here is my cue to offer you all a rattling good Christmas "Bah, humbug!" Except, of course, it's all utter nonsense. No one is out to ban Christmas or Christianity - not atheists nor other faiths. Yet every year the same urban myths are repeated about the banning of Christmas by some pantomime villain local authority suffering from "political correctness gone mad." King Rat Christmas wreckers are unearthed, and every year these turn out to be garbage stories, but they are stored in the attic for another airing next December.

I had at least five calls from broadcasters this year inviting me to say it would be a jolly good thing if Christmas were rebranded Winterval. That myth began years ago when Birmingham city council tried to spread the festive season across the long winter - though it never replaced Christmas, which came with official celebrations in the middle of it. But the Winterval myth lives on. This year it was joined by this: "God rest ye merry people all, Let nothing go to waste, So let us all this Decemberval, Recycle now with haste." Although written by a vicar for Warrington's Christmas recycling campaign, watch Decemberval enter anti-Christmas demonology.

Christmas opinion polls stir the same pot. Theos, the religious thinktank, found a quarter of adults and over a third of 18- to 24-year-olds couldn't say where Jesus was born. Over half didn't know John the Baptist was Jesus's cousin; over a quarter didn't know who told Mary she was pregnant; and 78% had no idea where Mary and Joseph fled to escape Herod. Even the faithful were ignorant: only 36% of regular churchgoers got all four answers right. I regard this as awful. The loss of classical mythology has made much poetry, art and literature incomprehensible to most people. The loss of Christian mythology would make most European history and painting impenetrable. Secularists do not welcome ignorance as a substitute for declining faith.

Pursuing their annual "atheists are stealing Christmas" riff, a Sunday Telegraph survey of 100 schools found only one in five had a traditional nativity play this year, which is odd considering over a third of primaries are Christian. The sad truth is that some did no play, but others did Scrooge, Arabian Nights, Hansel and Gretel, or the Snow Queen, all also cultural treasures.

British Christians yearn to be martyrs, but frankly atheists are a pretty toothless substitute for lions. In a daft parliamentary debate this month on something called Christianophobia, Mark Pritchard MP accused the politically correct of banning religion from Christmas cards and advent calendars: "Many shoppers find it increasingly difficult to purchase greetings cards that refer to Jesus." Alas, market forces are probably rather stronger than humanist plots: with only 7% of people in church of a Sunday these days, Santa and the Snowman trump the nativity.