THE concept of the Nativity as a celebration of the woke perspective is a beguiling one, yet not without merit.

The central characters, Mary and Joseph are a dysfunctional household challenging out-dated and patriarchal norms of family.

In spite of knowing that his pregnant wife is carrying a child that isn’t his Joseph displays admirable grace under pressure. They become refugees in a foreign land and are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.

They choose a stable for the birth and the company of agricultural labourers and beasts of the field. Also present are three immigrant strangers who, guided by nothing more than a command of astronomy, are able to pinpoint the exact location for the birth of Jesus. This was a happy communion of faith and science leading to redemptive outcomes.

Patrick Harvie, leader of the Scottish Patrick Harvie Party is an aggressive atheist who believes faith schools have no place in modern Scotland. But if he could contrive the ultimate in sustainable and carbon-neutral births surely the story of Christ’s would be a near enough approximation of it.

Curiously, all of Scotland’s devolved first ministers have avoided making any reference to the Nativity in their official Christmas cards. No reason is ever given for this. Are the central couple considered too wretchedly binary? Would such an endorsement of an event sacred to Christians alienate other faith communities?

I have several Muslim and Jewish friends and none has ever hinted that they feel excluded at Christmas. According to the last census, 53.8 per cent of Scots identified as Christian. In view of this it seems remarkable why their faith is invisible to our political leaders. No-one’s expecting a big evangelical message or a Gospel verse. A simple picture of the manger and a faith-neutral "Happy Christmas from Nic and Pete" would do the job.

This aversion to Scotland’s largest and most influential religion by successive occupants of Bute House seems reflective of attitudes across civic Scotland. The story of Christ’s birth has been largely written out of the modern Scottish Christmas narrative. Christians experience this at street level in their everyday lives.

It’s most commonly manifest in simple rudeness and arrogance from otherwise decent and thoughtful people. Often, when it’s discovered that you “actually believe that stuff” you are then forced to mumble something about “each to their own”.

A chap to whom you’ve only recently been introduced will insist on telling the assembled company why he thinks “organised religion has no place in modern Scotland”. What does a dis-organised religion look like? I’d back it.

One prominent former television journalist loudly insisted on telling the assembled company at an exhibition we both attended that she was “astounded” that Professor John Haldane, then a professor of philosophy at St Andrews University was a practising Catholic. “How can intelligent people subscribe to this sort of stuff,” she declaimed.

In recent months two commentators whom I admire have suggested that Catholic politicians like Chris McEleny, the SNP group leader on Inverclyde Council, should be denied public office. It wasn’t that Mr McEleny was a Catholic, you understand; just that he was the wrong type of Catholic.

It seems he is always insisting on, you know, being rather too Catholic. Perhaps we could be issued with guidelines on the correct sort of Catholicism … like they do in China.

At a time of acute national crisis, when money and power and technology were matchwood in the path of the Covid tornado the Nativity tableau has rarely been more relevant. A child born with a message of peace for the world and defying a murderous King [Herod]. The son of God becoming human in absolute poverty.

The experience of coronavirus has made the bonds of family and kinship seem profoundly relevant. In this pandemic there was revulsion at neo-liberal concepts which sought to exploit people’s initial panic. It seems chilling to recall that our Prime Minister and his chief advisor actually proposed herd immunity as an acceptable concept. When people began to consider the full implications of this they realised granny and granddad and Uncle Vinny were in the Downing Street crosshairs. This was stripped-down Tory doctrine at its most implacably inhumane.

There was another moment near the beginning of the pandemic when a capitalist instinct threatened to disfigure our immediate response. People stockpiled basic foodstuffs and toiletries, seemingly impervious to the possibility that others in the community with greater need would become more vulnerable still. But this soon passed and we began to care for each other.

In Scotland, politicians and a ridiculously swollen health bureaucracy actively connived in the wholesale sacrifice of innocents at the end of their lives. Did they simply feel that the aged and infirm were expendable? Perhaps the profoundly moving stories and pictures of families striving desperately to comfort their beloved parents and grandparents trapped in care homes re-cast as mortuaries may lead to a national conversation on government attitudes to the elderly.

Coronavirus has exposed the utter failure of the UK’s political and managerial classes more than at any other time since 1945. In England the Government continues to preside over an obscene PPE feeding frenzy for the enrichment of Tory friends and donors. As well as consigning many old people to lonely deaths the Scottish Government were initially happy to undermine the exam results of a generation of non-privileged school pupils.

Yet, they were redeemed by real people who understood that to endure this peril they had to come together and act in the interests of the greatest many with the greatest need. The essential Christian message of selfless love and human redemption resonated in their response.

Even if you consider the events and meaning of the Nativity to be fanciful why would you seek to suppress it? What is it that makes you fear, like Herod, the child born to be king? His story brings hope to millions of Scots who, having been betrayed and deceived by generations of smart, sophisticated politicians, find solace in the circumstances of His birth.

At Holyrood this Christmas though, like all other Christmases, they dare not speak His name.

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