He Knows If You've Been Bad Or Good

Some followers of a minority religious cult have attracted unwelcome attention with a delightful bit of baby kitsch showing an ultrasound image of a foetus with a halo. The message is "He's on His way: Christmas starts with Christ" and, according to Mike Elms, the vice-chair of the evangelists formerly known as the Churches Advertising Network, is not in any way political. Rather, it is designed to convey the Christian belief that for Christians and according to Christian tradition, Christmas starts with Christ as far as Christians in their Christianity are concerned; which makes one wonder what the whole business is meant to achieve. Presumably most Christians are already aware of their church's doctrine on Christmas, and presumably most of the rest of us don't care. However, some Christians of the chastity-and-coathanger denomination have welcomed the campaign as an anti-abortion statement, apparently because it resembles their own pro-unwanted-pregnancy propaganda to the effect that a human foetus is the same thing as a human being. "This is not a cluster of cells but a human person and it just happens to be the God man Jesus. It is about the humanity of the unborn," gushed John Smeaton of the Society for the Production of Unwanted Children; "That is a very, very powerful statement that will strike a chord with the general population", or at any rate more of a chord than the Saviour's own statement that his followers should hate and abandon their families rather than buy them presents and pretend to enjoy living with them for one day of the year. Be that as it may, St Michael claims that the campaign is intended to convey "that this baby was on the way." This seems a rather radical message, even for a campaign supported by the Church of England; I was not aware that the Christian churches, even Protestant ones, believed their messiah is born anew year after year as though trapped in some sort of gynaecological Groundhog Day. Stunts of that kind are generally the province of those pagan sun gods whose winter festival was subjected to hostile Christian takeover about the fourth century CE (i.e. when Christmas actually started), the point at which Christianity was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire and thereby gave up once and for all any pretensions to meekness, humility, charity and love that it may ever have indulged.