Student pages

‘From Jesus Christ to Father Christmas -- an attempt to define the scope and subject-matter of Christianity’.

The seminar relates to work in progress for a forthcoming book on Christianity, which seeks to approach the topic in a new way. Typically, textbook accounts of the Christian religion focus on its history and theology, and thus produce accounts of matters on which average believers are quite ignorant, and would not recognise as their own faith. In short, believers are less likely to be able to explain the doctrine of the Incarnation than how to make a Christmas pudding!

The folk celebrations, arguably, are a more significant part of a Christian’s reality than the tradition textbook material, but yet are seldom, if ever, covered in the literature. My argument is that these traditional approaches are inadequate, for several reasons. Writers on other religions - particularly Hinduism - comment freely on folk practices. A focus on popular religiosity also helps to explain the enormous discrepancy between the Census 2001 finding that 71.6 per cent of Britain’s population claim a Christian identity, yet only some 4 per cent can be found in church on any given Sunday.

The presentation argues that traditional accounts of Christianity draw on models of religion that define it in terms of ‘the holy’ or ‘the sacred’ (e.g. Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade). Other models, such as Simon Weightman’s ‘three complexes’ of Hinduism, suggest a way of analysing Christianity that does justice both to the more deeply theological components, and to the apparently more frivolous popular activities, such as the traditional Christmas dinner - which ought to have as much claim to inclusion in an account of Christianity.