Around this time of year, as the nights draw in and carol-singers don their hats and scarves, David Franks can count on receiving several enraged telephone calls and letters demanding to know why he has banned the people in Luton, just north of London, from celebrating Christmas. The exact circumstances in which the Liberal Democrat leader of Luton borough council came to outlaw centuries of Christian tradition are unclear, not least to David Franks, but the central facts are always the same. He and his fellow councillors have forcibly replaced Christmas with a "Harry Potter-themed" event called Luminos, to avoid offending minorities.
The Luton controversy recurs annually, but this year something in the tone of it has changed. According to Christian leaders, vigorously backed by right-wing newspapers, Franks is no longer a fringe figure, but one crusader in a fully fledged national war against Christmas. "The crazy gang who constitute the local council at Luton," as the commentator AN Wilson called them in the London Daily Mail last weekend, now have sympathizers across the country: at the council that erased all mention of Christmas from its Christmas cards, in the town that banned a generous millionaire from erecting his annual charity lights display, and in the Scottish hospital that refused to distribute a Christmas CD because it mentioned Jesus, to name just three. Almost 75 percent of British employers, according to a survey released this week, have banned Christmas decorations for fear of offending other faiths, and don't realize they have a legal obligation to celebrate Diwali and Eid, whether they like it or not.
"The dead hand of political correctness is throttling the life out of the festive spirit," thundered the Sun newspaper, announcing, like the Mail, a front-page campaign to defend Christmas. (In Birmingham, the paper noted despairingly, "Christmas has been rebranded as Winterval.") Spurred on by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and by the Christian Muslim Forum, which has launched a national battle against the de-Christianizing of Christmas, local leaders of three faiths wrote to Franks in Luton this week. They warned darkly of the "anger within religious communities" that might erupt if he did not "refrain from renaming the Christmas festival using another (non-religious) name".
All of which might be reasonable, were it not for a few awkward facts. Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn't even replace the council's own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything. Similarly, Christmas is not called Winterval in Birmingham. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children never banned a Christmas CD for mentioning Jesus. And Chester council's "un-Christian" Christmas card says — as cards have done for decades — "Season's Greetings."
Religious clout
"We're not going to have a war, we're going to have the appearance of a war," says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet's screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about this year's war on Christmas — a war that tells us much about the growing politicization and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.
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