How do we respond to fading Christian heritage?

There are many cultural expressions of the Christian faith – from the obvious things like Christmas trees, Christmas cakes/ puddings, Easter eggs and Shrove Tuesday pancakes through to ashed foreheads on Ash Wednesday, Lenten fasts, all kinds of Christian music/songs (carols, Mass, chants) and symbols like crosses and Bible verses on posters.

There are many other less well-known Christian traditions involving all kinds of rhymes and recipes, songs and stews, feasts and festivals. Some have become completely secularised so that nobody has any memory of their original Christian nature (like the croissant, which was associated historically with the defeat of Islamic armies, and thus was banned by Islamic State in 2013).

For all kinds of reasons, the Christian faith has been on the retreat in British (and Western) culture for at least 150 years. Whatever the reasons… we live in a culture in which the mainstream has been stepping away from conscious cultural expressions of the Christian faith for many decades. Even in 1867 Matthew Arnold could hear the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the Christian sea of faith.

Does it matter if the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ spills out into public, cultural expressions or not? Are these even harmful distractions, polluted by pagan and ‘worldly’ baggage?

Are the people who get upset about these things mindlessly driven by tabloid headlines, or are they responding to something deeper?

Is it wrong to bother about such small things because in other countries Christians are threatened with death?

Some of us shrug our shoulders as if none of these cultural expressions have anything at all to do with the power of the gospel – which is energised by a spiritual power unrelated to all these superficial cultural signs. These irrelevant ‘Christian’ foods, forms and fancies are only human traditions powered by commercialism rather than the Living God.

Some of us go even further and feel that many of these expressions of the ‘Christian faith’ are masks for older pagan festivals and traditions – and the Christmas tree or Eostre eggs are all occult anchors opening doorways to demonic influence. So, the fact that they are dying out is to be celebrated as a form of liberation.

Some of us are concerned or worried at the loss of all these Christian traditions from the mainstream of British/Western culture and feel that there are anti-Christian forces deliberately erasing Christianity. Not that commercial businesses have a duty to proclaim the gospel that Christians have failed to proclaim, but that there might be darker forces specifically targeting public expressions of the Christian faith.

Some of us don’t necessarily feel that there is a systemic, deliberate war against Christian traditions, but that the constant fading away and erasure of these cultural expressions is a simple manifestation of what is happening in the depths of British/Western culture.

Our distant Christian ancestors had fought hard, intellectually, spiritually, socially, politically to claim, convert and combine the disparate tribes of what we now call ‘Europe’. There was Charlemagne’s revolution of universal education based in every local church, or the incremental overthrow of polygamy and concubinage (which took hundreds of years), the eventual unification of a continent around Creed, Church and Bible, or the weaving of the Christian ‘worldview’ into architecture, ceremony and national identity.

Businesses and institutions may walk away from any and all of these left-over remnants of a faded Christian heritage. Of course they do – and why not? Why should they support the massive cultural revolution rooted in the Christian vision of Constantine, Charlemagne and their successors? To have an entire culture warmly welcome Christian rhymes and recipes, festivals and feasts is the fruit of generations of immensely costly evangelism, sown through blood, sweat and tears.

Perhaps instead of worrying too much about the loss of these Christian fingerprints, we need to reconvert the nation in our own generation and refresh the old Christian traditions with new ones.