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[duke_aldhein]

Some time ago, in a discussion on here, someone called JJ asked me a question: 'If you do dismiss literal interpretations of religious stories, how do you deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I have been slow to reply, because the series of posts that led to the question were riddled with assumptions

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[duke_aldhein]

Christian orthodoxy has more room for Bill Hicks than for the fundamentalists he took such joy in attacking...

I'm serious. I mean, I don't generally see eye to eye with Giles Fraser (he embodies the intelligent-enough-to-know-better liberal Christianity I take potshots at - and his attempt at a riposte to my column on the Church House Bookshop website was both condescending and feeble), but he did a good piece for the Guardian a few Christmases ago. Inspired by Kundera's definition of kitsch as 'the absolute denial of shit', he wrote about the 'caganer' - 'a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles.'Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

The problem with kitsch is not readily apparent because (by definition) the treatment of what is considered unwholesome takes place off stage. Think of those Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, healthy children skiing down the Bavarian Alps. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Of course there is. For this is a world that has been purified, where everything nasty or troubling has been eliminated... Kitsch turns out to be... the aesthetics of ethnic cleansing...

The baby in the manger now presides over a celebration of feel-good bonhomie that makes the true meaning of Christmas almost impossible to articulate. Boozed-up partygoers and proud grandparents demand the unreality of "O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie". Elsewhere Kundera writes of kitsch as "the need to gaze into the mirror and be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection". And it's this gratifying reflection that many want to see when they gaze into the Christmas crib. Christmas has become unbearably self-satisfied.

The caganer is a reminder of another Jesus and another story. From the perspective of official Christian doctrine, the story of Christmas is a full-scale attack upon the notion of kitsch... God is born in a stable. The divine is re-imagined, not as existing in some pristine isolation, but among the shittiness of the world.
The caganer is the Bill Hicks character, the guy defecating in the corner of the crib scene. If your version of religion hasn't got room for him, it'll tend to lead to the kind of obscenities being perpetrated in the name of faith by the likes of Bush (and bin Laden).

[duke_aldhein]

Yeah, he basically implied (by his selection of books and his comments) that I was a naive young Marxist who would doubtless mature to see the error of his ways, as he had - and also had a go at Radical Orthodox theology for being "fashionable", which is rather ad hominem for an Oxford philosopher. His whole column was pretty slapdash.

I could give a more nuanced critique of the militant liberalism he regularly promotes in the Grauniad, but I'll save that for another day.