Happy Holidays?

Hanukkah is a strange one. After the emergence of Judaism, set out below, Hanukkah was historically a very minor festival until almost into living memory, and in much of the Jewish world it still is.

But it does provide an opportunity to pre-empt this year’s round of lazy claims that Christmas is a taking over of some pagan winter festival. There is of course a universal need for winter festivals. But the dating of Christmas derives from Hanukkah, not from the pagan Saturnalia or anything else.

No British or Irish Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan continuation in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here.

Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century.

Furthermore, the dating of Christmas from that of Hanukkah raises serious questions for Protestants, who mistakenly exclude the two Books of Maccabees from the Canon because, along with various other works, they were allegedly not considered canonical at the time of Jesus and the Apostles.

In fact, the rabbis only excluded those books specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity, and they are repeatedly quoted or cited in the New Testament, as they were by Jewish writers up to their rabbinical exclusion.

Even thereafter, a point is made by the continued celebration of Hanukkah, a celebration thanks to books to which Jews only really had access because Christians had preserved them, since the rabbis wanted them destroyed.

Indeed, far from being the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah actually deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994), and so on.

Hanukkah bushes, and the giving and receiving of presents at Hanukkah, stand in a tradition of two-way interaction both as old as Christianity and about as old as anything that could reasonably be described as Judaism. As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “it is hardly surprising that Jewish communities living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the surrounding culture.”

There are many, many, many other examples that could be cited. These range from the Medieval adoption for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant editions, to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees, for example, had not believed in the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth, to the identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture technically different from but effectively very similar to those of Catholicism, to Medieval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian stories in their sermons.

Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find that root. I think that we all know why not.

But the real point is something far deeper, arising from the definition of the Jewish Canon in explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the Talmud.

Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly rather than its own, defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice, or which of their relatives is a polygamist. Judaism, I say again, is not some sort of mother-religion.

Rather, I say again that it is a reaction against Christianity, specifically, like Islam, a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as there always have been, although they are increasingly allied to Islam.

Thus constructed, Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle, again like Classically-based reactions, for all sorts of people discontented for whatever reason by the rise of Christianity in general and the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background.

Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth.

They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.

It is Christianity that refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple, Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person.

It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Priesthood. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Sacrifice, the Mass. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Including the two Books of Maccabees, the origin of Hanukkah, the true form of which, as of so much else, is Christmas.

Bounds Not Lawfully To Be Overstepped

Supposed defenders of traditional America are preparing to leaflet against ObamaCare. In shopping malls. On Thanksgiving.

But in the midst of this madness, John writes:

In an interesting piece in The Atlantic, Megan Garber discusses the new plan to have the U.S. Post Office deliver Amazon packages on Sundays. Ms. Garber also describes how an alliance of churches and labor unions ended Sunday delivery in 1912. While many people probably don't care much about this development, I find it rather disturbing.

Christian religious observance is being undermined by commercialism. Taking just one example, more people are working on Christmas than ever before. While I understand the need for health and emergency staff to work on holidays (of course, with extra compensation), I am shocked by how many non-essential services such as restaurants and  stores are open during the holidays. And yes, it is often the case that those who must work on the holidays are in low-paying service jobs.

The decline in the observance of holidays as days of rest from paid labor is part of capitalism's tendency to subject all of human life to economic calculation and the demands of capital. When Christianity was the dominant cultural force in Europe during the Middle Ages, peasants and artisans actually had ample holiday time.Workers sometimes had as much as one-third of the year off. Medieval farmers and artisans had more vacation time than their modern counterparts.

Despite predictions that leisure time would increase in advanced societies, Americans and Western Europeans are seeing their leisure time scaled back under neoliberalism. The eight-hour workday and other victories won by the labor movement are being demolished while workers are harangued by capitalists and their lackeys in the government and media about the need to stay competitive in the global economy.

Amintore Fanfani, in his seminal work Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, described how the capitalist state reduced the influence of Christianity and other forces that might impede the rationalization of society along capitalist lines. As Fanfani wrote:

"The one endeavor of capitalism has been to emancipate itself from ideas, or institutions based upon ideas, that impeded the economic rationalization of life." (Fanfani 1934: 92).

Interestingly, Fanfani goes on to described the Soviet Union as the final realization of capitalist civilization, writing:

"It may seem a paradox, but the most technically perfect economic realization of capitalistic civilization is the Soviet system, in which all private and public efforts have only one end: the economic rationalization of the whole of life, to the point of abolishing private property and the family and of attempting the destruction of all religious ideals that might threaten such materialistic rationalization. Russia has carried the rationalizing experiment of capitalism to its logical conclusion." (Fanfani 1934: 92).

In opposition to both capitalism and communism, Fanfani presents the Church as the entity that has, throughout history, sought to protect society from domination by purely economic forces.

"In the Middle Ages, by supporting the intervention of public bodies in economic life as a check to individual activity and to defend the interests of society as a whole; in our own time, by calling for State intervention for the same reasons, the Church has remained faithful to her anti-capitalistic ethics. Both during the predominance of the medieval guild system, and during that of capitalism, the Church, and those Catholics that listened to her voice, set or sought to set bounds not lawfully to be overstepped to the course of economic life — even at the cost of a sacrifice of mechanical and technical progress, which in the Catholic conception of society, has never been identical with civilization."(Fanfani 1934: 126).

Thus, we can see that sacrificing the leisure time of workers to the demands of the capitalist market is antithetical to the Catholic conception of society, which places certain non-economic values above purely economic ones, even if it may reduce competitiveness or technical progress or some other material aspect of life. From a Catholic perspective, those who insist on market fundamentalism are making the same mistake as followers of Marxist communism. This mistake is the reduction of all politics, and indeed all of human life, to economics.

Therefore, we should not be surprised when Pope Francis discusses the need for workers to have plenty of leisure time, a sentiment also shared by his immediate predecessor. It is not a coincidence that the decline of Christian influence in the West has led to an erosion of working conditions for Western workers. Without a strong, countervailing philosophical force to stand in its way, capital can simply run over whatever feeble opposition secularists manage to put up. By separating Christianity and economics, we have allowed ourselves to be ruled by the high priests of Mammon.

WORKS CITED

Fanfani, Amintore. Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism. 1934. Reprint. (Norfolk, VA.: IHS Press, 2003).

A One-Way Ticket To A Deeply Uncertain Destination

Alistair Darling writes:

Nothing has changed with the publication of the Scottish nationalists' white paper. Alex Salmond still bases his argument to break up the United Kingdom on mere assertions and uncosted promises. He has ducked the difficult questions on currency, pensions and our membership of the European Union.

This white paper was also an attempt at a manifesto funded from the public purse. The authors promised more childcare after independence. They failed to mention that they have the power to do this now. They promised to abolish the bedroom tax. They failed to mention that their own advisers have told them that they couldn't do so for some years because of the complexity of the benefits system.

They promised they would answer all the questions anyone could possibly have. Their aim is to point to this white paper and refuse to answer any further questions for the next 10 months. It won't wash.

We need the facts, but all we got was a political wishlist. We still don't know what currency Scotland would use if we vote to go it alone. The nationalists want a currency union with the rest of the UK but their own civil servants have admitted that they can't guarantee that. The problem is that the rest of the UK would have to agree to this – it looks increasingly like a non-starter. Even some nationalists see that a currency union would be a straitjacket, not independence.

So what's plan B? Using sterling in the same way that Panama uses the American dollar? Or is it a new currency? Or would we be forced to join the euro? We don't know who would set our mortgage rates. We don't know by how much taxes would have to go up. We don't know how secure our pensions and benefits would be in an independent Scotland.

Alex Salmond claims that we will leave the UK and be automatically waved into the European Union without any problem. The issue here is that leading figures – including the president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, has made it clear that Scotland would be a new applicant nation and would have to negotiate its way in.

No one thinks that an independent Scotland wouldn't eventually get into the European Union, but we don't know how long it would take and, crucially, we don't know what terms and conditions would be placed on our entry.

Would Scotland have to give a commitment to join the euro? Would we have to sign up to the open-borders Schengen agreement? We simply don't know. But still Salmond asserts that everything will be fine. In doing this, the Scottish National party leader exposes a fundamental flaw in the nationalist case. 

Rather than facing up to the challenges that leaving the UK poses for Scotland, he simply brushes criticism aside. Whether it's confronting the cost of an ageing population or accepting that North Sea oil revenues will decline, he simply ignores the consequences.

Like everyone else who lives in Scotland, I care deeply about the future of my country. I believe that the case for us staying in the United Kingdom is a strong one. However, I will never shy away from questioning a proposal from our government that will fundamentally change our lives for ever.

We have the best of both worlds right now in Scotland. We have a parliament in Edinburgh that allows us to do things our way and we have the security of being part of the bigger UK. I don't see why we should trade that in for a one-way ticket to a deeply uncertain destination.

We Need To Lose "Faith"

Kevin Meagher, with whom I was greatly impressed at the Blue Labour conference this year, writes:

If you control language then you control the debate. That is what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci claimed in his theory of “passive revolution”, which focused on shaping attitudes in order to secure changes in a society’s culture.

The methods may seem opaque now, but his successors are those who seek to reduce Christianity’s special place in society by anonymising religious denominations and removing any sense of entitlement, either for Catholics, Anglicans or, more broadly, for this country’s Christian heritage.

This is the product of a pseudo-liberal groupthink that remains inherently hostile to the religious having any role in public affairs at all. It therefore seeks to “manage” religions (or, as they are termed these days, “faith communities”), lumping Catholicism in with small groups like Scientology and the Bahá’í.

We find ourselves corralled together as “people of faith” in order to be controlled, minimised and, all too often, demonised. This all stems from a mindset where religion is seen to be an inherently regressive force, something that once enjoyed privileges and from whose clutches society should be escaping.

Something that’s had too much power and now needs firmly putting in its place. In fact, so pervasive is this belief that no less a figure than Barack Obama spouts it. Speaking in Northern Ireland while he was attending the G8 earlier this year, Obama said: “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear and resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”

At a stroke, his infuriating remarks reduced a complex ethno-national conflict to the fault of Catholic schools and the insulting, injurious and entirely spurious belief they are somehow fermenting intolerance and hatred.

Yet whatever disdain liberals reserve for the role of Catholic education now pales against the suspicion they direct towards the steady trickle of Islamic schools that are beginning to open up. Last month the Al-Madinah free school in Derby was judged by schools regulator Ofsted to be inadequate, with the threat that it would be closed unless urgent measures were taken to rectify its poor performance, which included discrimination against girl pupils and non-Muslims.

There will have been a collective muttering of “I told you so” among the panjandrums of the liberal educational elite, who see a growth in Muslim schools as a nightmare scenario, a de facto licence to introduce gender discrimination into the classroom, with a curriculum offering little more than “madrassas on the rates”.

Yet, rather than deal with the problem at hand, describing the Al-Madinah free school as a “faith school” is a way of not calling it a “Muslim school”. This way, Islamic schools can be challenged, but couched as a collective punishment for the God botherers.

This is why “faith” is a linguistic holding pen for Catholics, a way of marginalising the role of religion in society, but also a means for Catholics and other Christians to cross-subsidise Islam. This is the product of a post-9/11 obsession in trying to bring Islam into the mainstream to avert any accusation that there is a “clash of civilisations” with western Christian mores. The solution to reducing Islam’s “otherness” has been to place Muslims firmly together with all the other “people of faith”.

In minimising religion in this way, the aim is to reduce it to a solely private matter. It cannot provide moral leadership in a pluralist society. It must not provide adoption agency services that do not abide by strictures about gay relationships. And it certainly should not be involved in “indoctrinating” children with religion in school.

As Catholics, it is time we reasserted our separateness. We should stop allowing ourselves to be hemmed in by those who seek to manage and marginalise us. We should lead a counter-Gramscian cultural shift towards making the expression of religious conviction in the public sphere seem normal again. This should start by eschewing terms like “faith school” and “faith community”. It should also mean proudly and visibly proclaiming Catholic schools to be just that.

After all, there are no problems with Christian church schools. They offer the state sector – as they always have done – a bedrock of consistently superb educational establishments, basing access not on wealth but simply on religious adherence.

Measured either by parental consent or examination results, church schools form the building blocks of our state education system. So those liberals who dislike them should be forced to come clean about what they really mean.

Of course, what they really want is no more Al-Madinahs. They want to strangle off the very concept of Muslim schools, which they believe will usher in retrograde practices (with some evidence, it has to be said). But their liberalism is torn between protecting the rights of a religious and ethnic minority and upholding universal rights for girls. That’s their headache.

It’s time we Christians stopped allowing ourselves and our institutions to be framed as a problem simply because atheistic liberal opinion is too weak, or too conflicted, to face up to and deal with Islam’s less attractive cultural practices.

Of course, the parents at the Al-Madinah free school are simply exercising the same parental choice we enjoy in establishing a school that gives expression to the tenets of their religion. But if they see the value of boys and girls differently, the state, in the guise of Ofsted’s inspectors, is entitled to come down hard on their errant practices. But that is their battle to fight, not ours.

We Catholics should defend our right to religious freedom and parental choice, defending the record of Catholic schools in providing first-rate comprehensive education. We should throw off the shackles that have us bound up as a faith group in order to be classified and marginalised by atheistic pseudo-liberals.

We should wrest control the debate by insisting on our own language to define ourselves. We can start that process by losing “faith”. 

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of the website Labour Uncut and a former special adviser in the last Labour government.

The Pope Is A Catholic

That is considered news.

Oh, well, at least this time people might pay attention to the repetition of what every Pope has said about capitalism since 1891, which is everything that any Pope has ever said about capitalism.

Swearing To It

Andrew Mitchell ought also to be prosecuted.

He swore at a Police Officer. Anyone else would have been arrested for that.

Mitchell is not the innocent victim here, and the attempts to portray him as such are motivated by the desire to put policing into the hands of Serco and G4S.

That must not be allowed to happen.

Side Lines

Supporters of global capitalism and of American hegemony (including "the Anglosphere") who imagine that they are somehow opponents of European federalism, and supporters of European federalism who imagine that they are somehow opponents of global capitalism and of American hegemony, are struck dumb by the situation in Ukraine.

Not so, those of us who have the first clue what is going on in the world, and who therefore understand and celebrate the proper role of Russia against all of those evils. One such understanding person is here. We know which side we are on. And we have always known it.