Reviews
The Atheist's Guide to Christmas
Steve Tomkins
Ed. Ariane Sherine
The Friday Project, 352pp, ISBN: 9780007322619
I was in Hamley's toy shop on 1 November this year,
and they were blasting out Slade through six storeys of crowds, 'So
here it is, merry Christmas, everybody's having fun'. There's only
so much premature intrusive corporate jollity for Jesus a person
can take and retain their good humour, and in my case I was in
there for 15 seconds before I wanted to drop kick an elf. So spare
a thought for those less fortunate than you this Christmas,
brothers and sisters. By the time you're opening the cranberry
jelly, some people will have lived through two months of Christmas
hits.
And now here I am doing the same thing to you, writing a
Christmas book review that will hit your doormat in November. Sorry
about that. But the book did come out on 1 October and this
is the December issue, so I held off as long as I could. You don't
have to read it now, you could always wait a few weeks, but seeing
as you've got this far, you might as well continue.
The Atheist's Guide to Christmas is a collection of
articles looking at Christmas from an unbeliever's point of view.
Edited by Ariane Sherine, who led the atheist bus campaign subtly
alluded to on the cover, this may be the first book to be a
spin-off from an advertising campaign, but she has got
contributions from quite a range of pundits: scientists,
journalists, philosophers, comedians and Simon le Bon. Some are all
about Christmas, some only tangentially so, and some, like Brian
Cox's illuminating account of the large hadron collider have
nothing to do with it at all.
Derren Brown offers a thoughtful essay in defence of
kindness. What I found intriguing is his suggestion that atheists
can do disinterested kindness in a way believers can't, because
they are not expecting God's reward. And yet all his arguments in
favour of kindness - being kind makes us happy, successful and well
liked - are ultimately self-interested.
The comedian Richard Herring tells a funny story about a cat in
a bathroom. Which supposedly happened at Christmas. The poet Kapka
Kassabova writes movingly about the value of religion in Bulgaria.
The sex blogger Zoe Margolis remembers being excluded from the
nativity play because of her atheist family. David Baddiel
considers the problems of trying to make an atheist movie. The
journalist Anna Pickard re-writes 'While Shepherds Watched' as a
hoax.
The extraordinary Prof Dawkins takes a stab at fiction, and the
stab is near fatal. It's a really quite embarrassing P G Wodehouse
pastiche in which Wooster sees the atheist bendy bus and Jeeves
explains to him that God cannot exist, on the basis that penal
substitution is an appalling idea. There's something strangely
reassuring about the fact that the Dawk still thinks he can do
theology, impervious to the comprehensive critical dismantling of
The God Delusion. I suppose Christians can't help but find
it comforting that the archbishop of atheism is a bit of a twit.
Like the Italian and German occupying forces in Captain
Corelli's Mandolin, it's better to be attacked by clowns than
Nazis. Or maybe I'm just happy that all the disparagement didn't
get him down.
No fewer than 14 of the 42 contributors are comedians. Wondering
why this might be, I came up with a very interesting and credible
theory to explain why comedians are more prone to atheism than the
average person. It certainly had me convinced, until I noticed that
another eight are journalists. Ariane Sherine is a comedy writer
and journalist, so I guess the lopsided guest list reflects nothing
more profound than her address book. Shame, it was a good
theory.
The overall point of the book seems to be to reclaim Christmas
for atheists. As AC Grayling points out, the roots of our
festivities go back much further than Christianity, so if the
Christians colonized pagan celebrations why shouldn't humanists
take over Christmas?
Which is fine. I wish the godless a very merry one. There's two
months and £15bn of it, so there ought to be enough for everyone.
But there's a limit to how many times you can be interested to read
yet another article saying 'Everyone else says atheists can't like
Christmas, but surprisingly I love it!' It's like hearing 'Merry
Xmas Everybody' in every shop you go into. In the end it comes as a
delightful relief to hear Andrew Mueller despise it as 'a vast
coercive conspiracy' and discuss strategies for avoiding it.
Maybe in fact it's not so much a book to persuade atheists that
they're allowed to do Christmas. After all, it can't be too hard to
work out. Mince pies, office parties, Slade, presents and fairy
lights are not practices it takes a great deal of spiritual
commitment or metaphysical conviction to sustain. Maybe it's the
other way round - a book to persuade half-hearted just-about
believers that just because they like Christmas, that doesn't mean
they can't become atheists. It's like the church putting on a barn
dance to show that Christians can have fun.
I ended up not entirely convinced, however. The vision of
humanist Christmas I was left with seemed surprisingly unsatisfying
- like a nut roast and aubergine sausage Christmas dinner,
principled maybe, but not quite the real thing. If you strip away
the story, the carols, the church and the faith, are you left with
anything besides consumer excess and excessive consuming? There's
the decor, I suppose, panto and Now That's What I Call
Christmas, but is that enough? Maybe Christmas is still ours
after all.
Steve Tomkins