The coercive power of the state is found from the start of the story of our salvation; it’s in the Nativity story itself and the feasts that punctuate the 12 Days of Christmas. It was to comply with a decree by the pagan Roman Emperor Augustus that Joseph and the pregnant Mary travelled from Nazareth to be registered in Bethlehem. The birth of a son to a carpenter in a cowshed might have gone unnoticed by the authorities had not the three “wise men” from the east told the ruthless King Herod, who ruled Israel on behalf of Augustus, that they had seen a star in the firmament signifying the birth of the King of the Jews. When they failed to return by way of Jerusalem and tell Herod where this infant king was to be found, Herod ordered the slaughter of all male children born in the region at the time. The Holy Innocents are commemorated on 28 December.
There were three layers of governance in Palestine during the lifetime of Jesus: the Roman emperor, Augustus; Herod, and later his sons; and the Temple authorities. The adult Jesus quickly came to the attention of this third layer – in particular the chief priests Ananias and Caiaphas – who realised, in the view of the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan, that “Jesus, if he had succeeded, would really have effected the ruin of the Jewish nation”. They therefore persuaded the only official authorised to condemn a man to death – the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate – to order Christ’s crucifixion.
The teachings of Jesus survived, although attempts were made by the Jewish establishment to suppress it.
It soon became clear that the Christian religion not only threatened Judaism, but also the pagan beliefs of the Romans. When Christians refused to worship the Roman gods, in particular the divine Emperor, they suffered waves of persecution. It was not until 312, after the then-Emperor Constantine defeated his enemy Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome with a Christian emblem painted on the shields of his soldiers, that the persecution of Christians stopped.
Constantine did not become a Christian until the end of his life; he moved cautiously because most of his subjects remained pagan. Thus the churches he built in Constantinople were not named after Christ, the Virgin Mary or the Apostles, but after virtues such as Wisdom and Justice. However, under Constantine the state favoured Christianity with privileges and endowments; public funds were used to build great basilicas in Rome and Jerusalem. It was under the Emperor Theodosius (379-395) that Christianity became the state religion; and it was the conversion of the leader of the barbarian Franks – Clovis – in 496 which ensured that the nations of western Europe would remain Christian for many centuries.
It was not until the French Revolution of 1789 that a European state repudiated and sought to extirpate the Christian religion. “Christianity,” wrote Ludwig von Pastor, “had not been subjected to such merciless persecution since the time of Diocletian.” After the Revolution, Napoleon recognised Christianity as “the religion of the majority of French citizens”; and despite recent attempts to destroy the Church by secularists in Mexico, anarchists in Spain and Bolsheviks in Russia, such assaults by agencies of the state have never succeeded.
And what about Britain? As Fr Mark Vickers has established in his excellent book God in Number 10, only a few British prime ministers in recent years have been church-going Anglicans – members of the Church of England, established by law as the state religion in the United Kingdom. However, until recently all have recognised – as Clement Attlee put it – that “our Western civilisation has been built up in the main on the acceptance of the moral standards of Christianity. Even those who find themselves unable to accept Christian dogma accept in the main its ethical standards.”
Is this still true? Do we accept the moral standards of Christianity? Tony Blair, who would become a Catholic after relinquishing office, ignored John Paul II’s ruling that the conflict in Iraq was not “a just war”. David Cameron ignored the pleas of Christian leaders in Syria to support Bashar Assad because he protected their flocks from persecution by Wahhabi fanatics. It is Assad’s ally, Vladimir Putin, who now claims to be the defender of Christians in the Middle East.
In Britain, lines were crossed when Labour permitted the adoption of children by couples of the same sex – which led to the closure of Catholic adoption agencies – and when the Conservatives brought in same-sex marriage. As Cardinal Vincent Nichols wrote at the time, it was a significant step away from the nation’s Judeo-Christian foundations. But the 12 days of Christmas remind us that the Christian Church is often at odds with the state: the feast of St Stephen on 26 December recalls the first Christian martyrdom at the hands of religious authorities, while that of St Thomas Becket on 29 December honours the victim of a king. And so, in the midst of the festive season, are reminders that we have here no abiding city.
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