Please don’t wish me ‘Merry Christmas’

So wrote Julia Ioffe, a Russian-born American journalist. She explained her aversion to that greeting by adding: “It’s impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion.”

It’s neither, actually. But it’s definitely idiotic to think that only Christians have something to celebrate at Christmas. Such insistence suggests that Miss Ioffe fails to follow not only our religion, but also our civilisation.

Or else her Princeton education didn’t teach her that Western civilisation owes Christianity so much as to owe it practically everything. Anyone, whatever his religion or none, who appreciates Western law, science, art, music or politics thereby celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, if only indirectly.

Looking at our jurisprudence, for example, practically every core law we have can be traced back to Judaeo-Christian antecedents – and not just because their spirit was inhaled from the moral atmosphere of Exodus and Matthew.

When great medieval law-givers, such as Charlemagne or, later in the same century, Alfred the Great, began to compile legal codes, they lifted and incorporated whole tranches of canon law. Anyone who raises his right hand and promises to tell the truth must be aware of the origins of that practice, to name just one example of many.

Whenever we visit an art museum or a concert hall, we worship at the altar of Christian culture. Western painting, for example, started in the church, and one could argue persuasively that Western music has never really left it.

Like faith, music is not without, but within us, waiting to be released. In fact, one can say that music inhabits the same compartment of the soul as faith, and it comes alive by activating similar perceptive mechanisms. Because of that, a valid argument can be made that all Western music is implicitly Christian even if it is explicitly secular.

Franck’s chorale may have been written for the concert hall, yet anyone with a modicum of sensitivity will know it was animated by the same spirit as a Bach chorale written for the church. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and a listener who can’t discern Christian inspiration in, say, Shostakovich’s quartets, should send his senses out for a tune-up.

(Miss Ioffe fancies herself a Russian expert, so I’m sure she must have heard those quartets or at least, more likely, heard of them.)

The only Western art form that at its best has remained in thrall to the art of Hellenic antiquity is sculpture. But Christian culture breathed a particle of its founder’s spirit into that form.

Anyone looking at the two Pietàs by Michelangelo, one in Rome, the other in Milan, will notice their Christian content before admiring their Hellenic outer shell. That, incidentally, is the proper sequence for appreciating any Western art. Unlike its Greek predecessor (and some of its modern offshoots), its starting point is ‘what’, not ‘how’.

In a different field, inchoate political structures of Europe took their cue from ecclesiastical politics, with their fusion of solidarity and subsidiarity. In the lay world that concept was translated into the idea of the central state keeping the few essential powers for itself, while devolving all the rest to the lowest sensible level.

Judging by the list of publications blessed by Miss Ioffe’s involvement, most of them respectable, which is to say ‘liberal’, she may be unfamiliar with that type of political structure or else contemptuous of it.

When the word ‘liberal’ was coined, it designated transferring a maximum amount of power from central state to local bodies, and from the latter to the individual. Today’s liberals, if you peek behind the fog of their bien pensant verbiage, preach exactly the opposite: statist centralism, empowering the central state at the expense of the individual. Yet all successful Western states followed the structural amalgam they inherited from the church.

Even Western natural science would have been impossible without the Judaeo-Christian cosmology and general understanding of the world. The starting assumption of any scientific quest is that the world is governed by rational and universal laws. The existence of such laws presupposes the original rational and universal law-giver. This makes the world knowable by human reason and experiment.

Today we take that for granted, as we do many seminal Christian contributions to our civilisation. Few of us stop to wonder why no other civilisations of past or present have produced anything even remotely resembling Western achievements. For example, I’m fairly certain Miss Ioffe doesn’t turn and toss at night, pursued by such conundrums. Yet if a question along such lines ever crosses her mind, I hope she won’t look for the answer in the works of her fellow Princetonian, Peter Singer.

In fact, judging by some of the things she has written, Miss Ioffe is a thoroughly modern young lady with only a tenuous link to what I’d describe as Western civilisation. That word is after all a cognate of civility, a concept that seems alien to Miss Ioffe.

To wit, when a rumour began to circulate that President-Elect Trump was planning to assign the East Wing of the White House to his daughter Ivanka, defying the tradition of its being the First Lady’s quarters, Miss Ioffe tweeted: “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”

Interesting question, that, and an even more interesting choice of words. No wonder the young lady absolves herself of any involvement with the religion that has produced our civilisation and, by inference, with the civilisation itself.

Yet I’m going to defy Miss Ioffe’s injunction and wish her a Merry Christmas, in the hope that one day she’ll start delving into such issues at greater depth. And yes, I get it, she isn’t a Christian.