Hallelujah!

Well we now know the Christmas number one, and unsurprisingly, it features the winner of the TV show 'X Factor'. What is slightly more surprising is the choice of song. In Alexandra Burke's cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', we have the first Christmas hit to feature biblically themed lyrics since Boney M's camp rendition of 'Mary's Boy Child' in 1978. After 30 years, it seems that even the ultra-conservative producers of a mainstream pop show feel that religeous themes are no longer a taboo subject.

In our increasingly biblically illiterate society, columnists are falling over themselves to explain how the tale of a broken love affair is told through the metaphor of David and Bathsheba, spiced up with a slightly fetishist twist on Samson and Delilah. Does this herald a return to the Bible as one of our key cultural influences? It certainly shows that a quest for spirituality and meaning is back on the mainstream agenda.

Although Hallelujah is unashamed of looking to the Bible for answers, it seems to come with little hope of actually finding them. The keynote here is ambiguity: although the passion is genuine, the hallelujahs are 'cold and broken'. But it's a start.

Jesus was unafraid of ambiguity, and for much of it's history the church has been willing to live with it too. Maybe Alexandra Burke is the standard bearer for a new era of cultural engagement with Christ; not as a trite 'answer' but as the best place to come with our deepest and most urgent questions. Hallelujah to that!

Happy winterval

You hear about it, but you never think it will happen to you. Last week our little Essex town was splashed across the pages of the national press after a local primary school were banned from singing at the town festival because their programme of Christmas carols was deemed too religeous for the 'theme' of the event.

On the one hand, I do feel a bit sorry for the festival committee. They work hard for months trying to put together an event which genuinely does bring the community together for one night each year. Now one member makes a bad decision and they find themselves in the middle of a storm of criticism.

But the more I think about this, I'm glad that it has provoked such a strong reaction. Our forefathers fought and died for the right to freely express their faith in this country. Exactly how did we manage to get from a moderately sane society to one in which a well meaning local volunteer could somehow perceive that banning schoolchildren from singing carols was 'the right thing to do'? And even more worrying, how could a school head teacher (who you would expect to be at least a bit more politically and media savvy) simply roll over and accept it? If anyone along the chain had spoken up, they could have stopped this cruel, inexplicable, divisive, anti-inclusive action right there. But no-one did.

20 years ago society as a whole recognised that racism was wrong, but a lot of it still happened because people 'didn't know any better'. Our thresholds of acceptance are much lower today. We need to be equally intolerant of the creeping religeous persecution which has emerged under the cover of 'political correctness'. Hopefully in Corringham at least, next time someone suggests that it is OK to ban Christianity from public expression, there will be someone there to blow the whistle.