| How culture mutes politics at Christmas | Send to a friend |
| Wednesday, 28 December 2011 14:17 |
 By Patty MagubiraThe Political Platform Reporter Dar es Salaam. Whoever maintains that politics and Christianity are poles apart should revisit Bible stories on the birth of Jesus Christ before the dust of this festive season settles. Christmas has since 1830s been associated with goodwill, generosity, and empathy for those less fortunate. It is a time of family gatherings with a shared understanding of returning to a particular tradition that is celebrated within the family unit. For the Chagga, Christmas is a day for reunion with all relatives and friends, Innocent Mushi told The Citizen at the weekend before he travelled to Moshi Municipality along with his family members to celebrate the day. Bukoba Catholic Diocese Auxiliary Bishop Methodius Kilaini concurred with Mushi saying Christmas became meaningless if it was not used for strengthening families. “It is the day when Jesus was born in a family; and that is why sermons in churches focus on family as a crucial institution where love is nurtured,” he explained. Theos, a public theology think tank, and a polling company ComRes asked a demographically representative sample of over 2,000 British adults this year what they thought Christmas was about. Domesticity and charity topped the charts, as five in six people agreed that ‘Christmas was about spending time with family and friends’ and three in five agreed that ‘Christmas was a time when they should be generous to people less fortunate than themselves.’ Rather less popular was the idea that ‘Christmas is a time when people should challenge poverty and economic injustice’ and bottom of the list was the idea that ‘Christmas is a time for people to challenge political oppression around the world’. But Stephen Holmes, a senior lecturer in Theology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, argues that Christmas was all about God’s interference in and transformation of the political order. Christmas had initially been a public occasion pregnant with revolts against the social order. Politics of Christmas were both obvious and profound before the 19th century when the working classes were permitted to let off steam. The festival celebrated globally today, he says, is the product of a long, rich, and controversial British and western cultural development, which has deliberately reduced it to a family and gift-giving activity. Is the British invention during Queen Victoria’s era coupled with broad cultural agreement to reconfigure it as a celebration of domesticity correct, queries Holmes. Stories at the heart of Christmas, according to Holmes, offer a picture of the world in which politics affects the domestic life of ordinary families at every turn. “Domesticity the story of the birth of Jesus is completely intertwined with politics. Not just because the child is born to be king, but because the circumstances of the birth, and of the child’s early life, are profoundly determined by political realities “The story should bring us face-to-face with our views on homelessness, on asylum, on healthcare provision, on intervention in sovereign states whose authorities are repressing their citizens, on our attitude to foreigners and on our beliefs about gender politics,” Holmes says. A family being a primary component of social stability too can be politicised through debates over the extent or limits of what constitutes a proper ‘family’, Holmes adds. “Do gay and lesbian couples count? Do mixed-race couples count? What about adoption, or serial monogamy, or co-habitation without marriage,” he queries. Mary and Joseph were only in Bethlehem because of a census intended to regularise taxation records; they rapidly became asylum seekers in Egypt, fleeing oppression by the local political authority, King Herod. The biblical stories of the birth of Jesus were set at a time of political unrest. Palestine at the time had fairly been occupied by Rome, and resentment and talk of revolution were everywhere. The account of the birth of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, in particular, suggests that the Jesus birth was marking God’s decisive intervention in the political realm, which would lead to the overthrow of the empire and the setting free of the people. But The Tanzanian politicians have been accusing Christian churches and the Roman Catholic, in particular, when the church attempted to intervene in these political realities on grounds that politics was a preserve for them. In July 2009, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church published a manifesto on candidate selection ahead of the October 2010 General Election. Critics strongly argued that the church was meddling with politics. Long serving politician Kingunge Ngombale Mwiru pleaded with the church to withdraw the document to no avail. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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