We don't think of ourselves as a Christian country but I bet non-Christian immigrants do, and I bet they are not disappointed. They probably won't even notice that their invitation to a Christmas dinner put on by Auckland Regional Migrant Services has gone to great trouble not to mention Christmas.
Let's be fair, the agency wants to avoid any risk that its clients might think the invitation is only for Christians. I'm more disappointed to read that the "festive lunch", where the providers will be careful to say, "season's greetings", will be a "multi-ethnic pot-luck lunch", whatever that is. I wonder if they would prefer the real thing.
You can go to too much trouble to make people feel at home. They are not at home and do not always need to be reminded of it. Having chosen to come to a different culture, even as refugees, it is just possible they have been looking forward to the experience of Christmas in a country classified as Christian.
They cannot say so, for nobody wants to embarrass those who treat you with excessive sensitivity. But I do hope the guests of the nice people at Auckland Regional Migrant Services respond to their "season's greetings" with a hearty "Merry Christmas". Those are two English words every immigrant will know.
Soon enough they will discover that Western countries downplay their religious heritage even at Christmas. When Dame Susan Devoy, as Race Relations Commissioner, wrote a contribution to the debate this week in which she said, "the overwhelming majority of Kiwis are Christians", she must have meant it in a cultural sense. She has had a religious upbringing and maybe you need to have had one to realise how much of what we think, say and do reflects the stories, philosophy and ethics of Christianity.
Anthropologists delight in telling us Christmas had its origins in celebrations of the northern winter solstice that were common in pre-Christian cultures. But Christianity gave it a story. Cynics will say its celebration today is a creation of commerce but commerce alone could not have created goodwill on this scale. Commerce without a story is Mother's Day.
New immigrants know the story. Many of them come from countries that are more Christian in a church-going sense than New Zealand is. But more of them are now coming from Muslim countries and they know the story too. If they are the reason the Arms agency is neutralising its language, we have a problem.
Their religious tradition overlaps Christianity in its monotheism and texts, but it dominates their identity much more than religion does for other races or nationalities.
For the past two weeks countries like ours have been asking why young Islamic immigrants in Western Europe would go to a rock concert in Paris and shoot a hundred people in the back. They did it in the name of a religion they know Westerners find hard to respect, particularly its dress code for women. It disgraces the men who need them to wear it.
It is hard to think of Islam with good will, even at Christmas. It's too hard if Muslims cannot bear its name.
