Holy Smoke: Why was C.S. Lewis such a killjoy at Christmas? with Alister McGrath
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2024
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
‘It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure… Anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It's almost blackmail… Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?’
Step forward C.S. Lewis, beloved Christian apologist and children’s author, whose splenetic denunciation of ‘the whole dreary business’ of Christmas and mean-spirited comments about carol singers are hard to reconcile with his reputation for benevolence.
To make sense of the author’s views, Damian Thompson is joined by the renowned theologian and C.S. Lewis expert Prof Alister McGrath for a Christmas episode of Holy Smoke. They talk about the influence Lewis had on McGrath’s own conversion, the significance of the nativity and the question of whether the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth are apocryphal.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15 and a free bottle of Proreuxa champagne |
| 0:05.3 | if you go to spectator.com.uk for slash jingle. This offer is UK only and subject to availability. Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. |
| 0:29.6 | I'm Damien Tusser. |
| 0:34.6 | See if you can guess the identity of the 20th century Scrooge, who had this to say about the public celebration of Christmas. |
| 0:47.5 | It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. |
| 0:52.1 | Anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked |
| 0:56.0 | present of his own. It's almost blackmail. Who hasn't heard the wail of despair when, |
| 1:01.7 | just as everyone hoped the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy, |
| 1:07.6 | whom we hardly remember, flops unwelcome through the letterbox and back to the |
| 1:12.3 | grefle shops one of us has to go. Things are given us presents which no mortal ever bought |
| 1:18.5 | for himself gaudy and useless gadgets. We're told that the whole jerry business must go on |
| 1:25.5 | because it's good for trade. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter |
| 1:32.3 | just to help shopkeepers? |
| 1:35.3 | And then there's this. |
| 1:38.3 | At my front door they are once every year the voices of the local choir, |
| 1:42.3 | those are boys or children who haven't even tried |
| 1:45.6 | to learn to sing or to memorize the words of the piece they're murdering, the instruments they |
| 1:51.2 | play with real conviction of the doorbell and the knocker, and money is what they're after. |
| 1:58.4 | Step forward, C.S. Lewis, the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia, |
| 2:03.7 | the screw-shaped letters, and mere Christianity. Now I should say immediately that Lewis was |
| 2:10.8 | distinguishing between the solemn Christian feast of relativity, which was very important to him, |
| 2:16.3 | and the commercial celebration of what he called |
... |
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