THE REAL surprise is that anyone was shocked. When Madame Tussauds decided to depict David and Victoria Beckham as Mary and Joseph with Tony Blair, George Bush and the Duke of Edinburgh as The Three Wise Men and Samuel L. Jackson, Hugh Grant and Graham Norton as shepherds, not forgetting Kylie Minogue as an angel, they presumably imagined there was nothing particularly daring in the exercise. Especially when Jesus Himself hardly featured in the tableau.

After all, when Tate Britain exhibited a representation of the Crucifixion made up of discarded Marlboro Light cigarettes, Sarah Lucas’s Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy, in May this year there was no denunciation from the Church of England. Even though Lucas’s work was displayed alongside Damien Hirst’s take on the Passion, a cow carcass entitled The Pursuit of Oblivion, there was no expression of dismay at the distastefulness of it all from the Vatican that I can recall. Admittedly, when Hirst depicted Jesus lying in a cardboard box marked Quality Office Products and entitled his work Jesus is Laid in the Tomb the Evangelical Alliance was moved to comment that these transgressive exercises were becoming “a little tired”. Indeed.

If only, the Madame Tussauds management must be thinking, they had entitled their tableau The Impossibility of Reverence in the Mind of the Heat Generation and asked Nick Serota to contribute a programme note praising them for their subversive reimagining of myth in a way that challenged contemporary establishment views of what we meant by Christmas “stars”, then there wouldn’t have been any trouble.

As my colleague Daniel Finkelstein has pointed out before, it is the events that don’t cause controversy, or provoke news “storms”, that tell you more about Britain than those that do. As he remarked, we got in a frightful tizz about the permissiveness of the prison regime that Jeffrey Archer enjoyed in the final months of his sentence. But the real scandal was that Archer’s treatment wasn’t exceptional. He wasn’t doing anything more than taking advantage of a stunningly lax regime which many prisoners could exploit. The scandal was that no one had objected to the prevailing culture beforehand. So it is with the Beckham Nativity. The really surprising thing is that this calculated offence to Christianity, out of all the deliberate assaults on the Church, should have created such a storm. For the truth is, we have become practically inured towards cultural hostility directed at Christianity.

Indeed, the cheap sensationalism of Young British Artists is no longer, in any sense, boundary-breaking because reverence is the last thing our society appears to accord to traditional Christianity. Consider the coverage of the “Christian Right” during the American presidential elections, and the repeated assumption underlying the reporting that we were in the presence of something dangerous. The casual equation of Christian evangelicals with Islamic fundamentalists, implying moral equivalence between people who want to keep unborn children alive and those who want living Jews and homosexuals dead, did no one a service.

It is, of course, not just legitimate but in certain cases vitally necessary to question the legislative agenda of some Christian groups in the US. Such criticism has certainly enjoyed free rein. But in a spirit of pluralism, I would just ask, how often have the European media given space for a sympathetic hearing to America’s Christian mainstream?

The assumption that possession of traditional religious belief is somehow disabling was, of course, underscored by the treatment of Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian candidate for an EU commissionership. I should say, for the avoidance of doubt, that I profoundly disagree with Signor Buttiglione’s views about homosexuality. I certainly don’t think they should influence public policy. But then neither did he.

He was denied public office in the new EU because he refused to disavow his Catholic faith, even though he explained that it would not, and should not, bear on the performance of his public duties. It’s all very well for us to say that sometimes private acts can prevent someone discharging their public duty effectively. But it has come to something when one of the private acts that debars you from office is taking Mass.

It is in the context of a prevailing cultural hostility towards traditional Christianity that the words last week of Jayne Ozanne, a senior adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, should be read. Ms Ozanne feared that a time would be coming when Christians were “ridiculed for their faith and pressurised into making it a purely private matter”. She may have been guilty of hyperbole when she used the language of “persecution” but the retreat of Christianity from the public square is certainly increasingly apparent. And perhaps nowhere more so than in the failure of Britain’s church leaders to raise their voces against real, and terrible, persecution of Christians across the globe.

In China, Vietnam, Laos, Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt and Indonesia, Christians are variously imprisoned for their faith, tortured, have their families broken up, the public expression of their faith banned, their homes and churches burnt and their schools closed. But who champions their cause, and where do we hear of their suffering? Is this not a religious hatred against which we need to bear witness?

One does not have to be a Christian to be grateful for the ethical teachings of Jesus, the cultural glories of Christianity and the charitable work of the Church. Even those who do not attend church can understand how valuable it is to give one hour a week to consideration of our place in the world, reflection on how we have fallen short in our duties to others and association with those who are also pledging themselves to live better lives. Our society has, undoubtedly, been enriched by its Christian heritage. But our passion is now elsewhere. We are in danger, like Madame Tussauds, of being so caught up in our thoughts about Bush and Blair, or Posh and Becks, that we push Jesus Himself out of the picture.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

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