Not in the Right Spirit? The Latest Religious Storm in a Beer Mug

Civitas, 15 September 2006

In what threatens to be a rerun — mercifully, on only a more sedate and much smaller scale — of last year’s Danish cartoons furore, an ecumenical group calling itself the Churches Advertising Network (CAN) is rapidly becoming the centre of controversy over a poster it commissioned for display this coming Christmas. The poster is intended to remind to all in need of one that, at the core of the festive season, lies an event of religious significance being commemorated, a fact that makes the season more than just an excuse for a two-week bender which for so many is all it has become.
Displayed on the poster is an empty beer-glass down which froth has assumed the form of an image of a bearded face that can, and is clearly intended to, be taken as that of Jesus. Next to it, the poster asks: ‘Where will you find him?’
Newspapers have had no difficulty finding people who object to the the poster.

Today’s Times reports that a clergyman who runs a mission for young people in Yorkshire has called the poster ‘sickening’, because, so he claims, it presents a positive view of drinking. He is quoted as having written about the poster:
‘On the day when a Government-commissioned report suggests that rather than focus on drugs education, schools and youth work bodies should educating young people about drink, i.e drink is much the more serious problem, CAN launch this particularly obtuse poster.’
The irate Yorkshire clergyman seems not alone in considering the poster ill-conceived and offensive. The Times itself is no less scathing about the poster in an editorial commenting on today’s report. It is so, however, for somewhat different reasons than those of the vicar. The leader levels several objections against the poster.
First, it claims, it betrays a singular lack of self-confidence on the part of the churches that commissioned it, if they have felt in need of having to resort to such paid publicity to get their message across. Second, it claims its intended message is unclear and ambiguous. The bearded face, it claims, looks less like God or Jesus than, as it puts it, ‘Ethelred the Unsteady’, and it claims the person after whose whereabouts the question might be asking could just as well be whoever had downed the pint than bore a resemblance to the image it bears. Third, the leader accuses CAN of having lacked the courage – was the pun intended? — of its convictions. Given, so the leader claims, the theme of the poster was ‘redemption through inebriation’, why, it asks, did the poster not follow through with a suitable caption, such as, it obligingly suggests, ‘Reassuringly expansive’ or ‘Refreshes the hearts that other gospels cannot reach’. Instead, so the editorial witheringly concludes, the poster merely paid homage to naivety not to the Nativity.
I must say I see no grounds for either the ponderous condemnation of the poster offered by the Yorkshire clergyman or its more light-hearted dismissal by the Times leader-writer. Contrary to what both critics assert, I do not see it as commending the drinking of alcohol. Quite the contrary. As I interpret the image, it is intending to convey a two-fold message. First, that those currently devoid of a sense of the reality and presence of a loving and forgiving God, and who, in consequence of that void, perhaps, drink to excess, may eventually come to realise — and, as a result of viewing the poster, will do so this coming Christmas — that there is and can be no salvation in life other than through and in God. Second, that a salvific encounter with the living God is more likely to happen this coming Christmas Eve in church than down the local. This is not a frivolous message. Not is it one that can remotely be understood to be condoning let alone encouraging drinking, or suggesting blasphemously that in vino deus.
As for the suggestion that, in commissioning the poster, the churches who have display a disconcerting lack of self-confidence, this must surely rank as one of the most bizarre, baseless and historically unwarranted accusations ever to be made. Granted what has been commissioned is not for display in churches but in magazines, or on buses, or wherever, the suggestion that churches have never commissioned religious iconography to disseminate their message, save when suffering a crisis of self-confidence, is preposterous. That is, unless one supposes Pope Leo X to have been suffering one in deciding to build St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. The same goes for all those others who over the centuries have commissioned the innumerable paintings of the Nativity, and other episodes in the life of Jesus through which they have sought to celebrate and convey what they consider to be his message.
Rather than an advertisement for drowning one’s sorrows in drink, or for turning to drink in quest of an epiphany, as I see the poster, it is inviting viewers of it to discover for themselves an altogether different and more profound and wholesome kind of Christmas spirit than any to be found in a beer glass, or in any other receptacle for alcoholic liquor, save a Chalice. As such, all who consider themselves friends of religion, and who detest the pagan bacchanalia into which our mid-winter festival has once again sadly degenerated, should welcome the poster rather than condemn it.
I, for one, shall certainly be raising a glass or two to it this Christmas, I can tell you!