the pattas...: ‘Put the Christ back into Christmas’: Which ‘Christ?’

Far-right leader and one of the loudest anti-migrant voices in the UK, Tommy Robinson, has urged his “Unite the Kingdom” movement supporters to join a Christmas carol concert on the 13th of December 2025 in London to “put the Christ back into Christmas.’ He wants a large-scale Christmas event as a show of national pride, saying, ‘This event is not about politics…it is about Jesus Christ – fully and completely.’ This nationalist agenda is immensely hostile to people seeking asylum and Muslims, and is rooted in xenophobia and Islamophobia.

The Joint Public Issues team in the UK, a partnership between the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church, is offering ‘rapid resources’[1] to churches in resisting the co-option of Christian symbols for a nationalist agenda, including Christmas. Their posters ‘Christ has always been in Christmas’ and ‘outsiders are welcome’ challenge the anti-migrant campaign of the far-right during this Christmas.

There are twin dangers to our context today, particularly in relation to Christmas. One is the growing secularism, in which Christmas is interpreted as a ‘winter festival,’ and where market and consumerism have taken over our public sphere. The other is growing far-right extremism, where they hijack Christianity by spreading hatred in the name of faith against the other, particularly people who are seeking asylum and against Muslims, with a claim of ‘winning back Britain to Christ.’ In the present climate, we must critically examine what it means to “put the Christ back into Christmas.” Which “Christ” is being invoked in such appeals? It is certainly not a Christ in whose name hatred is legitimized, nor one whose symbols are appropriated for nationalist projects, nor one evoked merely through perfunctory declarations that “Christ is born today.” The other slogan that I hear during this season is “Jesus is the reason for this season.” But again, we haven’t reasoned out how Jesus is the reason for this season?

The reading from Matthew 11:2-10, which is the lectionary reading for the third Sunday in Advent 2025, is a helpful hermeneutical aid in our discussion here. John, when he was imprisoned by Herod, heard about Jesus, the Messiah’s deeds, and sent his disciples to enquire whether Jesus Christ is the one who is to come or whether they should wait for another one. Jesus could have answered a yes or a no, rather he invites John’s disciples to go and tell what they hear and see, the kind of transformation Jesus, the Messiah was offering to the people in the communities: the bling receiving their sight, the lame walking, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead are raising and the poor have good news brought to them. Jesus Christ’s identity is interwoven with people’s experience of transformation.

Jesus further says that blessed is anyone who takes no offence at him. To put this in other words, blessed is anyone who is not offended in the name of Jesus Christ.

Jesus could have proved his messiahship by explaining the fulfilments of the prophecies in his life, but rather, Jesus Christ’s identity is known by the deeds he does in the community, by the transformation happening in the community and by offering goodness in his name.

So, drawing on Jesus’ own self-accounting of his identity for his Messiahship based on his deeds of transformation is of great significance for us today in our discussion to ‘put the Christ back into Christmas.’ Which ‘Christ’ are we putting back into Christmas? It is this ‘Christ’ who self-identified himself through the liberative works of Jesus that we put back into Christmas.

Christ, who offers sight to the blind by opening new paths