I’M a little concerned about Christmas this year. Not because in the view of supermarkets and the advertising

industry it’s already upon us and I’m grossly unprepared for it, but because I’m led to believe it may not really be the religious watershed it has traditionally been made out to be.

There have long been discrepancies among theologians about the actual date of the birth of Christ in Palestine, up to five years either way, I am told. And we’ve had to put up with the bland ‘X-mas’ abbreviation, which annoys those with a Christian background who feel it officially reduces the spiritual significance of the festival to a commercial extravaganza of greed and excess.

No, my confusion has been sown by my former employer, ploughing its lonely furrow of broadcasting fairness and respect for religious and establishment propriety, and choosing to advocate the use of the more obscure Common Era (CE) and BCE (Before Common Era), in place of the conventional demarcation of our calendar into BC (before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – year of the Lord).

The argument from Aaqil Ahmed, the relatively new boss of the BBC’s religion and ethics department, is that the move represents ‘religiously neutral’ terminology.

Unfortunately, along with a chorus of derision about obsessive political correctness, it has touched a nerve among Christian groups. Far from accepting this as a ‘neutral’ initiative, they consider it part of a sinister anti-Christian campaign, equating it with other perceived institutional assaults on the faith which have seen a crucifix-wearer banned from serving at an airline check-out desk, a builder hounded for displaying a cross symbol on the dashboard of his van and a doctor disciplined for offering to pray with a patient.

Now there is indeed a flourishing industry in being offended, just as it is certainly not unknown across the breadth of racial groups or religious faiths at one time or another to court sympathy by playing the ‘victim’ card.
So it wasn’t surprising to read the Daily Mail, for example, reporting ‘fury in the Vatican’ over the BBC’s ‘foolishness’ for dumping the terms AD and BC’.
It went on to stoke its own agenda by suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church had claimed that the BBC was using respect for other religions ‘to erase every trace of Christianity from British culture’.

You’d be forgiven for imagining the dilemma among some Fleet Street hacks over which of their favourite targets to take the greater pleasure in bashing – the BBC or the Church.

Obviously in this case the broadcaster won. But what got overlooked in all the fluster was that the BBC had not actually issued any diktat banning the use of the existing designation at all.

But having used the terms for so long, we are left with the problem of how to express the past. It is relatively easy to drop AD because you can substitute it with reference to happenings up to 2,000 years ago. It is undoubtedly more difficult for BC.

I was therefore waiting for someone to explain to me exactly what the ‘Common Era’ is. So I found myself indebted to an erudite Daily Telegraph reader who explained that ‘the expression Common Era has a recorded use in Europe among Christians as far back as 1615 in its Latin form vulgaris aerae and, in 1635, in England as Vulgar Era, where vulgar has its original meaning of the common people.

The first recorded use of Common Era and Before Common Era in calendar form in England was in the 18th century. As the BBC was not around in 1615, it seems harsh to blame it for introducing the expression.

It isn’t necessarily common for Jews, Muslims and Hindus, all of whom have their own dating system, but they don’t seem to have any problem with BC and AD. So its use is quite some way away from appearing offensive to non-Christians.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 70 per cent of the British population profess to being Christian, even if they don’t actually go to church, so it’s understandable that Christian values play an important role in our laws, way of life and values.

We have been pretty ambivalent about adopting the PC terminology of ‘given name’ for what most of us used to describe as ‘Christian name’, and even if you haven’t enlisted into the ranks of the avidly devout Christian soldiers, it just seems like the removal of yet another layer of one’s cultural comfort zone.
Nevertheless, demographics have at least confirmed the perception that the nation as a whole now espouses many more creeds than once dominated our society from the spires of cultural establishment.

The problem lies with the religious mindset, which governs ideology, ritual and
terminology and does have a tendency to set things in stone, resisting change as an affront to doctrinal belief.

Despite the lurid tabloid headlines, neither the BBC nor the nation is actually turning its back on God. Reality doesn’t disappear with terminology; Celsius can co-exist with Fahrenheit.

It’s unlikely that reference to Advent will be banned before Christmas – even if there is commercial pressure for the calendars leading up to the religious festival to presage simply the ‘winter holidays’.

Surely it has a lot to do with confidence. In the great cultural melting pot across the Atlantic there is room for the celebration of Hanukkah, Diwali, Christmas or Chinese Lunar New Year, with less emphasis of a national hierarchy.

Try telling our continental neighbours that Christian feast days such as Ascension, Assumption and All Saints, which may have lost much of their religious adherence but still have a holiday attached, are to be dropped in case they offend non-Christians.