Although it has long been a Christian holiday - and was a pagan holiday before that - in recent years Christmas in the West has been largely secularized. The Church of England would like to reverse the secularization process and has demanded that the Royal Mail issue only religious stamps at Christmas time - no snowflakes, no Santas, and no secular imagery.

The Guardian reports:

The assault on the most popular annual designs for stamps, issued at the Post Office's busiest time of the year, came during a summer debate at the church's general synod at York University, amid complaints that what is a significant Christian festival is being ignored. Some members of the synod clearly saw the choice of design as a plot to appease an increasingly secular society and wanted the card-sending public to have a constant reminder of the nature of the festival they are celebrating. Every year the church feels it has to issue posters to tell people what Christmas is about.

To start off, I should say that I don’t mind if the church asks that religious stamps also be issued — that seems fair. The question si whether religious stamps should be the only ones issues. With that in mind, there are some serious problems in the above.

First, who are they to think that they need to “remind” the public about what they think Christmas is about. They don’t own Christmas — Christmas is a holiday that is completely outside their control. They have no more authority to determine the One True Nature of Christmas than do pagans they originally took most of it form. The choice of non-religious designs does not “appease” a secular society, it reflects a secular society. Religious stamps won’t turn back the clock and make people religious again.

Church members remain concerned about the playing down of the Christian message and some organisations dropping any mention of Christmas whatsoever. Being open and charitable however, speakers yesterday said that they did not mind other religions having their own festivals commemorated in stamps.

Oh, isn’t that generous of them? I feel all warm and tingly inside now.

Timothy Royle of Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, said: "We live in an increasingly secular society in which people don't like Christianity to be recognised. Other faiths should be able to celebrate their own festivals with stamps but Christmas is fundamentally a Christian festival in our country."

If it were true that “Christmas is fundamentally a Christian festival,” then they wouldn’t be having this debate in the first place. The absence of religious stamps is precisely because Christmas has stopped being a fundamentally Christian holiday. Today it has become a cultural holiday that still retains some of its original religious overtones but which has lost most of its overt religious meaning for many, if not most, people. This is because Christmas has long been an important holiday which people have not wanted to drop even as they have dropped their religious devotion.

Read More:

• Episcopalians
• Anglicanism
• Evangelicalism
• Archbishop Rowan Williams