Article
Christmas culture
Culture
4 min read

De-coding the hidden messages in Christmas carols

Beyond the festive imagery, some carols hint at rebellion and even revolution.

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

Dressed in Victorian clothes, a group of carol singers stand and sing amid Christmas foliage.
Mario Mendez on Unsplash.

Carols are one of the best loved features of Christmas celebrations and one of the most effective means of spreading the good news of the birth of Jesus, the Saviour of the world. In addition to their clear proclamation of the doctrine of incarnation, that God has taken on human form and come to dwell among us, some of our most popular carols may also have been written to convey further hidden messages. 

Take ‘O come, all ye faithful’, for instance. On the surface it seems a straightforward hymn of adoration to the newborn Christ but in fact historians suggest that it may well have been written in its original Latin form, ‘Adeste, fideles,’ as a coded message to rally Jacobites to the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie on the eve of his rebellion against the British crown in 1745. The man generally reckoned to have been its author, John Francis Wade, was a fervent supporter of the Jacobite cause who seems to have written it while he was plain-chant scribe at the English Catholic college in Douai, France where a weekly Mass was celebrated for the return of the Stuarts to the British throne. 

Half hidden Jacobite images, including Scotch thistles and the Stuart cypher, appear in the earliest manuscripts of the carol. Its call to ‘the faithful’ may have had a double meaning and been intended to alert the supporters of the ‘King over the water’ to Charles James Stuart’s imminent arrival in Britain from the  continent. Similarly, its reference to ‘Rex angelorum’, translated as the King of the Angels, could also be taken to mean the true king of the English in contrast to the Hanoverian incumbent, George II. In its original Latin form, the carol seems initially to have been sung only in Roman Catholic places of worship, notably in the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in London and its tune was long known as the Portuguese Hymn. 

Another well-known Christmas song may contain similarly coded messages. It has been suggested on the basis of letters from Jesuit priests attached to the English college in Douai, France, that that ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ was written to teach the elements of the Roman Catholic faith to children during the period following the Reformation in which it was officially proscribed and suppressed in the United Kingdom. In this reading, the twelve drummers drumming are the articles of the Apostle’s Creed; the eleven pipers piping the faithful apostles; the ten lords a-leaping the ten commandments; the nine ladies dancing the fruits of the Holy Spirit; the eight maids a-milking the beatitudes; the seven swans a-swimming the seven sacraments of the Catholic church; and the ‘five gold rings’ the five wounds of the crucified Christ.  

A hidden message of a rather different kind may be lurking in another popular carol, ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’, which first appeared in a radical Sheffield newspaper entitled The Iris on Christmas Eve 1816. Its author, James Montgomery, the paper’s editor, was twice imprisoned for his support of the French Revolution and reform riots in Britain. The original last verse, which described Justice repealing the sentences of those sentenced to imprisonment and Mercy breaking their chains, was regarded by the authorities as too polemical and subversive did not find its way into any hymn book when the carol was taken up and sung in churches.  

A carol with a more overtly contemporary message is ‘It came upon the midnight clear’. Its author, Edmund Sears, who claimed descent from one of the original Pilgrim Fathers, was a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts with a deep commitment to social reform and the promotion of peace. He wrote it in 1849, following the violent revolutions in Europe and the bloody and costly war between the United States of America and Mexico in the previous year. These conflicts were undoubtedly in his mind when he wrote ‘O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and here the angels sing’ and expressed his heartfelt longing for a future age of gold ‘when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendours fling’, sentiments which we can certainly echo this Christmas. 

The German carol Stille Nacht (Silent Night), which regularly tops the list of the world’s favourite Christmas song, underwent several adaptations through the twentieth century expressing the changing political mood in Germany. A Socialist version entitled ‘The Workers’ Silent Night’ which circulated widely around 1900 highlighted the prevailing poverty, misery and distress and ended with an appeal to wake up to social action rather than sleep in heavenly peace. It was considered subversive and banned by the German Government before the First World War. During that war, German soldiers on the front adapted Stille Nacht to express a sense of homesickness and in the period of rampant inflation that followed in the 1920s Weimar Republic a social democratic version asked plaintively: ‘in poverty, one starves silently,/When does the saviour come?’. A 1940 Nazi adaptation turned the song into a celebration of the fatherland and traditional German family values. More recent parodies of the English version have tended to focus on the commercial aspects of the festive season, like the American author Chris Fabry’s send-up of last minute Christmas shopping:  ‘Silent Night, Solstice Night, All is calm, all half price’. 

The tradition of adapting traditional Christmas carols to contemporary events has a long pedigree in Britain. ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’ has proved particularly appealing to parodists. During the abdication crisis of 1937 a version circulated which began ‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our king’ and a group of journalists (of which I was one) heralded the birth of the SDP in 1981 with ‘Hark The Times and Guardian roar, Glory to the Gang of Four’. It is rarer to hear parodies of carols nowadays. Perhaps in our troubled times we just want and need to focus on their message of the coming of the Christchild and of God’s kingdom with its promise of a more peaceful and joyful world.  

Essay
America
Comment
Leading
Politics
6 min read

Democracy, hypocrisy and us

A deep dive into the pitfalls of political vision and our response to them.

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Donald Trump holds his arms out to his side while speaking.
Trump addresses a faith leader event.
x/realdonaldtrump.

Coverage of the Republican candidate for Vice-President, J.D. Vance can't help but return again and again to his Christian intellectual influences. Whether it's an interview with Rod Dreher or an analysis of Patrick Deneen and other 'New Right' thinkers, many US political journalists are having to give their readers a crash course in some of the most controversial ideas in contemporary theology. One recent Politico article stands out because it didn't just introduce an unsuspecting audience of political obsessives to an obscure theologian, it also told them (us) about contradictory ways one might read said obscure theologian. And yet these contradictions force us to confront a difficulty facing anyone engaged in democratic debate.  

In the article , Ian Ward sought to explore the impact of Rene Girard's scapegoat mechanism on Vance. In doing so, Ward underlines the importance of Girard's ideas in the intellectual circles around J.D. Vance and his mentor, Peter Thiel.  

Girard, a French academic who died in 2015, is remembered foremost for his analysis of the relation between desire and conflict. Girard proposes that desire is ‘memetic, that is to say, it mimics; I want what I see that others want. This naturally leads to conflict, a conflict that can only be resolved by a scapegoat. Identifying a scapegoat, an out-group, is a force powerful enough to create a sense of solidarity between those would otherwise be in conflict over shared desires. 

The Politico take considered how Vance's reading of Girard might relate to Vance's defence of his running mate's false suggestion that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbour's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It went as far to suggest that—rather than a rejection of Girard's analysis— Vance could be understood to be applying a pragmatic reading of Girard. Ward writes:  

Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society. 

Scapegoating is inevitable, deploy it to your advantage. We cannot know how exactly this or any reading of Rene Girard factors into his political tactics. What we can know is that Vance's public fascination with big ideas opens him up to a charge upon which a healthy democracy depends: hypocrisy.  

In contrast, there is often a surprising transparency to Trump's appeals to self-interest, Addressing a audience in July, Trump declared:  

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. 

As much as Vance and others try to change this, there is little ideological content, no substance behind ‘Make America Great Again’ insofar as Trump tells it. It is politics at its most transactional and what Trump offer his supporters, beautiful or otherwise, is so often a scapegoat. Trump tends to be pretty open about this and, as ugly as this kind of politics is, there is a strange kind of honesty to it. But Vance is different. He has big ideas. And however weird you may think these ideas are, and however much tension there seems to be between his love of Rene Girard and his scapegoating of Haitian immigrants, democracy is better for that tension. Constructive democratic debate, in some sense, depends on hypocrisy. Without it, democracy would be nothing more than a negotiation around mere self-interest.  

A politician with an ideological vision is one that can be held accountable. Keir Starmer's recent decision to pay back £6,000 worth of gifts is a case in point. Had he not sought to set himself as a contrast to the Boris Johnson of Partygate, the criticism of his accepting clothes and tickets would not have had the same bite. 

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact.

The first generations of Christians encountered a similar problem. The law they believed that they had received from God showed them a vision for the good life just as it revealed all the ways they fell short. As the early church leader Paul wrote: “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” We might add that through political ideology or aspiration comes the knowledge of political hypocrisy.  

Had Vance never publicly explored Girard's theory, if he were only an opportunist more like Trump, we would have one less means by which to hold him to account. Every politician will be found lacking when judged by their public ideological aspirations. And the more ideological aspirations, the greater the charge of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy will always be found wherever we find people debating and aspiring to ideas more perfect than they are.  I'm not defending any individual hypocrisy; the residents of Springfield, Ohio and newcomers across the US deserve so much better. Hypocrisy is always disappointing, but it is less disappointing than the alternatives: either a naked pursuit of self-interest or a naïve expectation of ideological purity. 

The question for each of us in a democracy is how we live with hypocrisy, expecting it while still expecting more from those who wish to serve us in public office. And a moment's introspection reveals that it is a charge that confronts each of us also: the shaming gap between my aspirations for my life and the reality. To ask how we live with these hypocritical politicians is really to ask how we live with ourselves? 

With that we return to Girard. He claimed that Jesus Christ willingly became a transparently innocent scapegoat and in doing so undermined the mechanism. In the Politico article, Vance is quoted as follows:  

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims. 

The exacting logic of the crucifixion prevents us from scapegoating even the scapegoating politicians. 

But Jesus’ death is more than an embodied social critique. In coming to us and dying in the person of Jesus, God showed his love for imperfect people struggling under the weight of perfect ideas. He came to give the home and safety we all desire, offered freely to hypocrites.  The point of Christ's death is not, at least in the first instance, to inspire me to treat others better. It is God's unconditioned offer to the broken and hypocritical, as the broken and hypocritical, not as he'd rather we be. 

Paul puts it like this: "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Yes, God's grace is too dramatic, too strong not to provoke us and empower us to change, but his love comes to us before any change. It comes to us as we are, nursing our pitchforks and that self-righteous sense that it's all really someone else's fault.  

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact. We must not excuse this hypocrisy; we should hold ourselves and our leaders to account. And yet we can do so gratefully haunted and gratefully held by a God who came for hypocrites.