Church in a spin

The Churches Advertising Network (CAN) will be bringing out its posters and radio ads very soon, celebrating Christmas and getting people to think about the Christian faith. But in a reversal of the old Salvation Army motto, ‘why should the Devil have all the good tunes?’, they’ve been pipped by the opposition this year. The anti-Christ, Richard Dawkins himself, author of ‘The God Delusion’ along with his devilish hordes, the Borders book chain, have cleverly scooped this year’s award for the best Christmas campaign, or rather, anti-Christmas campaign.

Of course it’s wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels! ‘Faithless’? … Militant, fundamentalist atheism is a faith like any other, dependent on a belief that the human race with all its wonders, it’s incredible sense of self- understanding, love, poetry and music, is as much a cosmic accident as a chunk of rock circling Saturn. The adherents of this faith are completely confident that death is the end, that life has no meaning, that matter came about by chance.

A Christmas PR campaign for a book that would like to see the end of Christmas? I’m sure it’s done with a touch of irony (though possibly, I fear, an irony lost on the staff at Borders.) However, if Christmas is a delusion, then linking a campaign with this worldwide festival is also dishonest. Those of us with doubts, those who are agnostic, even the less militant branch of the atheistic persuasion, would all probably admit that the world would be a duller place without festivals like Christmas, and Borders certainly know they would be out of business without their Christmas stocking fillers and the season of goodwill to all.

Wrong, too, from a PR point of view. As CAN has discovered in the past PR campaigns that miss the mark can backfire dangerously. Would Borders have dared bring out this campaign poking fun at Divali, or Ramadan? Hardly. Dawkins is against those too, of course, as he is against anything which cannot be proved by science. Watch out for the backlash.