Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are all visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. At this time of year, people and events that have gone before feel closer at hand – both the personal and the historical.
One of the main ways we experience this is through our tradition of Christmas carols. A recent YouGov survey showed that 14 per cent of Britons usually attend a carol service. Not as high as one would hope, but attendance rates are rising: in 2023, Church of England Christmas services alone saw a 20 per cent leap in attendance. I sense 2025 is already continuing the trend. Yet many churches will be pointlessly squandering the opportunity by continuing a fad which both turns off newcomers and lets down regulars: modernised Christmas carols.
If you have never experienced this phenomenon, then God bless you, everyone. But I have. The modernisers have three targets in their sights: the senior, the sexist and the strange.
First, the senior – stuff that sounds old. Most obvious is the needless excision of the ‘ye’, ‘thee’, and ‘thou’, up to and including awkward renditions of ‘O Come All You Faithful’ and ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’ (and yes, that comma is in the right place – it’s the rest that is merry, not the gentlemen). The condescending assumption here is that newcomers will either be put off by fusty old-fashioned language, or that they’re too stupid to understand it. The redacters in the hymnodist Ministry of Truth are haunted by memories of slack-jawed boys in short trousers being taught Julius Caesar by a droning schoolmaster in a three-piece suit.
The condescending assumption is that newcomers will either be put off by fusty old-fashioned language, or that they’re too stupid to understand it
Then comes the sexist. ‘Good Christian Men Rejoice’ becomes ‘Good Christian Friends’, and of course the aforementioned gentlemen resting merry become ‘people’ (losing a syllable along the way). ‘Joy to the World’ no longer exhorts ‘let men their songs employ’ but ‘let us’. Even ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ – the most glorious hymn ever written, never mind Christmas carol – isn’t safe. ‘Pleased as man with man to dwell’ becomes ‘pleased with us in flesh to dwell’. This is no superficial change – it junks the theological significance of Christ being incarnate as male, a second Adam undoing the sin of the first. As an older carol reminds us, ‘Adam lay ybounden’, not Eve.
Finally, the strange. The basics of the Nativity, a simple story that conquered the world, remain ubiquitous. But its theological riches are endless. ‘Joy to the World’ promises Christ’s blessing ‘far as the curse is found’. Yet rather than momentarily explain the reference to Genesis 3, we just sing ‘wherever guilt is found’. Some carols, such as ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’, with its ‘Babel sounds’ and ‘prophet bards’, seem to drop off the hymn sheet entirely.
These changes are well-intentioned: outreach-minded churches fear inaccessibility and so seek to remove stumbling blocks. Quite right – the New Testament says as much. With regard to music, much of this specifically flows from the work of the Jubilate Group, an evangelical publisher set up in the 1960s by the late Bishop of Chester, Michael Baughen. With hymnody in the doldrums, they sought to revive it by both writing new hymns and updating old ones.
The former worked well enough. But the results of the latter already sound more dated than anything they replaced. A Jubilate member once told me that Christians who complain about modernised lyrics should realise they don’t come to church to ‘have their tummy rubbed’. True enough. But those old lyrics are precisely why so many non-Christians also turn up to carol services. I have at least one unbelieving relative who no longer bothers with her local carol service precisely because the traditional lyrics have been lost. And far from tummy-rubbing, giving regular churchgoers old words to sing is part of our spiritual formation: it humbles us in the knowledge that the Church has been around far longer than us.
In the late 1960s, after the introduction of a trial liturgy, W.H. Auden wrote his rector the kind of letter clergymen love to receive. ‘Dear Father Allen,’ he began, ‘Have you gone stark raving mad?’. Auden waxed lyrical on the Prayerbook and the King James:
Our Church has the singular good-fortune of having its Prayer-Book composed and its Bible translated at exactly the right time, i.e. late enough for the language to be intelligible to any English-speaking person born this century (any child of six can be told what ‘the quick and the dead’ means) and early enough, i.e. when people still had an instinctive feeling for the formal and the ceremonious which is essential in liturgical language.
The same is true of our carols. We have a glorious, accessible, basically Victorian canon. Does anyone really misunderstand ‘thee’ and ‘thou’? Does anyone actually care if we sing ‘men’ rather than ‘friends’? Does anyone benefit in the end from dumbing down rich if unfamiliar language? It’s all so tiresome.
Of course, learned swats will point out that Wesley’s great carol was originally called ‘Hark! How All the Welkin Rings!’. Yes, lyrical changes can happen. And there are new carols I sing with gusto. But that’s no reason to pretend all our carols were written five minutes ago. At Christmas, more than any other time, as Auden again said, ‘one of the great functions of the liturgy is to keep us in touch with the past and the dead’.
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