English Heritage try to steal Christmas (again).

Why the propagandists won't give up on the 'sol-invictus' myth.

It happens almost every year that propagandists try to steal Christmas from Christ and the Church.

A couple of days ago, it was English Heritage’s turn. They put out a tweet claiming that Christmas on the twenty-fifth of December was adopted, stolen, or borrowed from the Roman sun god Sol Invictus and a pagan midwinter festival.

Tom Holland, the co-host of The Rest Is History, put his head in his hands and tweeted, “Please make it stop.” Every time this old trope is trotted out with the intention of destabilising and stealing Christmas, historians have to remind propagandists that the claim is simply wrong.

Which raises the obvious question: why do they keep doing it?

The reason the claim is wrong is straightforward. Some time before the Roman pagan festival emerges in the sources, the Church had already made its impact and claims known with the belief that Christ’s conception took place on March 25, leading naturally to the celebration of his birth on December 25. The Sol Invictus festival breaks into public consciousness significantly later. In other words, it follows rather than precedes.

Hippolytus of Rome (c. AD 170–235) explicitly dates Christ’s birth to December 25 in his Commentary on Daniel (c. AD 204), well before any secure evidence of a Sol Invictus festival on that date.

The association of Christ’s conception with March 25 derives from Jewish and early Christian traditions linking a prophet’s conception and death to the same calendar date. See De Pascha Computus (anonymous, 3rd century), which assumes March 25 as the date of both the Crucifixion and the Annunciation.

But the more important question we have to face is what this repeated attempt to hijack Christmas is really about. Why is paganism being used as a political tool?

The answer seems to lie in the instrumentalisation of paganism as a kind of cultural solvent, aimed at dissolving Christianity and getting rid of it. Pagan propagandists suggest that Christianity should be reframed as derivative, parasitic, or opportunistic.

This has been going on for the whole of my lifetime, and it is now, as it was then, simply not true.

One of the obvious effects of this narrative is that it delegitimises the moral claims of Christianity and the way Christianity has shaped society. It suggests that Christianity is a colonial interloper rather than what it truly is: the civilisational matrix of Europe.

This is not neutral, if flawed, antiquarianism. It is full-blown ideological reframing, and the stakes are very high.

Christmas has become the public glue that holds together the entire civic space, encompassing schools, music, architecture, and civic life. It frames all of this within the teachings and character of Christ. It brings a very specific message — that God enters history at a particular time and place — and, I think this is the part that they particularly do not like, that this event has a moral claim on our self-understanding and our behaviour.

I have always suspected that, as with atheists, pagans resent this moral claim. They are trying to displace the universal morality of Christianity with a relativistic, do-whatever-you-want pseudo-neo-paganism.

What is extraordinary is that English Heritage should lend itself to this task.

After all, English Heritage has a job, and that job is to preserve national memory. And the national memory it curates is entirely Christian. Christianity built the culture that English Heritage exists to preserve: cathedrals, calendars, moral grammar, laws, language, customs, festivals, and music.

The neo-pagans who appear to be employed by English Heritage are brazen enough to suggest that paganism is the real England, and that Christianity is a colonial interloper. This is simply untrue.

So why this new secular-pagan alliance between the managerial elite and a romanticised pagan past? Why are they doing it?

One reason may be that paganism has no binding moral code in the way Christianity does. Christianity acts as a constraint on the raw exercise of power because it teaches universal moral virtues for which people — especially those in power — are accountable.

Holland has repeatedly argued — most notably in Dominion — that Christianity did not absorb paganism but fundamentally dismantled it, desacralising power, nature, and empire in favour of moral accountability and the sanctity of the person.

Paganism, by contrast, is a make-it-up-as-you-go religion. It does what it wants.