When first invited to respond to Scott Stephens’ stimulating exploration of connections between faith and culture, I groaned. I had resolved to never again even think of The Da Vinci Code. But Scott’s reflections on the cultural implications of the novel and of art are fresh and engaging. His reflections on the consequences for Christian attitudes to Christmas, and to the use of embryonic stem cells, also provoke thought, even though I was not finally persuaded by them.
For Scott, The Da Vinci Code appeals to a "sloppy, sentimental spirituality". He opposes sentimentality to faith and ethical rigour, detecting sentimentality in conventional Christian attitudes to Christmas and to the embryo. Sentimentality, of course, is a pejorative word: it is sentiment misused. I would describe sentimentality as feeling without deep connection. When our judgments are governed by sentimentality, our feelings are connected neither to ethical reflection, nor to concrete relationships, nor to commitment. Sentimentality can lead us, for example, to oppose capital punishment when it threatens an attractive Australian and to demand it for someone who kills Australians.
Not all sentiment, however, is sentimentality. We might empathise deeply with asylum seekers, for example, be deeply moved and angered by their plight, argue that it is immoral and inconsistent with a reasonable or Christian view of humanity, and resolve to have them treated more humanely. Our sentiment here complements ethical rigour and faith.
Scott is right to see the risk of sentimentality in Christmas piety. It can be a time for feeling good about babies, family and God, without attending to the meaning of Jesus Christ and to his claim on us. But for most Christians, the "babe in the manger" feeds the conviction that in Jesus, God is with us.
God’s presence is mediated by the vulnerable reality of an ordinary human life, with all its messiness. The fact that God has taken human beings so seriously as to join them has ethical consequences. It marks each human being and all human relationships as precious and irreplaceable in God’s sight. This closeness of God to ordinary human life and to each human life is the scandal of Christianity.
As Scott claims, it does entail the rejection of spiritualities amassed for security, but more fundamentally it entails the rejection of the security we find in keeping God at a safe distance. That is why "the babe in the manger" can be challenging.