In the Gospel of St Matthew, we read of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. Herod put to death every male child under the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Christian response was to render unto state power what belonged to it, without being able to identify what did and what didn’t. The results were predictable. First the Christians accommodated empire. Then Christianity became one.

We read in contemporary human rights reports of the Israeli state’s Massacre of Innocents in Gaza and elsewhere. The numbers are disputable, but the fact is not. Israel is a regime with an insatiable lust for the blood of children. That truth may be hard to hear, but is no less true for that.

The Christian response has largely been to regard the Israeli bloodletting as a condign response to what pious Christians regard as the Palestinians’ endemic anti-Semitism—ignoring the fact that anti-Semitism is an evil that Christianity invented, one that Christendom has practiced for centuries, and one that it habitually projects onto everyone else. Applied consistently, of course, the Christian defense of Israel would entail the extirpation of Christendom itself. If anti-Semitism can only be defeated by the physical elimination of its presumptive source, why not eliminate the actual source? But consistency has never been the forte of either the Zionists or their Christian handmaidens. And it’s easy enough to see why.

Nietzsche famously declared the churches of Christendom to be the tombs and sepulchres of God. He might more aptly have described them as the burial grounds of justice. Christendom is where resistance to injustice crucifies itself and abjectly goes to die.

There are noble exceptions to this rule, but too few of them to overturn the rule itself. The notable fact about Christianity since Constantine is its marriage to state and corporate power, and the farcical quality of its claims to moral pre-eminence. You can expect justice from a church here and there. You can only expect complicity and shamelessness from the Church as a whole.

That’s the only Christmas sermon worth preaching in the Year of Our Lord, 2024 AD. The crux is that morally speaking, “Merry Christmas” is the emptiest of empty sentiments. Christendom has nothing to celebrate: it’s lost its way in the moral wilderness. It should either find its way out, or forfeit the pretense it makes at proclaiming the word of a just God. It’s a long way from Herod to the present, and a contemptible thing to have made no progress in the passage from the one thing to the next. But progress is a matter of works, not grace. If you don’t put in the work, you get no progress. And when you don’t, you have no one to blame for the contempt you earn but yourself.