On Christmas morning I stood in the Cathedral and read the Gospel. I did not simply read it aloud; I ‘performed’ it. I moved between voices, I was an angel, I had a small rod puppet shepherd, and then there was the holy family. I was conscious that this story is not an abstract text but a narrative meant to be heard and inhabited.
There was a moment, brief and intentional, where the oddness of the scene was acknowledged: I, a bearded man, had to embody a pregnant Mary. The biblical text stated it, twice. Rather than pretending otherwise, I named it. People laughed, gently. The laughter was not the point; what followed was. The room relaxed. The congregation listened. In that moment something unspoken was shared: a trust that we were listening together, not auditioning one another for ideological purity.
For many in the room and, indeed, some familial viewers at home, my reading was a highlight; a focal point around which the rest of the service hung. I had worked with the BBC to ensure that it was the gateway to the liturgy, the sermon and the music.
Later that morning, on my phone, I encountered a different reception of the same moment.
On social media, particularly on X, the Gospel reading was redescribed in language I barely recognised. It became “prancing”. It became “a man pretending to be pregnant”, as though I were making a pro-trans statement. It became evidence that the Church had “lost its way”. One comment suggested that people like me were “mentally ill” and should not be given a platform on Christmas morning. Others contrasted the service with a more solemn broadcast elsewhere, as though Christianity were a consumer choice between aesthetic packages.
I was not especially hurt by this (maybe a little!). What struck me more was how quickly the moment was absorbed into a wider narrative that had already decided what it was seeing.
Why did this particular reading of the Gospel become a flashpoint? Why was humour interpreted as mockery rather than hospitality? And why did Christmas, once again, become the moment when Christianity was enlisted into cultural battle lines that long pre-dated the service itself?
I want to be clear about my intention here. I want to avoid simply justifying myself, but because intention and reception are now so rarely allowed to meet, I want instead to explore how our culture, shaped by the speed and incentives of social media, has become so individualised that any sense of sociality is quietly eroding. Grace, space, and curiosity are skipped over in favour of statement and performed certainty.
The humour in that Gospel reading was not there to provoke or to undermine reverence. It was there because I know how people listen. I know how easily attention can become trapped by surface strangeness, by the question of why this is happening rather than what is being said. By naming the oddness up front, I was trying to release the congregation from it. The humour functioned as a pastoral gesture; it said: you do not need to fixate on this, you can stay with the story.
In the room, that is what happened.
Online, the gesture was read very differently, either deliberately or through a lack of imaginative practice. What had been an attempt to open space became, in some accounts, evidence of contempt. The humour was not simply missed; it was reinterpreted as threat.
This is where social media culture becomes significant. Humour depends on trust, shared presence, and a willingness to be vulnerable together; it assumes a mutual commitment not to rush to the most hostile possible reading. These are precisely the things platforms are least able to sustain. Online, context collapses, intention is flattened, and the most suspicious interpretation is often the most rewarded.
It would be easy to attribute this simply to bad faith or a lack of imagination. But something more structural is at work. We are increasingly shaped by environments that discourage curiosity and train us to interpret quickly, defensively, and alone.
The reaction to the Bradford service did not occur in a vacuum. It came amid an ongoing argument about Christianity, nationalism, and belonging, sharpened recently by the controversy surrounding a carol service associated with Tommy Robinson.
Some Church of England clergy were quick to condemn that service, framing it as a distortion of Christianity and a capitulation to racism or extremism. In response, others accused the Church of despising the working class, of sneering at Reform voters, of aligning itself with a liberal elite that no longer understands national loyalty or cultural loss.
What struck me was how quickly both sides reached for caricature.
On one side, supporters of Robinson were reduced to racists or reactionaries, their fears dismissed as morally illegitimate. On the other, clergy and institutions were portrayed as decadent, faithless, and contemptuous of “ordinary people”. In both cases, the same move was made: complex human motivations were collapsed into moral shorthand, and with that collapse came the withdrawal of any obligation to listen.
This is where I find myself increasingly unable to stand comfortably with either camp.
I have no interest in baptising nationalism, nor in pretending that Christianity belongs naturally to any ethnic or political identity. But neither am I convinced that the Church serves the Gospel well when it treats national feeling, cultural grief, or anger at social change as inherently suspect or morally inferior.
Both responses are animated by fear. Both seek clarity through exclusion. Both prefer the certainty of an enemy to the risk of uncomfortable understanding. In different ways, both sides step away from a shared responsibility to treat one another as participants in a common moral world, rather than as symbols to be managed or threats to be neutralised.
The tragedy is that each believes it is resisting precisely what it is mirroring.
Social media does not create these dynamics, but it dramatically intensifies them once they are fed into the system. Platforms reward certainty over curiosity. They reward speed over attentiveness. They reward moral performance over moral risk. Across ideological spaces the same pattern appears, though it wears different clothes. Progressive platforms reward denunciation dressed as justice. Conservative ones reward outrage framed as defence.
In both cases, distance is created quickly. People become avatars rather than neighbours. Disagreement becomes pathology. The language used against me, particularly the leap to mental illness, is not unique. It is a familiar tactic across ideological lines: to name something as sick is to absolve oneself of the obligation to listen.
What concerns me most is not the aggression itself, but how readily it is normalised, including by Christians. Well-meaning colleagues on the left, myself included at times, can assume that the right kind of moral clarity excuses a lack of charity. Those on the right, again including myself at times, can assume that defending tradition excuses a lack of self-examination. Social media offers both sides endless opportunities to reinforce their own virtue by refusing complexity.
It would be easy at this point to conclude that X is simply broken, that the loudest voices are marginal, and that nothing of value is being lost. But that conclusion feels too easy, and too costly.
The sadness is not that people were angry. It is that the informal agreements that make shared life possible, the habits of patience, generosity, and interpretive restraint, feel increasingly thin. To dismiss these exchanges as inevitable noise is to accept the erosion of a social contract we rarely name because it once felt so obvious: that we owe one another enough time, care, and attention for meaning to emerge at all. The loss is not merely of civility, but of a common life in which faith, disagreement, and imagination can still meet.
So where does this leave me?
It leaves me deliberately standing in a space that is uncomfortable and increasingly unpopular. A space between easy alliances. A space where difference is acknowledged without being weaponised, and unity is sought without pretending differences do not matter.
This is not neutrality. It is a commitment of a different kind.
It means refusing to dismiss those who reacted angrily to the service as simply bigoted or backward, while also refusing to allow anger and fear to define the boundaries of Christian faith. It means challenging colleagues on the ecclesial left when critique slips into contempt, just as it means challenging nationalist readings of Christianity that collapse the Gospel into cultural defence.
It also means continuing to take risks in worship, not as acts of provocation, but as acts of trust; small, embodied ways of repairing the fragile agreements that allow us to listen to one another at all. Trust that the Gospel can survive misunderstanding. Trust that the Church does not need to harden itself into a single cultural posture in order to remain faithful.
Christmas does not offer us control. It offers us presence.
Social media will continue to demand sides. It will continue to reward outrage and simplify complexity. But the Church still has choices to make: about how it speaks, how it listens, and where it is willing to remain when misunderstanding arises.
The Gospel suggests that God does not resolve conflict by choosing a faction, but by inhabiting the space between. Perhaps the task now is not to shout louder from one trench or another, nor to abandon the public square altogether, but to stay, patiently and vulnerably, in that difficult middle ground where listening is still possible, where shared responsibility has not yet been surrendered, and where incarnation, against all odds, continues to take place.
