My children (3 and 5) just had their end-of-year concert for all us parents to go ooh aah about. And indeed it was very cute. Songs about different animals, Santa wearing shorts and so forth.

Then a song was introduced as one that they’ve been singing with the children because the words “teach the story of Christmas in a really nice way”. As you can no doubt imagine, that raised my hackles no small amount. When they got into the song, with lyrics like: “unto us this holy night, a little baby’s born” I threw up in my mouth a little. A reasonably large part of me wanted to scoop up both my kids and get the hells out of there with them – but you know: making a scene and stuff … kids were enjoying themselves … “be nice” and such ….

Feck.

I did take no small amusement from the apparent theology fail in the repeated line: “mother Mary, father Joseph” which gave me a mildly amused smirk … until I thought more about it this morning. What that song is, actually, is careful indoctrination. In exactly the same way as $cientology waits until you’ve been prepared carefully over some years (and many thousands of dollars) before hitting you with the batshit stuff about Xemu and other-dimensional Thetans and so on, this song I think is presenting the plausible/non-fantastical/somewhat acceptable aspects of the Jesus story (wrapped rather reverentially) so as to avoid the unpleasant questions that unprepared kids would raise, such as “how come Jesus has two dads?”, “who has primary custody?”, “does god get access visits?”, “who has Jesus at Christmas?” (wait, what?), “are childrens’ services involved?” and so on.

Once they’re used to the notion of a “holy night” and a special baby and such, the implausible magical fantastical stuff can get brought in around this base.

Nasty and calculating – not on the part of the daycare staff, who are just good caring people who it seems are somewhat unthinkingly devout: on the part of the writer/s and distributor of that song, and no doubt others like it.

Or am I reading too much into it? I admit it’s possible, but judging by the current and historical actions of the Churches and other Christian organisations, I would say they think very carefully about how best to hook kids in – and so I think it probable that this song was written deliberately with that goal in mind.

The power of song.