Image: © Royal Mail. Used for commentary/critique.
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How the Holy Family Became Too Brown for Britain
There’s nothing more British than a Christmas stamp scandal. Every year, the nation that once ruled half the world now works itself into a moral froth over an adhesive square worth a pound twenty-five. It’s as though we treat the Royal Mail like an oracle: speak, O perforated prophet, tell us who we are this December.
This year, the oracle spoke with a strange audacity:
Mary and Jesus appeared on the stamp looking… well… like people who actually lived where the Bible says they lived.
And Britain gasped.
Not at Mary’s halo; halos are fine.
Not at the swirling Byzantine gold; gold is acceptable.
Not at the stylised facial features; we survived Picasso, after all.
No — the great offence is that Mary and her infant look ‘too brown.’
Imagine that.
A Middle Eastern Jewish mother and her Middle Eastern Jewish child depicted with Middle Eastern colouring.
Outrageous!
Burn the heretics!
Fetch the Daily Mail!
It’s one of history’s charming consistencies that every culture paints God to look like themselves. Ethiopians painted a Black Christ; the Chinese painted an East-Asian Christ; medieval Europeans gave Jesus the complexion of a Norfolk milkmaid and the hair of a pre-Raphaelite angel.
This wasn’t ideology.
It was humanity.
People see the divine in the mirror they understand.
But in our postmodern carnival of suspicion, where every artistic decision must be a coded political gesture, some insist that the Royal Mail is ‘appeasing Muslims,’ as though Islam invented brown skin and robes in the 7th century.
Mary wore a head covering because she lived in 1st-century Judea, not because she was attending Friday prayers.
And the infant Christ was wrapped in swaddling clothes because the climate of Bethlehem doesn’t treat naked newborns kindly — even divine ones.
People rarely rage about what they truly fear.
They rage about symbols because symbols feel safe.
No one wants to admit the deeper truth: Britain has become so disoriented, so whipped about by cultural self-loathing, that even the Holy Family — those two figures who have survived crusades, empires, schisms, and the Reformation — are now dragged into debates about national identity.
A brown Mary isn’t the problem.
A nation terrified of its own shadow is.
Some see the stamp and cry ‘political correctness!’
Others see it and cry ‘whitewashing finally undone!’
Both, in their own way, miss the point.
The Holy Family existed long before the culture wars, and they’ll exist long after.
Their skin was never the issue.
Their message was.
If one wanted to truly appease modern sensibilities, one would make Mary look like a Scandinavian yoga instructor and Jesus like a cherubic gluten-free toddler from Surrey.
But instead, the artist went back to something startlingly simple:
a Holy Family that looks like where they were born.
In other words, something authentic — the very thing modern Britain seems least prepared to handle.
And so people are offended.
Not because Mary is brown, but because Mary is real.
A brown Mary reminds us that Christianity wasn’t a European invention but an eastern one.
A brown Jesus reminds us that salvation came from the dust of Judea, not the pews of Northamptonshire.
A brown Holy Family reminds us that faith began at the margins long before it ever entered a cathedral.
We like the Nativity as long as it stays sentimental — a safe, soft-focus Victorian oil painting.
But show us the truth of it, and suddenly we shout ‘agenda!’
In the Gospel of Luke, Simeon takes the infant Christ in his arms and declares that this child will be ‘a sign spoken against.’
He wasn’t wrong.
Even on a postage stamp, He still is.
If people can’t tolerate a brown baby Jesus, it’s not theology that troubles them — it’s the mirror.
The mirror held up to history, culture, and self.
And perhaps, if we’re honest, that’s why the stamp matters: because it reminds us that the divine refuses to conform to our preferences.
Christ doesn’t need our approval to be who He is.
And Mary, as always, bows her head over Him — calm, dignified, and entirely unbothered by the uproar of the world.
As ever, the saints remain serene while the mortals behind them froth.
Wording 