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Good morning. I recently received a letter asking me to ban “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from the churches of the Diocese of Norwich this Christmas. As well as showing a touching faith in a bishop’s authority over such things, my correspondent had also picked on one of my favourite carols. The reason for banning it? The second line says of Bethlehem “how still we see thee lie”. This, I was told, is a blatant untruth. Bethlehem is not still. Its streets are not silent. It isn’t a city at peace. All true. 2,000 years ago it was under Roman occupation, and coping with an influx of visitors caused by a census. Bethlehem’s life down the years has been far from tranquil. But even in places of conflict, there can be stillness in the streets at dead of night. By tradition it was in the quietest hours that Jesus was born. It’s no accident that the story locates his birth in a troubled place. That carol was written in 1868 by an American, Phillips Brooks, for the children of his church in Philadelphia. Three years earlier he’d travelled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on horseback on Christmas Eve. He visited the traditional site of the Shepherds’ fields and then attended a service in the Church of the Nativity which lasted most of the night and didn’t impress him. There were tensions in Bethlehem at the time, not least between the different Christian communities themselves. Brooks knew it was a place of unseemly squabbles when he wrote his carol. What’s more the American Civil War was very fresh in the memories of the people of Philadelphia. Brooks wanted the children of his church to be captured by a story of peace which wasn’t about power but humility, one in which God wasn’t a distant dictator, but who identified with human hopes and fears. There’s debate about how well known the Christmas story is in Britain today or whether it still has power to capture our hearts and minds. There’ll be millions going to church over the next few days who wouldn’t normally be there, and are perhaps not religious at all. They’re drawn somehow by this story as an antidote to the commercial merry-go-round of the season. In the current New Statesman, and speaking as an atheist, the journalist Peter Wilby says he’ll be at a carol service and possibly Midnight Mass. So why? He writes “Christianity has the best story: an omnipotent God who chooses to be incarnated as a human, born in the most humble circumstances possible.” This is clearly a story with some mileage in it yet. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is still worth singing. First broadcast 23 December 2015