"Deck the halls with boughs of Kali

Trah lah lah lah lah lah lah lah."

- The late Jacob 'Killa' Miller, Rastafarian musician

Lloyd Cooke stirred up a wasp's nest when he labelled the cultural wake for the great Herb McKenley 'pagan'.

"Our supposedly Christian nation," he wrote in "utter disgust and disappointment ... ought to express its strong disapproval of the use of our tax dollars to promote anti-Christian activities in our name".

The fundamental weakness in Cooke's argument is the presumption (double meaning intended) that Jamaica is a 'Christian' country. Even the Europeans who kept Africans in abject slavery here were, in the main, hardly Christians except in a very loose cultural sense, as the reports of the missionaries, to whom Cooke appeals, will attest.

Cooke objects to 'Christian' tax dollars supporting pagan cultural practices. In passing, the reverse has often been true, with pagan tax dollars being forced to support Christianity. The clergy of the Church of England in Jamaica, like other European state churches, was paid from the public purse containing everybody's tax until the Church was disestablished here in 1879. This has been one of the powerful arguments for the separation of church and state, which, in part, requires that no state religion be established to be supported by dissenters' taxes against their will.

Paganism mixed with christianity

Cooke lashes the pagan worship of ancestral spirits. His critics might want to point out, however, that the worship of ancestral spirits is also deeply embedded in elements of Christianity where the preferred label is 'the veneration of saints'.

And, at this Christmas season, they could be quick to point out that Christmas is the Roman/ Babylonian Saturnalia baptised. As that other most holy season on the Christian calendar, Easter, with its full moon, eggs, buns and bunnies, is borrowed from the pagan spring festival in honour of the goddess of fertility in many pagan cultures.

The prophets of pristine Christianity saw all of this coming - and issued their warnings. Paul told Thessalonian believers, "Let no one deceive you by any means; for that day (the return of Jesus Christ) will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition."

And the angel of the Revelation told John to tell the Church at Thyatira that they were allowing "that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and beguile My servants."

In this the bicentennial year of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Africans, Lloyd Cooke parrots the Christian/European myth that only animist savages were dragged out of Africa across the Atlantic.

Purer faith in Africa

There is incontrovertible evidence that the three great monotheistic, non-pagan faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were widely dispersed across the African continent and deeply embedded in African culture. During the Dark Ages of Europe, there were streams of Christianity in 'dark' Africa purer in faith than anything on the 'Christian Continent'. And Hebrew blood, faith and culture have been traced to the very southern end of the African continent. The Lemba, living in an area in what is now parts of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique, is one such group. Black Hebrew leader, Ben Ammi, in God, the Black Man and Truth, has pulled together an impressive case for African Hebrews.

The presence of Islam in Africa at the time of the slave trade does not raise any question of fact. Enslaved Africans would, therefore, beyond any reasonable doubt, reflect the religious mix of the continent to varying degrees. And Africa would not have escaped the sort of religious syncretism which occurred in Europe, shaping much of modern 'Christianity'. And the Caribbean has not. Brutal slavery erased much of memory and culture. But Jamaican religion, in all its varied manifestations, including that native creation, Rastafarianism, perhaps is best seen as reconstructivist syncretism - something awaiting far deeper and more sensitive study.