Church bells, the manger, the crib, carols, Holy Communion on the big day.

Just go out and have yourself a very Christian Christmas. Things are looking up when even the Archbishops have said as much. Usually the best they can do at Christmas is to tell us that the coming to Earth of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is a metaphor for Fair Trade coffee.

Dr Williams and Dr Sentamu have warned about "creeping political correctness" - a warning which is all right so far as it goes.

But there's nothing "creeping" about political correctness. It is galloping and has been for a long time. There's something else I'd like to say about political correctness. It's a polite phrase, a respectable phrase, to disguise something that is, in fact, a rampant evil.

To use the phrase "political correctness" to describe what's going on is as if you would refer to an attack of double pneumonia with pleurisy as "the sniffles".

Political correctness is a euphemism for militant secular atheism which is being perpetrated against the Christian traditions of our country with vicious enthusiasm and malice aforethought. Under the pretence of avoiding giving hurt to people of all faiths and none, the politically correct commissars are really waging a war on the Christian religion which they would like to abolish.

Especially at this time of year, the militant atheists and secular totalitarians write to the papers telling us of the virulent influence of religion down the ages.

They claim that it is Christianity which has caused the most misery experienced in western society over the last 2000 years.

This is a lie. If we're adding up the numbers of mass murders, pogroms, genocides, wilful displacements of whole peoples, then it is the political systems based on avowed atheism which have done incomparably more damage.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. National Socialists. International Socialists. Communists. All the lot of them: secularists, iconoclasts, blasphemers, atheists.

It is not God and his gospel which causes the trouble but - as the prophets and Jesus Christ warned us often enough - turning away from God and his gospel which produces our misery.

And do not underestimate the power and the sheer nastiness of the nihilists, even in our own country, who would love nothing better than to see Christianity abolished and replaced entirely by their squalid rubbish heap of secularism.

The realm they want - and which they have virtually got - is one where any sexual coupling is as good as any other and totally value-free; where mass abortion is used as a means of contraception to avoid inconvenience to the promiscuous; where euthanasia is made ubiquitous; where the traditional family is despised; where no one must be "judgemental" about anyone's "lifestyle" however filthy and destructive.

All this talk about religious symbolism being "offensive".

I'm not offended by Ramadan or Diwali or Passover and I guess the readers of this newspaper are not offended by them either. Whatever their differences, the one thing good Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews have - or ought to have - in common is a loathing for the politically correct, totalitarian, secular, atheistic gang of opinion that seeks to destroy all our values.

Stand up against it. Receive Holy Communion this Christmas.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.