In the run up to Christmas, Steve McAlpine looks dubiously at the West's repeated calls for 'peace on earth'. 

Could peace - at least as far as the West is concerned - remain beyond reach because of the direction our culture wars have taken?

If calls for tolerance are now viewed suspiciously as a fig leaves for oppressive powers, so much so that we must behave in a violently intolerant way, then what room is there for peace?

Instead, we may find ourselves in a society that is perpetually at war with itself because we haven't learnt the ability to forgive our enemies without requiring their total subjugation.