"Proposal For Two Years Obligatory National Service"
It Was Christians Who First Waged War On Christmas
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/11/it-was-christians-who-first-waged-war.html
In November 2007, the American Family Association found itself in a state of panic. The collective cold sweat came after the self-proclaimed culture war crusaders saw that the word “family” — not “Christmas” — appeared before the word “tree” in the slick pages of Lowe’s just-released holiday catalog.
The organization quickly alerted its members. “The ads mentioning ‘Christmas’ cover only 12 square inches of the 5,236 square inches available,” the AFA notice said. “Lowe’s even has one of their Family trees turned upside down on a stand.”
The reaction was swift and severe: AFA members clamored to their phones and keyboards to reprimand the home improvement store’s corporate offices for such errant and offensive diction. The same day, a Lowe’s spokesman issued an apology, saying that the word swap was a mistake, and that they were “disappointed in the breakdown in [their] own creative process.”
Awash in victory, the AFA later wrote on its website that “Lowe’s has contacted the AFA and assures us that it is proudly committed to selling Christmas trees this year, as it has done in the past.”
That day marked one battle the AFA had won amid the interminable “War on Christmas,” but the nonprofit knew that many more loomed. In the years since the Lowe’s incident, the American Family Association has fought against any and all actors they believe are attempting to secularize the United States — a process that, if successful, the group fears will gut the country of its moral foundations.
This “War on Christmas,” AFA executive vice president Ed Vitagliano wrote in a November 2015 missive, is part of a “wider attempt to secularize the nation.” Such a move, Vitagliano continued, is “bad for America and ultimately threatens the very existence of the Republic.”
Vitagliano’s fear of a godless, “family tree”-filled world where citizens can barely find the wherewithal to whimper “Happy Holidays” to one another may very well be a Salvador DalĂ-esque study in hyperbole. His worries of a war on Christmas, however, are not that far outside the realm of historical reality. Indeed, one of these wars has already taken place on American soil, and is older than the United States itself. Unlike today’s so-called War on Christmas — which the AFA claims has been ongoing for nearly the past decade — this war lasted for nearly 200 years, and was waged by Christians in the name of Christianity.
In the early 17th century, a cadre of austerity-cloaked Christians who called themselves Puritans made their way to the so-called New World. The icy, grim ground they met upon arrival corresponded well with their vision of an authentic Christianity: one shorn of its Elizabethan frills and scrubbed of its insidious pagan stains. It was from this “pure” soil and purified Christianity that these individuals believed a model society would, and must, be born.
Their immaculate beacon would also be born from labor. Historians have noted thatNew England’s calendar was one of the most physically draining ever adopted, with colonists working practically every day save for Sabbath, Election Day, public thanksgivings and “days of humiliation.” In 1629, Massachusetts Bay colonists went so far as to make it official company policy that those who appeared to be “idle drones” would not be allowed to live among them.
Christmas, then, posed a problem to Puritanical society. As practiced in Elizabethan England, the day offered both idleness and indulgence, and to the Puritans a painful reminder of the moment that Roman Christians mixed blood with dirty pagan customs, thus marking Christianity’s fall into wanton decadence. Wrote George William Curtis in an 1883 Harper’s, “Ritualistic decorations and delights, the pomp and splendor of holy-days…were not only [relics] of popery, but their retention was a sign of the fond cleaving of the Church of England to the hideous abominations of Rome.”
Christmas was not just an annoyance to ornery Puritan colonists; its celebration was a threat to discipline, an instrument needed to realize the colonists’ divine, purifying mission. Should the Puritan colonies succeed, Christmas and all it represented had to be buried.
And so it was. Before they officially banned Christmas in 1647, Puritans used labor to suppress the holiday’s observance. Shops were to remain open on Dec. 25, and on the first Christmas in Plymouth, colonists did not rest but began to build colonial settlements. Wrote one Plymouth colonist, “Munday [sic], the 25th day, we went on shore, some to fell tymber, some to saw, and some to carry, so no man rested at all that day.” He added that the closest the colonists came to commemorating Christmas was at the tail end of the day, when a master “caused us to [have] some Beere [sic].”
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