Christmas controversies
[10][11] There are two competing theories on why 25 December was chosen as the date of Christmas,[18][19] although theology professor Susan Roll writes that liturgical historians generally accept that it had some relation to "the winter solstice and the popularity of solar worship in the later Roman Empire".
[23][24][25] The earliest document to place Jesus's birth on 25 December is the Chronograph of 354 (also called the Calendar of Filocalus), which also names it as the birthday of the Invincible Sun.
[30] Gary Forsythe, Professor of Ancient History, says: "This celebration would have formed a welcome addition to the seven-day period of the Saturnalia (December 17–23), Rome's most joyous holiday season since Republican times, characterized by parties, banquets, and exchanges of gifts".
[32]In a mid fifth century Christmas sermon, Pope Leo I rebukes those "who hold the pernicious belief that our celebration today seems to derive ... from, as they say, the rising of the 'new sun'.
[34]According to C. Philipp E. Nothaft, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, though the history of religions hypothesis "is nowadays used as the default explanation for the choice of 25 December as Christ's birthday, few advocates of this theory seem to be aware of how paltry the available evidence actually is.
"[35] Proponents of the "calculations theory" such as Louis Duchesne, Hieronymus Engberding [de] and Thomas Talley, argue that Christmas was celebrated on 25 December before the Natalis Solis Invicti and suggest that Aurelian established it in order to compete with the Christian feast.
[30][36] They point out that in AD 221, Sextus Julius Africanus suggested the spring equinox, 25 March in the Roman calendar, as the day of creation and of Jesus's conception.
[39] Susan Roll, a critic of the calculations theory sees it as merely an attempt by early Christians to retroactively justify the winter solstice date.
[43] The Christian Council of Tours of 567 established Advent as the season of preparation for Christmas, as well as the season of Christmastide, declaring "the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany to be one unified festal cycle", thus giving significance both to 25 December and to 6 January, a solution that would "coordinate the solar Julian calendar with the lunar calendars of its provinces in the east".
[52] Prior to the Victorian era, Christmas was primarily a religious holiday observed by Christians of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations.
[55] In 1647, the Puritan-led English Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas, replacing it with a day of fasting and considering it "a popish festival with no biblical justification", and a time of wasteful and immoral behaviour.
[56] Puritans disliked traditions that inverted social hierarchies, such as wassailing in which the rich were expected to give to the poor on demand, and which with the addition of alcohol sometimes turned into violent intrusions.
[57] Protests followed as pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans.
[64][65][66] The ban by the Puritans was revoked in 1681 by an English appointed governor, Edmund Andros; however, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region.
[69] Historian Ronald Hutton believes the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday, spearheaded by Charles Dickens, who "linked worship and feasting, within a context of social reconciliation".
[71] Historian Stephen Nissenbaum contends that the modern celebration in the United States was developed in New York State from defunct and imagined Dutch and English traditions in order to refocus the holiday from one where groups of young men went from house to house demanding alcohol and food into one centered on the happiness of children.
And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, "It is, O Stranger, a racket ..."[74]The Soviet Union (until 1936), and certain other Communist regimes, banned Christmas observances in accordance with the Marxist–Leninist doctrine of state atheism.
[9] The December 1957 News and Views published by the Church League of America, a conservative organization founded in 1937,[78] attacked the use of Xmas in an article titled "X=The Unknown Quantity".
Smith further argued that Jews introduced Santa Claus to suppress the New Testament accounts of Jesus, and that the United Nations, at the behest of "world Jewry", had "outlawed the name of Christ".
The People's Republic of China has a doctrine of state atheism and prior to the start of the Christmas season in 2018, the Chinese government shut down many Christian churches and arrested their pastors to prevent them from celebrating the holiday.
[84][85][86] Brimelow, O'Reilly and others claimed that any specific mention of the term "Christmas" or its religious aspects was increasingly censored, avoided, or discouraged by a number of advertisers, retailers, government sectors (prominently schools), and other public and secular organizations.
"[87] Heather Long, an American columnist for The Guardian, addressed the "politically correct" question in America over use of the term "holidays", writing, "people who are clearly celebrating Christmas in their homes tend to be conflicted about what to say in the workplace or at school.
[88] The American Civil Liberties Union argues that government-funded displays of Christmas imagery and traditions violate the U.S. Constitution—specifically the First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment by Congress of a national religion; on the other hand the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian advocacy organization, believes that Christmas displays are consistent with the First Amendment, as well as court rulings that have repeatedly upheld accommodationism.
[15] The controversy also includes objections to policies that prohibit government or schools from forcing unwilling participants to take part in Christmas ceremonies.
[93][94] Supreme Court rulings, starting with Lynch v. Donnelly in 1984, have permitted religious themes in government-funded Christmas displays that had "legitimate secular purposes".
[97] Since at least 2005, religious conservative groups and media in the United States, such as the American Family Association (AFA) and Liberty Counsel, have called for boycotts of various prominent secular organizations, particularly retail giants, demanding that they use the term "Christmas", rather than solely "holiday", in their print, TV, online, and in-store marketing and advertising.
[128][129] The common practice of schoolchildren visiting local churches for Christmas services in December is opposed by the Norwegian Humanist Association, the Children's Ombudsman and by the Union of Education.
Eighty thousand Swedes signed a 2012 protest letter (Adventsuppropet) initiated by the newspaper Dagen to Minister for Education Jan Björklund, demanding that school visits to churches should still be allowed to include religious rituals.
Turkey has adopted a secular version of Christmas and a Santa Claus figure named Noel Baba (from the French Père Noël).
[147] In Indonesia, some radicalists have suggested proposing December 25 as "World Moslem Convert Day" (Hari Muallaf Sedunia), even though some people dismiss this idea as both asinine and dangerous.
