Ted Cruz’s Biggest Financial Backers Oppose the Celebration of Christmas

[LiberalElite]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/key-cruz-backers-oppose-celebration-of-christmas.html?mid=google&google_editors_picks=true

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Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you are a culturally agitated conservative, to get all worked up about the War on Christmas, the alleged persecution of Christians by department-store owners and other institutional officials who try to stay out of trouble by deploying religiously neutral greetings and slogans like "Happy Holidays." This year's biggest outrage, it seems, has been Starbucks's decision to use traditional holiday colors rather than specific messages on its seasonal beverage containers.

You certainly don't have to be non-Christian to marvel at the conflation of such minor symbolic issues with the actual persecution of believers over the centuries, or wonder if some American suburbanite aggrieved by a coffee cup is on the edge of being enlisted in the ranks of the martyrs. But what always interests me at this time of year is how thoroughly today's culture warriors ignore the once-strong and still-living tradition of Christian hostility to Christmas. Calvinist Protestants all over Europe once frowned on the holiday as a Pagan/Catholic challenge to regular Sabbath worship; it was actually banned for centuries in Scotland, and during the Puritan interregnum in England. But it's the heirs of the "radical reformation," who thought Calvin and Luther did not sufficiently break with Catholicism and root out practices added since the Early Church, who have carried on the anti-Christmas tradition here in the United States even today.
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