Sue Darroch and Matthew Didier's Paranormal Blog

This week, historian Chris Laursen reviews some of the ways political correctness has been aiming to de-Christianize Christmas with a parallel made in this month's issue of the Fortean Times of how the Nazis tried to do the same thing on a much greater scale, partly through attempting to resurrect the pagan roots of the Germanic people.

O Christmas tree, woe is politics
by Chris Laursen

Controversy brewed last week in Toronto, Canada as a provincial court justice ordered an artificial Christmas tree removed from the lobby of a courthouse. Among the many people who vocally opposed the order was Ontario's premier Dalton McGuinty. "We enjoy the wonderful privilege of building a pluralistic, multicultural society," the Toronto Star reported him saying, adding no one should be "asked to abandon their traditions." It harkened back to an attempt in 2002 by Toronto councillors to change the name of city hall's Christmas tree to the "holiday tree." In my opinion, both are seriously flawed attempts to redefine traditions to accommodate cultural change.

Politics softens holiday traditions in Britain as well. In the February 2007 issue of Fortean Times, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, complained that attempts to quash Christian holiday symbols were "political correctness gone mad." There, Christian imagery on holiday season postage stamps has been replaced by neutral imagery of Santa Claus. Government-issued greeting cards no longer have "Happy Christmas" printed on them. Even Birmingham City Council tried to rename Christmas "Winterval" in 1998. Regarding these outbursts of political correctness, Britain's Christian-Muslim Forum stated, "Those who use the fact of religious pluralism as an excuse to de-Christianize British society unthinkingly become recruiting agents for the extreme Right. They provoke antagonism towards Muslims and others by foisting on them an anti-Christian agenda they do not hold." It is easy to see the hypocrisy in political correctness that in one moment promotes embracing a wide diversity of beliefs, but at the same time attempts to shut down the traditions of a prominent belief system. Not only is it disrespectful, it's ludicrous!

Interestingly, the Fortean Times' February cover story is about "how the Nazis stole Christmas" during their reign by neutralizing Christian symbology and reinventing the season through neo-paganism. In his memoirs published in the book I Will Bear Witness (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), German-Jewish professor Victor Klemperer wrote on December 25, 1938: "Yesterday for the first time in the Third Reich, the 'Thought for Christmas' in the newspaper was completely de-Christianized. Great German Christmas - the rebirth of the German soul, signifying the resurrection of the German Reich. The Jew Jesus and everything relating to the spirit and humanity in general excluded. It has undoubtedly been ordered for all newspapers."

Fortean Times editor David Sutton wrote of how during their 12-year reign, the Nazis desperately tried to transform Germans' identity to the supposed paganist Aryan roots of the "volk." The article details the influence of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels who led an "order of modern-day Knights Templar, the Ordo Novi Templi" in Austria and his mentor Guido von List, "founder of a branch of mystical neo-paganist thought called Ariosophy," on Nazism, most notably notorious SS commander Heinrich Himmler who dug up archaeological sites across Germany seeking the origins of pre-Christian Germanic ancestors. Even Adolf Hitler derailed Himmler's quest to promote Germany's lost past. "Why do we have to call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past?" the dictator asked. "It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when we were still living in mud huts?"

The movement to reconnect Germans with their pagan roots was one way that the Nazis tried to de-Christianize Christmas. Imagery of a giant swastika atop a Christmas tree, renaming Christian terms (such as Holy Night) to neo-pagan ones (Yuletide and Rough Night), and even rewriting Christmas carols to refer directly to Hitler as the father of the German people all serve as distinctive reminders of politicized redefinition gone wrong.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with pagan celebrations of winter solstice or tracing ancient roots and even personally reinventing these things for your own spiritual needs, but I am certainly weary when people try to force redefinitions on religious and cultural beliefs. The history of Christianity is wrought with examples of people coming in and redefining the meaning of the belief system, and the same goes for pretty much every belief system. It's a game of telephone where, along the line, certain people deliberately change the overall message to suit their own purposes, almost always political.

By no means is the current wave of political correctness in Canada and Britain anywhere as extreme as was encountered in Nazi Germany. But both situations clearly show how political mandates can reverse into yet another form of discrimination. Pluralism is clearly recognized in Canada's political system, and there is no need to redefine people's beliefs to suit an overarching secularization that already serves the dual purpose of allowing people freedom of belief but also protection from dogmatism and racism.

Further reading:

"How The Nazis Stole Christmas" by David Sutton and the editorial in the February 2007 issue of Fortean Times. Website: http://www.forteantimes.com/

Richard Steigmann-Gall. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Nicolas Goodrick-Clark. The Occult Roots of Nazism. IB Tauris, 2004.

Image credit:

German soldiers around a Christmas tree from the booklet Deutsches Weihnachtsbuch published by the Reichsführer-SS in 1942.