The fine old conflict over Christmas

This ridiculous rightwing brouhaha about the alleged "war on Christmas" in the US reminds me that there have been times when Christmas was under fire - from other Christians.

Ernest Jones, who was Sigmund Freud's friend and biographer, and himself the long-time head of the International Psychoanalytic Association, did a piece called "The Significance of Christmas" which appears in his Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis Vol. 2 (1951).

He talked about how the Christians in the Roman Empire had used the celebration of Christmas to promote the image of Mary as the Mother of God, thus bringing some of the appeal of goddess-worship into the religion. He thought it was an effective marketing tool that allowed Christianity to beat out Mithraism to be the official religion of the Empire.

But, he also recalled that some Christians were long suspicious of the holiday (my emphasis):

The feeling, however, that Christmas is in some deep sense a pagan festival has evinced itself with a strange persistence throughout the ages. The Western Church was responsible for its incorporation in the Christian religion, and the Eastern Church for long protested against what they regarded as a pagan innovation. Behind this word "pagan" surely lies the idea of Mother-Goddess worship, the attraction of which so often seduced the patriarchal monotheistic Hebrews and indeed the Christian Church itself. It is perhaps fundamentally what Protestantism protested against, following the Hebrew prophets. Our own Puritans have felt very strongly on the matter, and an Act of Parliament in 1644 forbade the celebration of Christmas as being a heathen festival, until the Merry Monarch once more sanctioned it. To this day many Protestant sects, notably in Scotland, look distinctly askance at Christmas as being something alien to the pure faith. Ever since the Reformation this attitude of suspicion has connected Christmas with what has often been called the "paganism" of the Roman Catholic Church. An amusing example is recorded of a fanatical member of Parliament moving that, in order to eliminate any association with the [Catholic] Mass, the word itself be purified by being changed to Christ-tide; by way of answer, however, he was exhorted to initiate the change by altering his own name from Thomas Massey Massey to Thotide Tidey Tidey!

Tags: anti-semitism, ernest jones, war on christmas