As illustrated by the recent controversy about Starbucks' holiday cups and their lack of Christmas imagery, the idea of a "War on Christmas" is alive and well. And while that rallying cry against what Christians perceive to be overly-P.C. slights on their religious celebration has intensified with social media, it's by no means a new concept.
Journalist Daniel Denvir, who traced the history of the War on Christmas for Politico in 2013, joined HuffPost Live on Thursday to explain the origins of this politically-charged conversation, which goes as far back as the inventor of the Model T. He said:
In the 1920s, Henry Ford, who was a notorious anti-Semite, circulated a text called "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem" in a news weekly. The first part of this quote will sound very familiar from what you hear today on Fox News: "Last Christmas, most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated someone's birth." It then went on to say, "People sometimes ask why 3 million Jews can control the affairs of 100 million Americans in the same way that 10 Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils." So back then it was very clear, this idea that we're a Christian nation and that scary outsider religious minorities -- in this case, Jews -- were trying to destroy it.
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