The War on Christmas: How to Build Mass Support for Right-Wing Ideology [Picture, Video]

By Mary Anne Henderson and Brian Platt, CounterPunch

23 December 15

omplaints about Starbucks cups this October ushered us into the annual conservative panic about the “war on Christmas.” Fox News serves as a perennial megaphone blaming “secular progressives” for undermining Christian values as part of a grander scheme to lead the United States down the path of sin and collectivism. Liberal pundits respond to Fox’s “Christmas Under Siege” segments by mocking conservatives and getting cheap laughs at the general silliness of it all. Few however, have addressed or taken seriously the broader politics of which this phenomenon is a part. The war on Christmas is more than a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, it is a gateway into a conservative politics that exalts capitalism, racism, and nativism while attacking the Left.

Antisemitic Origins of the War on Christmas

The first reference to a war on Christmas appeared in an article in Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem—a collection of antisemitic articles published in Ford’s personal newspaper The Dearborn Independent in the early 1920s. Ford’s editorial staff warned that “The Jew considers any public expression of Christian character as being derogatory to his religion.” They reported—in a story that might seem familiar to today’s Fox News audience—that “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth.” Going on to warn, “People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 children.”

Ford’s conspiratorial rants were more than crude antisemitism, they were part of a broader politics that he actively tried to inculcate in his workers who were given copies of The Dearborn Independent as a condition of employment. Latching on to current trends in racism Ford turned Jews into a boogeyman designed to garner greater compliance among his workforce. In Ford’s editorials workers who sought a better life through union organizing or who dared to dream of alternatives to capitalism were merely the dupes of diabolical Jews “who sought to destroy the world” by controlling the labor movement and promoting communism. A pro-capitalist/anti-labor Protestant Christianity served as a bulwark against the Jewish-Bolshevik plot to “destroy America” and create a one world government. Thus Ford warned of Jewish efforts to “secularize” public schools in order to “prepare the soil” for the teaching of “Jewish revolutionary ideas” by “red professors” at the college level.

The worldview that Ford created was entirely self-serving, framing the unions that he struggled against in order to maximize his personal profit as part of a shadowy Jewish conspiracy. When workers at his Rouge River plant in 1939 threatened to unionize he had signs posted reading “Jews Teach Communism, Jews Teach Atheism, Jews Destroy Christianity, Jews Control the Press, Jews Produce Filthy Movies, Jews Control Money.”

As the Great Depression escalated the conflict between capital and labor others followed Ford’s lead melding pro-business politics with racist conspiracy theories. Most importantly several influential religious leaders took up Ford’s call to turn American Christianity into a bulwark against labor. Baptist Reverend Gerald Winrod traveled the country warning of Jewish conspiracies from the pulpit. When a lawsuit in 1927 forced Ford to stop reprinting antisemitic editorials in his paper, Winrod used his own press to begin reprinting sections of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion alongside editorials hewing close to the Ford mold. As Nazism violently expanded its influence in Europe Father Charles Coughlin brought American Catholics into the racist conspiricist fold declaring the need for a “Christian Front which will not fear to be called ‘anti-Semitic’” in order to oppose the Jewish-Bolshevik menace.

Still the presence of a strong Left led by radical political parties like the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Party and bolstered by radical trade unions engaging in the largest strike wave in American history held the rightist politics of Ford, Winrod, and Coughlin at bay. The social base was still far too radical for conspiracy theories like the war on Christmas to gain mass appeal.     source