Christmas Banned
If you take a few moments to research this subject, you will find that Christmas has no roots in true Christianity. Many Bible scholars of various religious denominations acknowledge this. With that in mind, it should not surprise you that in England, Cromwell’s Parliament decreed in 1647 that Christmas be a day of penance and then banned it outright in 1652. Parliament purposely met on December 25 every year from 1644 to 1656. According to historian Penne L. Restad, “ministers who preached on the Nativity risked imprisonment. Churchwardens faced fines for decorating their churches. By law, shops stayed open on Christmas as if it were any regular business day.” Why such drastic measures? Puritan reformers believed that the church should not create traditions that did not exist in the Scriptures. They actively preached and distributed literature denouncing Christmas celebrations.
Similar attitudes were evident in North America. Between the years 1659 and 1681, Christmas was banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. According to the law enacted then, Christmas was not to be observed in any form or fashion. Violators were subject to a fine. Not only were Puritans in New England uncomfortable with celebrating Christmas but some groups in the middle colonies were also. Pennsylvania Quakers were as adamant as the Puritans in their view of the celebration. One source says that “shortly after Americans had won their independence, Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker herself, divided Philadelphians into three categories. There were Quakers, who ‘make no more account of it [Christmas] than another day,’ those who were religious, and the rest who ‘spend it in riot and dissipation.’”
Henry Ward Beecher, a renowned American preacher who was raised in an orthodox Calvinist household, knew little about Christmas until he was 30 years old. “To me Christmas was a foreign day,” wrote Beecher in 1874.
The early Baptist and Congregationalist churches also found no Scriptural grounds for celebrating Christ’s birth. One source notes that it was not until December 25, 1772, that the Baptist Church of Newport [Rhode Island] observed Christmas for the first time. This was approximately 130 years after the founding of the first Baptist church in New England.
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