Day: December 9, 2007

The War on Christmas has a glorious history. In 1645 Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan brethren took over jolly old England. Deciding that anything jolly was probably of the devil, they vowed to rid England of such decadent conceits as Christmas. Cromwell and Company banned Christmas and any festivities having to do with it. Not to be bested by their colleagues across the pond, Massachusetts Puritans criminalized Christmas, and, in 1659, the General Court of Massachusetts passed the Five-Shilling Anti-Christmas Law.

While there has been a great deal of commentary about Mitt Romney’s speech on faith in America, there is growing concern by some that the most disturbing aspect of the speech was that it expressly excludes the so-called faithless. David Brooks captured these concerns well in his New York Times column on Friday.