How Christmas Has Shaped Our History and Values
[originally published 25 December 2017]
“Christmas is essential to our understanding of Western Civilization and our values,” said Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour on Sunday.
Mansour made her comments while co-hosting Breitbart News Sunday alongside Breitbart Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon during a special Christmas Eve live broadcast on SiriusXM.
“The symbols and celebration of Christmas have shaped our history [and] Western Civilization,” said Mansour.
Reflecting on “the dawn of Christianity,” she noted Christianity’s “transformative” impact on the old pagan world and the culture of Germanic barbarian warrior tribes.
Chivalry – rooted in ethical monotheism – spread the concept of valuing all human life as having dignity, said Mansour:
Chivalry was introduced to Western feudalism [via Christianity]. It made feudalism actually livable and bearable. What chivalry called for, what the concept of chivalry was, it was about the defense of the weak. It said that the strong had to be champions of the right and the good against injustice and evil. That was the code of chivalry.
This only came about because of the Judeo-Christian West, and I say Judeo-Christian for a very specific reason; all of this is rooted in the ancient Jewish scripture, what the Christians would call the Old Testament...
“The idea of protection of the weak and innocent,” said Mansour, entered Western culture via Judeo-Christian ethics, which radically “changed the way that we have looked at the rights of the weakest among us.”...
Pointing to the Battles of Vienna (1683) and Warsaw (1920) as examples, she noted the centrality of Christian symbolism to the war efforts of European nations in defending against Islamic and communist invasions, respectively...
Mansour and Bannon went into particular detail about the epic Battle Vienna in 1683. As Mansour explained, the Polish King Jan III Sobieski rallied his forces to liberate the besieged city of Vienna from the Islamic army of the Ottoman Turks ...
“It was on September 11, 1683 that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, describing the rationale behind the date selection of the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001...
“We would all be in mosques today” if not for Christianity and Christmas as galvanizing forces among Western societies against hostile Islamic societies, said Bannon...
Related
Cancelling Christ, by Jonathan Madison, Epoch Times, 23 December 2022.
How Christmas Has Shaped Our History and Values, by Robert Kraychik, Breitbart, 25 December 2017.
I lived under Soviet communism and it taught me to love Christmas - Lenin 'canceled Christmas' and Soviets had 'hammer and sickle replacing the cross', Fox News, 24 December 2022.
Just say: "Merry Christmas!", by Fred Elbel, 26 November 2019.
Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Unherd, 11 November 2023.
American Christmas 1776: “Victory or Death”, by Christopher Flannery, American Mind, 23 December 2022.
