Doktor Luther’s Twitter Feed directs us to this item from the London Daily Mail, featuring recently published color photographs from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party “Christmas” celebration in 1941.

Details not included in the article’s photos, but very important, are noted in the accompanying article:

But the Nazi Christmas was far from traditional.

Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice’, rather than Christmas.

Out of sight at the top of the tree behind Hitler was a swastika instead of an angel, and many of the baubles carried runic symbols and iron cross motifs. The remarkable pictures were captured by Hugo Jaeger, one of the Fuhrer’s personal photographers.

No, Nazism was not a Christian movement. No matter what Bill Maher tells you.

Also, another fine piece at the American Spectator by my friend Hal G. P. Colebatch, about the British YWCA’s recent decision to drop the organization’s historical name (with it’s icky C, standing for Christian), and to change its name to Platform 51:

In a further maneuver in the one-way war against British traditions and values, what was known for 156 years as the Young Women’s Christian Association has dropped the word “Christian,” along with the rest of its title, changing its name to Platform 51.

This is not, apparently, a new point of departure for the Hogwarts Express, but a reference to the fact that women make up 51% of the population. The word “Platform,” it is said, was chosen to reflect the fact that they can use the charity as a platform “to have their say” and “to move to the next stage of their lives.” The old name, it is said, “no longer stands for who we are.”

This is despite the fact that the organization has been funded mainly by legacies left by Christian supporters who intended its specific Christian orientation to continue. The YWCA was founded by Emma Robarts, who ran London prayer groups, and Mrs. Arthur Kinnaird, who ran a London hostel for nurses on their way to work in the Crimean War hospitals. 

I mourn the change, though it’s probably a good thing when organizations that have ceased to have any Christian purpose adopt, at least, a truth-in-labeling policy.

It always saddens me when I think about institutions founded for the glory of God (there are so many), which have gone “neutral” or actively hostile to their founding faith, whether in the social, religious, educational, or charitable spheres. I often meditate on John R. Mott, a devoted American layman and Nobel Peace Prize winner, almost entirely forgotten today. He poured out his life for the advancement of two Christian organizations, one devoted to foreign missions, and one devoted to providing decent lodgings, wholesome activity, and biblical instruction to young men adrift in the big city.

Those two organizations became The World Council of Churches, and the YMCA.

It is, as they say, to weep.