If Jesus was born in the fall, not on December 25—if Christmas was not among the festivals observed by first-century Christians—if the festival is nowhere mentioned in the Holy Bible—if it was instead introduced four centuries after Christ—and if the Roman Catholic Church established the holiday on the same day as the idolatrous festival of Brumalia, a popular pagan custom celebrated throughout the Roman Empire—then why do so many people today observe the holiday as a religious festival that supposedly honors the birth of Christ?

Perhaps some recent history might help to explain why.

When Herbert W. Armstrong died on Jan. 16, 1986, he left behind a church with 1,200 ministers and 725 congregations in 57 countries. It had a weekly worldwide attendance of 120,000 people, and another 210,000 outside the church, called co-workers, donated money to the church regularly.

Millions more were very familiar with Mr. Armstrong’s biblical teachings because of his popular World Tomorrow television program, the Plain Truth magazine and the many books, booklets and pamphlets he distributed over the course of his ministry.

Of the 35 million booklets he distributed during his 50 years of writing, one of the most popular titles ever released was The Plain Truth About Christmas—distributed to nearly 2 million households worldwide. In it, he proved how Christmas was not a Christian festival at all. Its true origins, he explained, were actually rooted in Babylon, the city of Nimrod.

It was during the fourth century a.d. that this Babylonian custom was given a Christian-sounding name by the Roman Catholic Church. Instead of fighting to keep the world out of the church, Emperor Constantine, a Catholic convert, wanted Christianity to be on equal footing with paganism! He wanted to make it easier for pagans to become “Christians,” Mr. Armstrong taught.

Needless to say, the many thousands of ministers and members of the Worldwide Church of God (wcg)—even many of its co-workers—did not observe Christmas or its associated holidays of New Year’s and Easter.

Somewhat like Constantine, however, a few of the church’s highest-ranking ministers wanted to blend Mr. Armstrong’s teachings into the customs and traditions of this world. These impostors began working, even before Mr. Armstrong died, to surreptitiously rework the church’s body of doctrine.

One of the earliest revisions appeared in the 1982 version of The Bible Story. The original version of the six-volume set, produced during the 1960s, contained quite a lot of history about the establishment of civilization after the Noachian Flood. It discussed how Noah preached God’s truth and prophesied about a coming Messiah.

“But something happened back then to cause men to believe that the son of a god had come to Earth shortly after the flood,” author Basil Wolverton wrote. He went on to explain how Nimrod and his wife, Semiramis, established a Babylonian religious system as a great counterfeit to God’s true religion. “There, in ancient Babylon,” wrote Wolverton, “were born the false beliefs that have wormed their way into almost every religion. Even today millions and millions of people who may want to live according to the right ways are not aware that their manner of worship follows very closely that of ancient idol worship and pagan rites begun at Babel.”

Virtually all of this critical history—Nimrod’s plans to rule the Earth; his wife’s successful attempt to make a false god out of her slain husband—was removed from the 1982 version of The Bible Story. It was edited out four years before Mr. Armstrong died, at about the time his eyesight began to fade.

After Mr. Armstrong died, his successors immediately began work on overhauling The Plain Truth About Christmas. In the original version, for example, Mr. Armstrong had written, “Nimrod, grandson of Ham, son of Noah, was the real founder of the Babylonish system that has gripped the world ever since.”

This statement, along with the rest of a paragraph about the idolatrous system that originated in Babylon, was cut from the 1987 version of the Christmas booklet. Two years later, even that lukewarm version of The Plain Truth About Christmas failed to survive an editorial review. The booklet was permanently discontinued in August 1989.

Still, less than four years after Mr. Armstrong’s death, church leaders were smart enough to refrain from fully embracing Christmas observance. So they explained away the decision to shelve the booklet, saying there were a few “little” inaccuracies that needed to be corrected.

The following year, in 1990, they released Christmas—The Untold Story. The basic message of that booklet was this: We still don’t celebrate Christmas, but if you do, we’re totally fine with that.

Of course, by that point, a few long-time members of the church were quite upset about the changes coming out of wcg headquarters in Pasadena. Those who openly protested the church’s new direction, like my father and mother, were quickly excommunicated. The fledgling flock of the Philadelphia Church of God, which now sponsors this website, desperately tried to warn our wayward brethren about the deceitful transformation going on inside the wcg.

If you now believe Christmas did not originate in Babylon and that Jeremiah 10 no longer refers to the Christmas tree, the next thing you know, you will be celebrating Christmas, we warned.

That’s ridiculous! We’ll never observe Christmas,wcg members howled back.

Meanwhile, the changes coming out of Pasadena became more blatant and far-reaching.

Toward the end of 1991, Joseph Tkach—Mr. Armstrong’s handpicked successor—made these earthshaking remarks in the church’s periodical, the Plain Truth: “Are all the activities surrounding Christmas wrong? Is there anything wrong with giving gifts? Certainly not. Is there anything wrong with rejoicing that Jesus was born? Of course not. … Is it then appropriate to avoid having a special dinner with the family on Christmas day? No. Is it wrong to fellowship and talk about Jesus at Christmas time? No.”

Mr. Tkach still acknowledged that Christmas was linked to “the birthday of the invincible sun,” but by the end of 1991, it had become transparently clear to all whose eyes were open that the wcg’s position on Christmas had been placed on equal footing with the pagan traditions of men.

Finally, by early 1995, wcg ministers were required to teach that Christmas was a legitimate form of Christian worship and acceptable in God’s sight. It was explained in a personal correspondence letter at the time: “We do not teach that it is a sin for Christians to do things that originated in paganism. We do not teach that it is a sin to participate in paganism. … It depends on the person and what they do with it” (emphasis mine).

This is the very same reasoning many traditional Christians have always used to justify Christmas observance. They may be fully aware of its pagan origins and that its traditions are rooted in idolatry and lies. They may also know about the many side effects to this festive season of “merriness”—the pre-holiday stress, the post-holiday depression and the years it might take gift-givers to dig their way out of credit card debt. They certainly must know that for most Westerners—even the so-called “religious” among us—Christmas is little more than a highly commercialized, decidedly secular event that is associated far more with shopping malls and binge-drinking parties than it is with any kind of reverential religious worship. They probably also know that for law enforcement officials, the Christmas season is the busiest and most dangerous time of the year. Jesus is the reason for the season, many say—and yet, the Christmas season is the reason for sharp increases in all sorts of criminal behavior: drunk driving, domestic abuse, thievery, scams, and so on.

Christmas-keepers may well understand all of this. Still, for many, the bottom line is this: It all depends on what you decide and do. If you want to be religious, simply convert a pagan festival into a sacred religious observance!

When all of this was first introduced in the fourth century, not surprisingly, it shocked a lot of people in the religious world. As explained in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, “Christian preachers of the West and the Near East protested against the unseemly frivolity with which Christ’s birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun-worship for adopting as Christian this pagan festival.”

Over time, however, these ardent protests were buried under a tidal way of popular support for the new “Christian” festivals.

The same thing happened inside the Worldwide Church of God two decades ago. At first, there were many loud and angry protests against the Tkach agenda. But today, precious few protesters remain. Over time, most church members simply caved in to the pressure of everyone else is doing it and drifted along with the wave of lies and deceit. Many of them now enthusiastically participate in all the Christmas festivities.

Last week, I ran across a short video clip produced by one of my favorite instructors at Ambassador College in 1988—a former minister of the Worldwide Church of God. This man once had a firm grasp of Bible truth. In this recent video, however, he didn’t refer to the Bible once. He did, however, have a religious-sounding message for Christmas-keepers. The first Christmas, he explained, was “when God in the person of Jesus came into our world.”

In actual fact, of course, the first Christmas didn’t happen until well over four centuries after the birth of Christ—when a Roman emperor imposed his brand of Christianity on the Roman world and the church at Rome later demanded that a celebration of Christ’s “birth” be observed on the same day as a popular pagan observance.

But that’s beside the point, many will still argue. Christmas is Christian if you make it Christian. And if everyone else is doing it anyway, isn’t that all the more reason why we should join in on the merrymaking?

Few, it seems, ever stop to consider what God thinks about these humanly-devised traditions. “Howbeit in vain do they worship me,” Jesus said, “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men …” (Mark 7:7-8).

Throughout the Bible, God plainly reveals that He will not accept vain worship, even if it is intended to be in His honor! Jesus said in John 4:24 that true worshipers of God obey Him in spirit and in truth—which means according to the truth of God’s Word (John 17:17).

Christmas is an unbiblical tradition manufactured by human reasoning. It’s rooted in paganism and is expressly forbidden by the commandments of God. Yet still, as Mr. Armstrong explained in The Plain Truth About Christmas, “[M]ost people today take that command of God lightly, or as having no validity whatsoever, and follow the tradition of men in observing Christmas.”

One reason Christmas is so popular today is because God’s law forbids observing the custom—and man’s mind, as it says in Romans 8:7, is hostile to God’s law. As Mr. Armstrong used to say, if God’s law actually commanded us to observe Christmas, there would be a lot less people doing it!

Another reason for its popularity is simply because everyone else seems to be doing it. It’s human nature to follow along with the crowd—to blindly accept popular customs, without ever stopping to question why.

And another reason for the universal acceptance of this pagan custom in the Western world: Satan has used false ministers and deceitful workers to blind this world to the plain and simple truth of what the Bible actually says (see 2 Corinthians 4:4; 11:13 and Revelation 12:9).

For more of God’s perspective on this subject, be sure to watch the Trumpet Forum embedded above: “The Truth About Christmas.”