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Kwanzaa’s artificial origins, degenerate criminal founder, and divisive message are antithetical to the principles of truth, beauty, virtue, and goodness found in our Christian faith — which is why Christians should not celebrate it.
On Tuesday, the Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris, posted this to X (formerly Twitter) from her official government account:
Sounds like a harmless holiday post, right? Wrong.
Saurabh Sharma, president of American Moment, responded to Vice President Harris’s post by noting that “Today our half-Jamaican, half-Indian Vice President has elected to acknowledge a fake holiday invented by a communist fed, violent pervert, and convicted criminal Ronald McKinley Everett, also known by his adopted LARP moniker Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga.”
What does he mean? Well, in the realm of manufactured celebrations of “diversity,” few holidays stand out quite like Kwanzaa. A supposed African-American tradition (it’s not), Kwanzaa has been embraced by the progressive Left as a symbol of diversity and unity. However, a closer examination (by that I mean a five-minute Google search) reveals that Kwanzaa is the product of a concoction of falsehoods, hails from dubious origins, and was the brainchild of a man who was involved in radical “Black Power” movements and who even went to prison for torturing women. Once you move past the “Seven Principles” of the made-up humanistic holiday, it becomes evident that Kwanzaa is not just a harmless festive celebration but a carefully crafted tool of propaganda designed to sow division and discontent.
In short, Kwanzaa is fake, degenerate, and subversive — which makes it the perfect holiday for the modern progressive Left in America.
Kwanzaa is presented as an African celebration of heritage and community. It is, in reality, a modern creation with no historical roots in Africa. Created in 1966 by Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett, Kwanzaa is an amalgamation of various African traditions and languages. Karenga himself admitted in a 1978 interview with the Washington Post that Kwanzaa was a synthesis of Swahili and other elements, crafted to provide African Americans with a holiday that wasn’t rooted in Christianity.
Here is an important excerpt from the interview mentioned above:
“‘I created Kwanzaa,’ laughed M. Ron Karenga like a teen-ager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precisions secret.
‘People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So, I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!’”
There it is, straight from the horse’s mouth: Karenga just made it up.
This fabrication of the “cultural heritage” that supposedly undergirds Kwanzaa’s symbolism and rituals exposes it as a thoroughly inauthentic celebration. Given that the holiday lacks the organic evolution that makes other celebrations meaningful and culturally significant, it’s clear that Kwanzaa is really nothing more than an artificial attempt to replace established traditions with a politically motivated narrative. In essence, the holiday is a cultural appropriation of African symbols and traditions, repackaged for a specific ideological agenda — and an anti-Christian one at that.
Digging into the origins of Kwanzaa reveals disturbing truths about its creator, Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga. Before adopting his Swahili name and creating Kwanzaa, Karenga was involved in serious criminal and violent activities that went beyond mere youthful indiscretions. In 1971, he was convicted of felony assault and false imprisonment for torturing two women from the United Slaves organization, a group he founded.
Michael Knowles, a conservative commentator at The Daily Wire, exposed Karenga/Everett’s disturbing recording in a 2017 article titled “Kwanzaa Was Invented By An Insane Leftist Gangster Who Tortured Women.” Among the revelations was the following:
“Everett himself is no stranger to crime. In 1969 his black nationalist gang, ‘US,’ murdered two Black Panthers during a turf war at UCLA. Two years later, Everett was sentenced to prison for felonious assault and false imprisonment after he tortured two women, Gail Davis and Deborah Jones. According to court testimony, Everett stripped the women naked, whipped them with electrical cords and karate batons, placed a hot soldering iron in Davis’ mouth and on her face, tightened Davis’ toes in a vise, put laundry detergent and running hoses in their mouths, and hit them on the head with toasters.”
Karenga’s actions, including the use of a soldering iron to inflict harm on his victims, are far from the principles of “unity” and “community” that Kwanzaa purportedly espouses. The fact that Kwanzaa’s creator was involved in such heinous crimes raises serious questions about the moral foundation of the holiday. Celebrating a festival conceived by an individual with a criminal record contradicts the values of personal responsibility and moral integrity that conservatives often champion.
Here again, the utter hypocrisy (or, as some argue, “hierarchy”) of the Left is exposed: They want to tear down statutes of any of our Founding Fathers who owned slaves but will gladly celebrate a “holiday” invented by a sadistic criminal. In their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) system of morality, any and all sins of minorities can be overlooked as long as their work advances the revolution, but any sins of white men (or their allies) in centuries past can never be forgiven or forgotten.
While Kwanzaa’s origins and the character of its creator are troubling, the holiday’s subversive nature becomes even more apparent when considering its impact on societal harmony. Kwanzaa serves as a tool to further divide Americans along racial lines, fostering an “us versus them” mentality. By promoting a separate holiday exclusively for African Americans, Kwanzaa inadvertently reinforces the idea that diverse communities cannot find common ground within the broader tapestry of American culture.
Moreover, the emphasis on the seven principles of Kwanzaa — unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith — can be interpreted as an obvious attempt to undermine the Christian values that have historically shaped American society and to replace them with a neo-pagan and humanistic framework.
Gabe Hughes, a pastor, explains that:
“Once the holiday grew in popularity, Karenga softened his position on establishing Kwanzaa as an alternative to Christmas, and he encouraged black Americans of all faiths to participate. Still, as much as Karenga wants to insist that Kwanzaa is a secular holiday, it’s more religious than even Hanukkah is. Drink offerings, or libation, are ritual offerings to a god or spirit—in the case of Kwanzaa, they’re offerings to the spirits of dead persons.
Kwanzaa is a celebration of humanism, a worldview in which human values and fulfillment are the focus. The humanist proclaims people to be inherently good and moral and insists that we seek strictly secular or irreligious means to solving human problems. The Christian should recognize that this mindset is of the flesh and incompatible with our faith in Christ.”
In other words, the principles, while seemingly benign on the surface, have instead been intentionally leveraged to advocate for alternative moral frameworks that challenge the traditional Christian principles that America was founded on.
The façade of Kwanzaa as a genuine celebration of African heritage crumbles under scrutiny. And the bottom line is that Christians shouldn’t celebrate Kwanzaa. The holiday’s artificial origins, degenerate criminal founder, and divisive nature are antithetical to the principles of truth, beauty, virtue, and goodness found in our Christian faith.
Instead, Christians should educate themselves about the origins of Kwanzaa and the history of its founder and denounce it as the fake, degenerate, and subversive celebration that it is. Jesse Hughes, a student at Liberty University, shows us exactly how we should do that in his own X post:
“Never forget that Kwanza is a fake holiday created by a black supremacist who wanted black people to shun Christianity and was arrested for holding women against their will and beating them with electric cords.”
Christians are called to know and speak the truth, even if it’s unpopular. Speaking the truth about Kwanzaa is, quite frankly, an easy place to start.
Christians don’t say, “Happy Kwanzaa,” we say, “Merry Christmas.” We don’t honor a man who whipped women with electrical cords but the Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ, who received 39 lashes on His way to the cross to bear “our sins in His body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
The healing wounds of Christ stand available for all who repent and believe — even for Ronald McKinley Everett/Maulana Karenga. Now that is something worth celebrating.
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