The calendar flips to December and the old, familiar talking points begin.
The White House tweeted, “We’re saying MERRY CHRISTMAS again!” along with a photo of President Donald Trump standing stiffly next to a Christmas tree. Laura Ingraham has warned Fox News listeners, “The Left is ramping up its war on Christmas again.” Liberty Counsel released its annual “Naughty or Nice” list, which denotes which major retailers use the word “Christmas” in their holiday advertising.
For a holiday centered on the Prince of Peace, a lot of folks spend an extraordinary amount of time feeling threatened.
Josh Olds
It’s an irony hard to miss. The Incarnation — the radical claim that God became flesh and dwelt among us — happens in the midst of real persecution. Mary and Joseph are forced to travel to Bethlehem because of an edict by an authoritarian government. They later will flee to Egypt as refugees when the self-proclaimed “King of the Jews” sees their son as a threat to his power.
The survival of Christianity is quite tenuous through its literal infancy, and that survival is continually threatened by the authoritarian powers — religious and political — that would eventually put Christ on a cross.
From there, a fledgling church serving a resurrected Christ encountered ostracization and persecution: Forced into hiding, removed from the marketplace, killed for their beliefs. After those first few hundred years, the tide began to change. Christianity became aligned with the same systems of empire that had persecuted it and — while history is far from monolithic — in many places in the West became inextricably intertwined with those systems of power.
Hence, when Laura Ingraham claims the Left is launching a war on Christmas, her guest, Clay Travis, opines that it is because they have a “genuine distaste” for American history.
But that now-empowered Christianity still understands that, in the words of the church father Tertullian “the blood of Christians is seed.” They read the words of Jesus that, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” So they seek out persecution and in lieu of any real, substantive oppression, create a system of victimization where anything that might potentially call into question their cultural dominance is called a “war” against them.
In trying to “save Christmas,” it seems we may have lost Christ.
The manufactured crisis
The “War on Christmas” is not an ancient Christian concern but a contemporary political invention.
In 2005, Fox News anchor John Gibson published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. The book alleged that “literally any sign of Christmas in public can now lead to complaints” and decried the work of “professional atheists and Christian haters” to protest everything from Christmas trees, Santa Claus and even the colors red and green. Fox News host and sex-pest Bill O’Reilly then took up the mantle of general against the War on Christmas and, to quote Gibson, “When Bill made it an issue, it went mega.”
Now in its 20th year, The War on Christmas has grown from talk-radio outrage cycles and cable-news monologues to the halls of governmental and religious power. Megachurch pastors are claiming the angels who visited the shepherds were dressed “not in robes, but most likely … in battle fatigues” because of the War on Christmas. Donald Trump is claiming he has kept Christmas alive and declaring everybody is saying “Merry Christmas” again.
“The War on Christmas is a conservative cultural shorthand.”
The War on Christmas is a conservative cultural shorthand for anything that could be framed as an assault on Christian identity or as proof that the culture was slipping away from “Christian values.” What rarely gets questioned is what values we are talking about.
The Nativity story is not a tale of cultural dominance. It is the story of God entering the world through the margins — a baby born to a young teenage girl living in occupied land, laid in a feeding trough and first visited by shepherds who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society. Jesus’ birth does not protect the powerful. It does not comfort the culture. The Incarnation shakes the system of power to its core.
But in our modern retelling, Baby Jesus often is conscripted as a mascot for nationalism, stripped of his prophetic edge and repackaged as a symbol of sentimental tradition. Jesus, son of God made flesh, is whitewashed and sanitized, made a token mascot in the Christian culture wars.
Mascot Baby Jesus
The culture-war Jesus bears little resemblance to the Christ of Scripture. In the Gospels, Jesus identifies with the poor, the oppressed, the displaced. His birth is a story of vulnerability and disruption.
Yet this Jesus is difficult to fit into a political model built on outrage. And so he is softened, sanitized, domesticated.
The manger becomes decoration rather than a declaration of God with us.
The Holy Family become porcelain figurines instead of flesh-and-blood humans.
The message of liberation in Mary’s Magnificat is omitted from the Christmas story.
The Christ Child becomes a symbol that can be used, not a Lord who must be obeyed.
Once Jesus becomes a mascot, the holiday becomes easy to weaponize.
And once Jesus becomes a mascot, the holiday becomes easy to weaponize. Saying “Merry Christmas” becomes a test of loyalty. Inclusive greetings become enemies. Political identity becomes fused with religious devotion, and somehow the one who blessed the peacemakers becomes the justification for perpetual cultural conflict.
Meanwhile, the real Christmas is being stolen
The interesting thing about this War on Christmas is that none of the battles actually seem to be about Jesus. Of the stories Gibson highlights in his book, none touch directly on the Christmas story. Instead, you learn about the word “Christmas” being removed from a school calendar, allegations of Christmas trees being banned and Santa being taken out of a Kansas school. The Liberty Counsel’s focus on the War on Christmas is whether or not retailers are using the word “Christmas” in their advertising.
None of this is about Jesus.
This year, the Left’s response to the Right’s contrived culture war is to claim that the “real” War on Christmas is Trump’s economic policies. The Atlantic bemoans what it calls “Donald Trump’s War on Christmas,” citing the increased prices resulting from Trump’s trade policies. Democrats have doubled down on this message, calling Trump “the Grinch who made the holidays more expensive than ever.”
For both “sides,” the war on Christmas is about political, cultural and economic power. The Christmas at stake in this war is the commodified, commercialized, consumeristic cultural Christmas — not a celebration of the Incarnation.
“We are not losing Christmas to secularism; we are losing it to materialism.”
We are not losing Christmas to secularism; we are losing it to materialism.
Every year, we spend billions celebrating the birth of a child who arrived with nothing. The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to surpass $1 trillion for the first time ever this year.
We stress over gifts while the Child whose birth we celebrate proclaimed good news to the poor. We hunt for the perfect present while ignoring the economic systems that keep many families anxious, underpaid and exhausted during a season meant for rest and rejoicing. We protest inclusive greetings more loudly than the exploitative labor conditions that make our holiday bargains possible. We demand public manger scenes but remain unmoved by the unhoused families in our own cities. We sanctify tradition while ignoring the suffering of our neighbors — something the prophets warned about repeatedly.
In Isaiah 1, God rejects religious festivals divorced from justice: “Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” In Amos 5, God grows weary of holy days unaccompanied by righteousness: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. … But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
If there is a real war on Christmas, the prophets suggest it is being carried out not by the utterance of “Happy Holidays” or the recognition of celebrations other than Christmas, but by the forces of greed and indifference that Christ’s coming was meant to confront.
What would it mean to ‘save Christmas’?
If Christians truly want to reclaim Christmas in a way that honors Christ, it doesn’t begin with superficial slogans or cultural conformity. Saving Christmas would look like resisting the cultural formation of consumerism through the practice of generosity and simplicity. It would look like choosing presence over presents, community over consumption, compassion over competition. It would mean choosing to own less so everyone can have enough. It would mean calling for the destruction of all systems of empire — political, religious, economic, social and more. It would look like reading Mary’s Magnificat not as optional poetry but as the Spirit’s own commentary on what God’s arrival means for the world.
“Saving Christmas would mean paying attention to those whom Jesus identifies with most closely.”
Saving Christmas would mean paying attention to those whom Jesus identifies with most closely: the poor, the hungry, the unhoused, the refugee, the stranger. It would mean building traditions that cultivate justice and mercy, not just nostalgia for a world that exists only in Hallmark movies. It would mean telling the truth about who Christ is: Not the mascot of a culture war, but Immanuel, God with us, God for us, God in us, a God who looks a lot like those we are most tempted to overlook.
A Christmas worth keeping
Perhaps the real threat to Christmas is not that people say, “Happy Holidays,” but that Christians have accepted a version of Christmas that requires nothing of us — no humility, no justice, no repentance, no solidarity with the marginalized whom God chose to draw near.
Christ does not need our outrage; he desires our obedience.
He does not call us to police language; he calls us to love our neighbor.
He does not ask us to defend the holiday; he asks us to embody the hope it proclaims.
Christ is not lost when a store clerk says, “Happy Holidays”; he is lost when his people forget the meaning of his birth.
If we truly want to keep Christ in Christmas, we must stop using him as a cultural symbol and start recognizing him in the faces of those to whom the kingdom belongs — the poor, the weary, the vulnerable, the overlooked.
Christ doesn’t need us to save Christmas. Christ calls us to receive Christmas — to welcome the God who comes to us not in power, but in poverty; not in outrage, but in love; not in cultural dominance, but in a quiet, startling nearness of a baby in a manger.
That is a Christmas worth keeping.
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the forthcoming small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.