The ‘War on Christmas’ is the wrong fight for American Christians

By Frank Barry

This holiday season brings an extra reason to be joyful: A recent poll found that Americans’ belief in the existence of a “War on Christmas” has fallen dramatically since 2022, to 23 per cent. Peace on earth and mercy mild!

Perhaps with the ongoing “invasion” of our southern border, Fox and other conservative networks have decided that it’s best to focus on drumming up support for one war at a time. Or maybe waging a two-decade war over the Prince of Peace with imaginary grinches has finally grown wearisome, even if Donald Trump is still manning the barricades.

The idea that there’s a war against Christmas has never been about the ability to practice Christianity, only the fear that America is under siege by secular liberals and their allies among Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths. It is based on the claim that saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays” is culturally verboten, rather than a well-intentioned (one might even say Christian) effort at inclusive grace.

The tragedy of making up a forever war on Christmas to score political points isn’t that it’s been needlessly divisive. It’s that so many Christians spent so much time confusing a greeting with the gospel. In taking aim at secularization, they trained their fire on the most superficial and meaningless target, rather than the big prize: infusing the Christmas season with more of Christ’s spirit, in the face of the avalanche of commercialism that overwhelms it.

Credit: Bloomberg

The work of rescuing Christianity from partisan warriors is captured in an inspiring new book, Your Jesus Is Too American. Its author, Steve Bezner, is the pastor of a large evangelical church in Houston, Texas, which I visited recently on a cross-country RV trip.

“It’s not unusual,” he writes, “to see signs featuring a cross draped in an American flag or even Jesus wearing an American flag as a sash.” Those images lead to “people being convinced that being an American citizen is synonymous with being a Christian” — and often, that being a Christian is synonymous with being a Republican.

“You’re not a Christian if you vote for a Democrat,” a megachurch pastor in Dallas said earlier in the year. He was hardly the only person to make that claim, which has led many Christians to believe, Bezner writes, “that our salvation is found not in Jesus but in who occupies the White House.”

His book aims “to remind us of the backward and upside-down values of Jesus and to hold them in tension with our American values.” He’s deeply patriotic, but doesn’t confuse love of country with love of God, or loyalty to party with fidelity to scripture.

Bezner thoughtfully explores paradoxes at the heart of Christianity that challenge American culture: denying our material wants to fulfill our spiritual needs, which runs counter to our consumerism; giving away our resources to enrich ourselves, which runs counter to our ambitions; and serving others to save ourselves, which runs counter to our individualism.

“Jesus’ final act of teaching before sharing a meal with his disciples and then journeying to the cross,” Bezner writes, “was an act of joyful service” — washing his disciples’ feet, demonstrating that the lowliest forms of service are God’s highest calling.

“Too many of our pastors sound like pundits,” he writes. “Too few of us wash feet.”

Bezner examines the most difficult of Jesus’ commandments — love your enemies — by placing it in historical context that has contemporary relevance. Jesus spoke those words to Jews living under a violently repressive Roman regime that was “militarily occupying their homeland, taxing them, and building up pagan worship.”

At a time when hatred of Donald Trump runs deep through the Democratic Party, and when Trump and other Republicans are threatening retribution against their enemies, Jesus’ call to practice what Bezner calls “enemy love” is a challenge to Christian members of both parties.

Bezner is especially compelling when examining Jesus’ solidarity with “ethnic outcasts,” including Samaritans despised by Jews, and with aliens and exiles who arrive to new lands with nothing.

“His reputation as the friend of sinners is well earned,” Bezner writes of Jesus, “but we might do well to think of him also as the friend of foreigners.” His disciples took that lesson to heart. “The earliest churches,” notes Bezner, “were multiethnic in an age when xenophobia was high.”

Bezner has worked to make his own congregation more ethnically and racially diverse, a process that led to “a lot of negative emails and comment cards and even a few death threats.” And while some members left, his church has grown in numbers — and in strength — as it has gone from 99 per cent White to about two-thirds White.

Over the past decade, leading a church while tacking against the nation’s howling political winds has been an extremely difficult challenge that courts backlash and risks failure. But we need more pastors, like Bezner, willing to attempt it. “A good preacher,” another evangelical pastor told me earlier this year, “steps on toes.”

As December 25th approaches, churches will be aglow with purple candles. In the Christian tradition, purple signifies penance. In the American tradition, it signifies unity — the blending of red and blue.

What better way to celebrate Christ and country than to carry the purple of this season with us into the new year.

Merry Christmas.