Evergreen

If Americans are enjoying the Christmas season, it’s because the Donald Trump’s presidency to restored it—according the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, in a recent interview on the U.S. cable-news network Newsmax.

Invoking a theme from Trump’s 2016 run for the White House, Huckabee told viewers that “America had gone through a long period where people quit saying Merry Christmas,” but then Trump put things right after being elected five years ago. “When I started campaigning,” Trump explained, “I said, ’You’re going to say Merry Christmas again,’ and now people are saying it.”

All of which could sound strange, given the enduring place of Christmas in American culture at this time of year. Yet in the past two decades, prominent figures on the U.S. right have put a lot of energy into the idea that many on the U.S. left—representing forces of secularism, progressivism, and political correctness—have waged an unyielding “War on Christmas.”

Few have been more vocal about this idea than the analysts of the right-leaning cable network Fox News, who suggested the issue had reached a moment of national crisis earlier this month, after a 50-foot “all-American Christmas tree” burned down outside their headquarters in Manhattan—according to the New York City Police Department, at the hands of a homeless man with a history of mental illness and drug abuse, previously arrested for exposing his genitals to reporters.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who believe there’s a War on Christmas is higher than ever—37 percent, including 71 percent of those who say they voted for Trump in 2020. Where does this idea come from and why does it persist?

Dan Cassino is a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the executive director of the University’s FDU Poll, and the author of Fox News and American Politics. Cassino says that at a time when political identities are increasingly central to Americans’ personal identities, and increasingly fraught, conflict entrepreneurs—in politics and in the media—are always ready to activate anxieties about these identities.

This is true of conservative commentators and activists who advance the story of a War on Christmas, and it’s true of the progressive podcasters and late-night comedians who ridicule them for it. As long as they keep fueling one another, Cassino says, the War on Christmas will keep imbuing seasonal aspects of American life—from wintertime school events to “holiday” cups at Starbucks—with polarized political conflict. Specific battles may end, but in the United States today, culture war may be a self-renewing resource …

Graham Vyse: Where did the idea of the War on Christmas come from?

Dan Cassino: It started with a Bill O’Reilly broadcast in December of 2005. A second-tier Fox News commentator, John Gibson, had written a book called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, and he went on O’Reilly’s show to talk about it. For several years, it was only Fox News talking about it, other than people who were mocking the idea. The issue started to get real traction around 2010 and 2011, coinciding with the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement and concerns on the U.S. right that President Barack Obama was insufficiently Christian or insufficiently American.

Gibson seemed to have gotten the term “War on Christmas” from a British-born nationalist who was writing about it earlier in the 2000s, so you can even link this to Brexit—the notion of immigrants coming to a Western country and not celebrating Christmas and ruining our culture. The idea was brought into American politics specifically with the idea that public schools weren’t doing Christmas plays but rather “holiday” plays. What Gibson was talking about—and certainly what O’Reilly seized on—was the idea of a War on Christmas as emblematic of secularization taking God out of civil society. O’Reilly described the War on Christmas as the spearhead of a movement to bring in abortion on demand, gay marriage, and the whole liberal agenda. The War on Christmas was a way of getting rid of the Christian essence of American society, as he saw it.