Opinion | A Christmas Argument That Ended in Harmony

Polarization is such a reality that for many years, we couldn’t even celebrate Christmas calmly or brightly. Again and again, the “peace on earth good will toward everybody” faction faced off against the “don’t tell me when I can’t say ‘Merry-Christmas’” caucus. When you turn the birth of a savior into an occasion for grievance, you’re kind of missing the season’s message.

Having followed the Christmas wars for a long time, I sense a bit of an abatement in the conflict, and thank God for that. I confess I have been an occasional polemicist in this quarrel (predictably for me, in the peace camp). This year, I want to revisit my favorite Christmas debate because it carries a lesson: Even within our discord, we can find a version of harmony that lifts up the blessings of a free, diverse and religiously pluralist society.

In 2004, Charles Krauthammer and I wrote dueling columns in The Washington Post, with Charles, who was Jewish, and I, a Catholic, taking opposing positions on the “Merry Christmas” question. If you knew about our religious backgrounds but not our politics, you’d be surprised where we landed.

Charles was his full-throated, eloquent self. “The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless,” he wrote. “To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel ‘comfortable’ not only understandably enrages the majority but commits two sins.

“The first,” he explained, “is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions. The second is the sin of incomprehension — a failure to appreciate the uniqueness of the communal American religious experience.”

His final lines: “Merry Christmas. To all.”

That “to all” did a lot of work in rebuking the “to those who celebrate” crowd.

We had not planned it, but as I recall, our columns ran on the same day in print. Mine wondered why it was so important for Christians to risk offending non-Christians.

“What in the world is ‘Christian’ about insisting on saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to a devout Jew or Hindu who might reasonably view the statement as a sign of disrespect?” I asked. “At the level of government: Is it really ‘Christian’ for a religious majority to press its advantage over religious minorities, including nonbelievers?

“Trying to delete every form of religious expression from the public square leads to foolishness,” I added. “But one thing is even more foolish: for the religious majority to feel ‘oppressed’ by a public etiquette designed to honor the rights of those outside its ranks.”

I cited the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote that “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.”

Who knows who prevailed in our face-off — we probably mostly gave comfort to those already committed on the question. But I later told Charles that I thought it was one of the most wonderfully American exchanges I could think of: a Jew defending everyone’s right to say “Merry Christmas,” including mine, and a Christian urging restraint out of respect for the religious commitments of others, including his. Deep down, we were both pluralists.

The spirit works in mysterious ways, and what prompted my remembering this episode was the publication of President Trump’s National Security Strategy. Don’t worry. There will be no abrupt turn here to foreign policy, although I can’t help asking how in the world Mr. Trump is helping bring about, as the document puts it, “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health.”

What I found particularly disturbing was how the strategy’s critique of Europe was, in large part, a critique of the Europe that the United States helped create. In effect, it took issue with core aspects of the American tradition: a broadly friendly attitude toward immigration; our nation’s view of religious and cultural pluralism as valuable and religious freedom as essential; and the immense worth of nations defined not by ethnicity or race but by shared commitments to democracy, liberty and justice.

After their ritual bashing of economic regulation, what the authors of this document seemed to dislike most about contemporary Europe are the ways in which it has become more, rather than less, like us.

The Trump view is that this more-American Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” The document lashes out at “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife” and declares, “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence.” What precisely does “remain European” mean? Is the continent less “European” because many Muslims have moved there? Because of migration from Africa?

The Europe of today was fostered and encouraged by a United States that sympathized with democratic parties of the center-left and center-right that were determined never again to endure the moral and human catastrophes of Naziism and Fascism while also resisting Soviet Communism. Here, by contrast, was a document hailing Europe’s far right — “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

The political import of all this is alarming enough, but at this time of year, it’s appropriate to think about those spiritual and cultural concerns the security strategy lifts up.

In the telling of the Trump document and Europe’s far right, Christianity is primarily about identity, not a set of moral principles, let alone a quest for transcendence and salvation. But Christianity has always been about far more than identity. It is universalist in its aspirations, if not always in practice. It was St. Paul who wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The religion that traces itself to that “lowly manger” directs its heart toward the marginalized, “the least of these.”

It’s no accident that Pope Leo XIV, U.S. Catholic bishops and so many prominent Protestant leaders have raised their voices against what the pope called “the inhuman treatment of immigrants.” The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights bore the mark of Christian thinking, notably the work of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in helping to create this charter of democratic liberty. Europe’s postwar embrace of democracy was a liberal and social democratic project, but it was also enabled by Christian Democratic parties that rooted their politics in the equal dignity of every person. This was not, and is not now, a project of “civilizational erasure.”

In the spirit of the season (and in memory of Charles Krauthammer, who died in 2018), I want to acknowledge the complaints of religious traditionalists who often see liberals as irredeemably hostile to their worldview. In his brilliant defense of liberal values, “The Struggle for a Decent Politics,” the philosopher Michael Walzer spoke critically of “zealots” who “disdain belief and treat religious men and women as fools, the victims of priestcraft.” By contrast, those who are authentically liberal, he wrote, “respect the lives that believers live and the communities they create, and work to guarantee the safety of both.”

Perhaps we can set aside the Christmas war long enough to remember that Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Mary and Joseph took flight with Jesus to Egypt to escape King Herod’s efforts to kill a baby he feared was the Messiah. Whatever our politics, standing together on behalf of those who flee oppression would seem a very Christmas thing to do.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.

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