This holiday season brings additional reason to rejoice: A recent poll found that Americans’ belief in the existence of a “war on Christmas” has dropped dramatically since 2022, to 23%. Peace on earth and sweet mercy!

Perhaps with the ongoing “invasion” of our southern border, Fox and other conservative networks have decided it is best to focus on mobilizing support for one war at a time. Or maybe waging a two-decade war against the Prince of Peace with imaginary grimaces has finally become tiresome, even though Donald Trump still mans the barricades.

The idea that there is a war on Christmas has never been about the ability to practice Christianity, but only about 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 inventing a forever war over Christmas to score political points is not that it was unnecessarily divisive. This is because so many Christians have spent a lot of time confusing salvation with the gospel. In aiming for secularization, they have aimed their fire at the most superficial and meaningless goal, rather than the grand prize: imbuing the Christmas season with more of the spirit of Christ, in the face of the avalanche of commercialism which overwhelms it.

The work to save Christianity from partisan warriors is described 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 is not unusual,” he writes, “to see signs depicting a cross draped in an American flag or even Jesus wearing an American flag as a sash.” These images lead “people to be 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 Dallas megachurch pastor said earlier this year. He was not alone in making this claim, leading many Christians to believe, Bezner writes, “that our salvation is found not in Jesus but in the one who occupies the White House.”

His book aims “to remind us of the backward and inverted values ​​of Jesus and to keep them in tension with our American values.” He is deeply patriotic, but does not confuse love of country with love of God, nor loyalty to the holiday with fidelity to Scripture.

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

“Jesus’ final act of teaching before sharing a meal with his disciples and then going to the cross,” Bezner writes, “was a joyful act of service”: washing his disciples’ feet, demonstrating that the forms of the humblest service is the highest of God. call.

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

Bezner examines the most difficult of Jesus’ commandments – love your enemies – placing it in a historical context relevant to contemporary times. Jesus addressed these words to Jews living under a violently repressive Roman regime that “militarily occupied their homeland, taxed them, and built a pagan cult.”

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