Andrew McGowan

Opinion contributor

The 2017 version of the “Christmas wars” has already had a good run, even though we still have a little more time for angst during this season of peace and good will.

What President Trump has called a defense of Judeo-Christian values makes much of a claim that “Merry Christmas” has been marginalized or suppressed, banter filling the airwaves well before seasonal holiday music. Yet the real but limited swing to “Happy Holidays” is clearly attributed to the business world from which Trump claims his credentials, rather than to some fantasy of political correctness.

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The president seemed to stumble upon the truth, in part, when he raised the Christmas issue during the Values Voter Summit in September: “You go to department stores, and they'll say, ‘Happy New Year’ and they’ll say other things. And it will be red, they'll have it painted, but they don't say it. Well, guess what? We're saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

Conservatives troubled by the disappearing Christmas greeting may well be channeling their anxiety about the decline in participation among Christian denominations, and polls where Americans report religious beliefs as waning. Yet these changes in the direction of uncertainty or disbelief don’t keep practicing Christians, or even secular fans of the holiday, from saying, “Merry Christmas.” The move toward “Happy Holidays” has its roots in a secularism driven by a much deeper force that Trump himself has spent a lifetime worshipping: The almighty dollar.

“Happy Holidays” has most certainly grown in popularity, but largely in corporate use — in stores, for instance, and on greeting cards sent to clients. Businesses greeting consumers with “Happy Holidays” seek to welcome those who celebrate Kwanzaa or Hanukkah to shop, as well as the Christmas-observant. Call me naïve, but I doubt the likes of Macy’s or Nordstrom are deviously working to erase the religious and cultural specifics of the different holidays, so much as trying to lure more customers who celebrate any of them. Our consumption culture is the likely culprit eclipsing Judeo-Christian or other holidays.

Christians do have a lot at stake in Christmas, however. Although Christmas doesn’t stem directly from Jesus’ birthday (a date not known), but is based on calculations made a few hundred years after his birth, it presents a set of fundamental beliefs about the world as well as about Jesus. Believers have long wanted to affirm the reality of divine presence in human life. The Christmas story — an angelic visit, a miraculous conception, a birth into poverty — reveals the heart of the Christian message that could and should be retold regularly and celebrated.

The celebration of Christmas has taken many forms across time. One consistency, though, has been an affirmation of human life and the possibility of glimpsing something of the divine in it, including in the experience of family life and children, as well as on the importance of caring for the vulnerable. Representations of the story, from the Bible, to medieval mystery plays, to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” to the more down-market TV versions from Peanuts or the Muppets, all gain their power from these themes. Christians of any stripe — and others who revere the holiday — have much to lose if its meaning were forgotten, or its celebration ended.

What about those other holidays? In the northern hemisphere, the proximity of the feast to the winter solstice has added themes of warmth and light. The different traditions associated with Hanukkah and Kwanzaa complement these and the Christian ones, for the wider community as well as for those who celebrate them.

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The anxiety about “Happy Holidays,” therefore, is not baseless, but simply misunderstood. We shouldn’t think of the “Happy Holidays” movement as a deliberate means of undercutting religious faith or Christmas itself; rather, this evolving cultural shift makes our common identity into that of consumers, rather than believers.

If there is a war against Christmas, the enemy is within the gates. Disparities of wealth and poverty are arguably the greatest threat to the full celebration of Christmas and to the Judeo-Christian values for which conservatives long — as much or more so, at least, than any squeamishness about greetings. Real success in the celebration of Christmas should be less about the particular slogans in store catalogues or email blasts luring you to department stores than in the health and prosperity of the community and the treatment of our most vulnerable.

Those concerned at the decline of faith in America might find better news this Christmas in a more sincere and practical witness to faith than in hollow repetitions of the culture wars. Supporting single mothers, refugees, and homeless children — all familiar characters of the Christmas story — would be one way Christianity might suggest to an increasingly skeptical public that its story is still worth telling, and its good news worth believing.

Merry Christmas indeed, President Trump.

Andrew McGowan is a scholar of early Christianity and an Anglican priest. He is dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.