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It’s that time of year again when we hear about the profanity of “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” and about Starbucks’ covert “war on Christmas,” run through their seasonal coffee cups. Inevitably, President Trump has intervened, insisting stores everywhere “don’t have Merry Christmas. They don’t have Merry Christmas. I want them to say, ‘Merry Christmas, everybody.’” Once again, we are awakened to the terrible assaults on the Christian heritage of our nation.

This year, however, it’s increasingly difficult not to notice the main threat to Christianity in America comes from American Christians themselves.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case from a baker who argued his Christian convictions led him to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. A week ago, we witnessed the spectacle of white Christians in Alabama who convinced themselves either that the man they hoped to elect as their senator was not so creepy around young girls as to get himself banned from a mall (fact check: he was) or that the behavior that got him banned is actually biblical in character and therefore OK (exegesis check: it isn’t). In the end, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Roy Moore.