Is The 'War On Christmas' Over?
In the post-Trump age of "woke", it seems like Fox's "war on Christmas" doesn't have the same power that it used to.
Well, it’s that time of year again.
“All I Want For Christmas Is You” playing on repeat.
Nostalgic Christmas specials on TV.
The scent of holiday cookies wafting through the house.
And, of course, thanks to Fox News, the latest dispatches from the front lines about the most urgent war of our time:
“The War On Christmas.”
Or is it?
This war has been going on so long, it’s hard to even know when or where it began.
Most of us understand that this fixation on a so-called “War on Christmas” is simply a grievance-fest manufactured by right-wing media to rile their White Christian viewership and the Republican base into a lather of rage about the notions that 1) the culture is leaving them behind (true) and 2) White Christians are really the ones being discriminated against these days (not true. At all.)
What an effective technique it’s been to distract their viewers from all the ways Republicans are harming their interests and Democrats are actually working to benefit them. Certainly wouldn’t want them to get wind of that.
But if you’ve sensed that the “War on Christmas” hasn’t been raging quite as loudly as it once did, you’re not alone. In today’s essay, I’ll explore why that is, and where this whole phenomenon originated.
Where It All Began
CNN’s John Avlon traces Fox News’ “War on Christmas” obsession back to December 2004, when Bill O’Reilly went on one of his rants, this one claiming that “no religious floats were permitted” at a Denver holiday parade and that in New York City, “no Christian Christmas symbols were allowed in the public schools.”
The villain in O’Reilly’s story? You guessed it: “The secular progressive agenda.”
Cut to the following year, October, 2005, when Fox host John Gibson took this grievance to the next level, singlehandedly launching the “War On Christmas” cinematic universe with the release of his book, The War On Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.
To promote his book, Gibson, then the host of Fox’s The Big Story, posted an OpEd on the Fox website pretty much laying out what would become the defining principle of Fox’s ongoing ‘War on Christmas’ coverage:
…my book focuses on the instances of very secular signs of Christmas being banned because they are thought to be too Christian or that they would offend someone.
These symbols include: Santa, the Christmas tree, the word Christmas and even the colors red and green.
He even launched a “Christmas patrol” to deploy Fox viewers to go out in their neighborhoods in search of attacks on Christmas. Because what could go wrong?
My Word is going to go on "Christmas Patrol" and I would like you to write me at a special e-mail address: waronchristmas@johngibson.com.
If you think there's an instance where Christmas is being suppressed in your town, school or workplace, send me a note and I'll look into it.
As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump demonstrates in a November 14th, 2023 article, the year 2005, which was when Gibson’s best-selling book came out, was the high watermark for Google searches of the phrase “war on Christmas.”
This timeline is confirmed by The Daily Show, whose recent segment mocking the “war on Christmas” traced Fox’s past coverage of this manufactured conflict back to…yep, 2005.
But it soon would grow much bigger than Gibson.
“Obama’s War On Christmas”
It’s appropriate in a way that John Gibson’s show was ousted from Fox’s air just a few years later in favor of the network’s 2008 election coverage of the historic election ultimately won by Barack Obama.
Gibson may have been out as an anchor, but the “War on Christmas” moniker he coined was just heating up, as Phillip Bump notes in The Post:
“It was really during Obama’s tenure that this issue was at its peak on the right.”
Remember the whole “Barack Obama never says Merry Christmas!” brouhaha? Even Snopes weighed in with a FALSE finding.
Because, well:
Taking a look at the number of times Fox News mentioned the phrase “War of Christmas” throughout its entire lifespan, you can see it literally peaked in the wake of the Republicans’ 2010 midyear election romp during Obama’s presidency, in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
Obama was a convenient villain for Fox’s “War on Christmas” melodrama. After all he was the first Black president and the right perpetuated the lies that he was neither American nor Christian. He was a national manifestation of the fears stoked by Fox and right-wing media.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, who was an anchor at Fox during these years, spilled the tea to John Avlon about just how Fox would weaponize the “War on Christmas.”
“Everything is some sort of marching order that came down from Roger [Ailes]. And this was a favorite, this was an evergreen story of Roger’s. As you know, because he did think that Chrsitian values were being eroded and that secularism was the downfall of the country. He loved the slogan, he believed it.”
In short, they manufactured panic out of nothing.
“One thing that Fox does very effectively is any little story in Paduka, Kentucky of a cross on a hilltop a secular court says needs to be taken down, they beat that drum so often you begin to think it’s a national crisis.”
And:
“...so they find these little stories of a nativity scene somewhere and then they talk about it every hour and every day and suddenly you think the country is under assault, and Christmas is under assault, and there’s a war on Christmas. Even though it’s like one local story, an obscure story somewhere.”
You can watch the segment below:
Fox’s MO was to take every little story and blow it up into a national emergency, yet at the same time, during the Obama years they had a potent very national symbol that their worldview was under threat sitting in the White House.
Why Isn’t Fox Saying ‘War On Christmas’ Anymore?
But just 6 years out from Obama’s exit from office (as well as the death of Roger Ailes in 2017), we see a distinct drop in “war on Christmas” mentions.
Just look at the dark 2023 line at the bottom of graphs above.
You can see how little the phrase has actually been mentioned this year (as of Nov. 14, 2023 when the WaPo article was published.)
As Bump notes:
In October 2012, Fox News mentioned the “war on Christmas” more than 50 times. This [October], it didn’t do so at all.
Ironically, Fox’s “War on Christmas” obsession may have been a victim of its own success. A primary culprit: Donald Trump.
As CNN’s Camerota, formerly of Fox, told Avlon, “Donald Trump learned it from Fox.” Trump not only co-opted Fox’s “war on Christmas” framing for his own campaign, but he later declared the war essentially won, thanks, of course, to him.
He apparently accomplished this Christmas miracle in less than a year in office:
As Bump reminds us, Donald Trump “in the pre-woke era, made ‘we’re gonna say Christmas again!’ an applause line at his 2016 rallies.”
And then as CNN’s Avlon notes, he made the claim that Joe Biden would somehow cancel Christmas as part of his 2020 closing argument, ending with:
“Remember I said we’re going to bring back Christmas, the name? Remember? We brought it back, right? Remember.”
You can watch it below:
But the “war on Christmas” framing was perhaps too successful in other ways as well. The right now brandishes woke-ism as the overarching anti-left rallying cry. Conceptually, it is a cousin to the “war on Christmas,” and I’d argue born out of it, but “woke-ism” has the benefit of being year-round and quite versatile.
And if Fox’s goal was to convince their viewers that their Christianity and their culture were under attack. Well, mission accomplished.
From The Washington Post:
In October, YouGov asked Americans how much discrimination different groups face in the United States. Republicans were more likely to say Christians faced at least a fair amount of discrimination than they were to say the same of Jewish people or Black people. (They were more likely to say White people faced discrimination than to say Black people did.)
But when it comes to whether there is actually a “war on Christmas” all you have to do is look at this 2017 Pew poll showing 90% of Americans say they celebrate Christmas.
And as Alisyn Camerota says:
“If you think Christmas has gone away, go down to and try to see the Christmas displays at Macy’s department stores in the 2 weeks before Christmas. Christmas is winning.”
But what puts the fear of, well…God, into Fox viewers and the White Christian right in this country is another data point in that poll:
Today, 46% of Americans say they celebrate Christmas as primarily a religious (rather than cultural) holiday, down from 51% who said this in 2013.
That trend mirrors religious affiliation more broadly.
According to a 2021 Pew poll, 63% of Americans now identify as Christian, down from 78% in 2007. During that same timeframe, religiously unaffiliated people went from 16% to 29%.
So, in a very real sense, perhaps the Fox panic was justified after all. Because when it comes to the fight for our culture, the secular left IS winning that war.
It would have been nice if all the energy and money devoted to this ridiculous campaign could've been used to produce something constructive, such as food for the hungry, housing or toys for those without. But, that isn't the Republican way. Note that Fox never promoted doing "Christian" charity as a way to fight the war on Christmas. Just rant and rage.
The only war on Christmas I see is when MAGA politicians post the pictures of their gun toting families under the Christmas tree. Taking the wonderful notion of peace on earth and goodwill to all and perverting it to that makes me wish for a special place in hell for these people.