There is a long tradition of the United States government releasing secular and non-sectarian messages for the Christmas season, carefully avoiding anything that appears to officially favor one religion over another. This is yet another norm broken by the Trump administration.
The Washington Post reports:
Top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration posted messages from their government accounts hailing Christmas in explicitly sectarian terms, such as a day to celebrate the birth of “our Savior Jesus Christ.”
The Department of Homeland Security posted three messages on social media Thursday and Friday, twice declaring, “Christ is Born!” and once stating, “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” One DHS video posted on X displayed religious images, including Jesus, a manger and crosses.
Those social media posts are “one more example of the Christian Nationalist rhetoric the Trump administration has disseminated since Day One in office,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement. “Our Constitution’s promise of church-state separation has allowed religious diversity—including different denominations of Christianity—to flourish in America. …
In 2015, as Trump campaigned for president, he told voters, “We’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again.” A decade later, officials in his second term have gone further in overtly seeking to align the administration with Christian advocacy in both language and action.
These examples are not simply personal messages from politicians but official communications from the agencies they head. And they are not general greetings to the faithful but advocacy for a specific religious doctrine. But key supporters of this administration are Christian nationalists who believe in tearing down the separation of church and state, and this is a small step toward that goal.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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