Well, it turns out, the Evangelicals were right.

The pulpit-pounding preachers were right.Franklin Graham was right.The Republicans were right.Donald Trump was right.Fox News was right.The Religious Right was right.Every single one of them was speaking gospel truth all along.

They’ve all been warning me for years, and I didn’t want to believe them, lest hopelessness set in. But the proof is unavoidable now, and I need to confess they were correct and I was mistaken. I once was blind and now I see it clearly.

There is a war on Christmas in America.

They told me Christianity was under attack here. It is.They told me Jesus was being rejected. He is.They told me a brazen mockery was being made of his birth. It is.They told me the Gospels were being perverted. They are.They told me decent people were being deceived. They are.

The only thing they neglected to tell me in their bombastic, sanctimonious, sky-is-falling sermonizing was the source of the offense.

The brutal yuletide assaults haven’t come from Atheists or Agnostics, not from Humanists or Muslims, not from coffee franchises or the Liberal Media or Progressive Christians or the mythical Woke Mob.

The very white Conservatives who’ve been loudly sounding the alarm are the incessantly advancing hordes.

They’re the only ones warring with Christmas because they’ve disregarded their own story.

Christmas was a child of Palestinian Jewish parents desperately fleeing politically ordered genocide.Christmas was a dark-skinned child, born amid the smell of damp straw and animal dung, because no human-worthy welcome could be found.Christmas was a poor, itinerant, street-preaching rabbi, living off the generosity of those around him.Christmas was a compassionate caregiver; feeding, clothing, and healing whoever crossed his path.Christmas was a liberal activist fighting for the poor, condemning violence, shunning material wealth, and calling the world to live sacrificially for the common good.

The white Evangelical Church in America has no use for this Christmas. In fact, worse than that, it has open contempt for it.

Because this Christmas is antithetical to its arrogant supremacy.This Christmas is incompatible with its rabid Christian nationalism.This Christmas is counter to its ravenous capitalism.This Christmas is resistant to its closed borders and erected walls.This Christmas will not consent to its heartlessness, its callousness, its myopic America First hubris.

And this Christmas, it is now hiding here in plain sight among the “least of these:”

It is the Latino father brutally assaulted and kidnapped at his workplace by a gang of masked thugs wearing badges.It is the third grader whose plate and belly are continually empty in a land of abundance.It is the grievously ill toddler whose parents have exhausted their resources trying to keep him breathing.It is the terrified young woman having to traverse three states to have autonomy over her own body.It is the transgender teenager trying to feel at home within their own body, while being terrorized from without by lawmakers and preachers.It is the exhausted mother in Atlanta waiting for hours to cast her vote while being gerrymandered into silence.It is the homeless veteran starving to death on the corners of opulent megachurches who pretend to care for the poor.It is the young black man terrified during a traffic stop, because he has seen this viral body cam video a hundred times before.It is the poor, sick, hungry, and marginalized of this nation who exist on the razor-thin line between living and dying.

This is the Christmas these professed Christians are assailing.

And so this season, while they hide behind ceremonial religion, armed with recklessly wielded Bible verses, dressed in ornamental piety, drenched in flowery prayers, and singing sweet songs, these religious people wage their war on Christmas.

With every social media diatribe, every Fox News nationalistic rant, every piece of legislation, every racist cell phone complaint, every anti-immigrant press conference, with every homophobic distortion, every manufactured crisis, every incendiary Sunday sermon.

White Evangelical Christianity in America cannot peaceably coexist with the Jesus of the scriptures; with the truth of the poor baby in the center of the Nativity; with the gritty, non-white, non-American reality of Christmas, which is why it is choosing to remove him.

We cannot let this happen.

We who seek to emulate Jesus and guard humanity need to speak this truth. We need to oppose their perennial act of aggression and their annual victim rhetoric.

We need to fight for the sick child, the migrant family, the transgender teenager, the homeless veteran, the young black man; because when we do, we are perpetuating the heart of the Middle Eastern child, born under duress in the place where livestock dined—the one who turned the world upside down in the name of a compassion that knew no borders and a love that had no walls.

Yes, there is a war on Christmas.

And the good people left here need to fight to save it.

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