You Don’t Have to Be a Believer to Celebrate the Christmas Revolution

December 24, 2023

We build so many barriers these days — left vs. right, secular vs. religious, modern vs. traditional — that we forget how knowledge, inspiration and achievement almost always require sharing and borrowing across our divides.

Christmas is an appropriate time to remember this, yet even a sweet holiday of joy and light has become one more occasion for bashing each other. The phrase “Christmas Wars” ought to be a contradiction of terms (what happened to peace on earth and good will toward each other?), but we seem to have them every year. Cable ratings are the new Scrooge.

So here’s a call for celebrating Christmas as a reminder of how much religious and secular people have to teach each other — and how developments across our intellectual and spiritual barricades helped humanity move forward.

Continue reading in the Washington Post.

About the Author

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

E.J. Dionne is a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center, University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture teaching in Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and Government Department, and a leading scholar and commentator on religion in U.S. politics. In addition, since fall 2017 he has been William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Kennedy School. The W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, Dionne writes a column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 200 outlets nationally and abroad. His books include One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (2017, with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann); Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism: From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (2016); Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012); Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008); Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004); They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era (1996); and Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee.