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.
The messages sharply diverged from the more secular, Santa Claus-and-reindeer style of Christmas messages that have been the norm for government agencies for years. The posts provided the latest example of the administration’s efforts to promote the cultural views and language of Trump’s evangelical Christian base.
That drew criticism from advocates of a strict separation of church and state.
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.
“People of all religions and none should not have to sift through proselytizing messages to access government information,” she added. “It’s divisive and un-American.”
Administration officials aggressively defended their approach. Asked about the Christmas morning post on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s official X account declaring, “Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson provided a one-sentence reply: “Merry Christmas to all, even the fake news Washington Post!”
Conservative Christians make up an important part of Trump’s political support, even as the country has become less Christian in recent decades.
The Pew Research Center’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, released earlier this year, found that 62 percent of Americans identify as Christian, a 16-point drop since 2007. The share of Americans who said they have no religion — including atheists, agnostics and those who say “nothing in particular” — was 29 percent, up from 16 percent in 2007. The share of the population following other religious traditions — Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others — has remained fairly constant, at around 6 percent.
Just under 1 in 4 Americans identify as evangelical Christians. But those evangelical voters play a central role in Trump’s electoral coalition. He won 81 percent of White evangelical voters in the 2024 election, according to a separate Pew study of voters. Those voters made up about 3 in 10 of his supporters in the election.
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.
Most recently, on Thursday, Trump justified airstrikes against alleged Islamic State camps in northwestern Nigeria by saying he was aiming to “stop the slaughtering of Christians.” Nigerian officials said they approved of the strikes but said Trump was wrongly injecting religion into a situation that was primarily about terrorism.
How to celebrate Christmas while respecting the Constitution’s ban on “establishment of religion” has been an issue for federal officials at least since 1870 when President Ulysses S. Grant, seeking to unite the country after a brutal Civil War, designated Christmas — along with Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day — as federal holidays.
Government officials sought to balance the celebration of a federal holiday rooted in a religious tradition with the country’s tradition of pluralism and secular public spaces. The result was often a Christmas message that avoided specific references to Christianity. For decades, it was common for government officials on both sides of the aisle to share celebratory yet secular messages about Christmas with images that did not carry overt religious meanings, like snowflakes and Christmas trees.
Many still do. The State Department, for example, posted a secular Christmas message this year, directed at “all Americans.”
Many of the Trump administration’s officials who are most active on social media, however, took a different approach.
Just before 9 a.m. on Christmas Day, for example, Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, posted a message on X wishing “Christians nationwide” a happy holiday “celebrating the birth of Jesus!”
In the post was a video more than a minute long in which Dhillon said the department uses the principle of “religious liberty” and the First Amendment on “a daily basis to protect Christians.” She did not mention protecting other religions.
About two hours later, DHS’s official account posted on X that “we are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” A video in the post began with text that said, “Remember the miracle of Christ’s birth,” followed by 90 seconds of religious images, including Jesus, Mary and a manger, as well as several of Trump.
Just before 3 p.m. the department posted another message on X, stating, “Christ is Born!”
Hegseth posted his message around 8:30 a.m. Less than an hour later, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a video on X in which she stood in front of a Christmas tree and said “the very best of the American spirit … flows from the very first Christmas, when God gave us the greatest gift possible: the gift of his son and our savior, Jesus Christ.”
Just after 10 a.m., Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted on X about how “we celebrate the birth of our Savior.” And just after 1 p.m., the Department of Labor wrote on X, “Let Earth Receive Her King.”
Representatives for the departments of Justice, Agriculture, Education, Labor and Homeland Security did not respond to questions about their posts.
The post Trump aides’ official religious messages for Christmas draw objections appeared first on Washington Post.
