SWAJ Rewind: "Who Owns Christmas?"

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who “owns” Christmas? When Christians tell non-Christians that they need to “remember the reason for the season,” or accuse them of engaging in a “war on Christmas,” do they have a right to do so? Is Christmas “theirs” just because it originated as a Christian religious holiday? In this episode, Dan argues that American Christians made Christmas a mainstream part of American culture, a dimension of general Americana, and that as a result they no longer have a claim on the holiday or the right to dictate to others how it should be observed (or not). Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 1000+ episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Subscribe to Teología Sin Vergüenza Subscribe to American Exceptionalism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AXIS Mundi.
0:12.4	This episode is brought to you by Vanta.
0:17.6	Security and compliance done wrong is a headache.
0:20.0	Done right, you build trust and grow faster.
0:22.2	That's Vanta. For startups, Vanta acts as your first security hire, using AI to get you
0:28.2	compliant fast. For enterprises, it's your AI-powered hub for compliance, risk and automating workflows.
0:33.9	From startups like Cursor to enterprises like snowflake top companies
0:38.1	choose Vantor to security and compliance right get started today at vanta.com Hello and welcome to an episode of It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast, Straight Wide American Jesus.
1:05.5	My name is Dan Miller. I'm Professor of Religion and Social Thought Landmark College.
1:09.6	As always, pleased to join all of you.
1:12.1	We want to thank Brad for helping with some content the last episode as I was continuing to get over something, some sort of non-COVID illness that I haven't had in like, you know, three years, like many of us.
1:24.6	But I'm back up and running.
1:26.6	Voice is still a little weird, still using cough drops and so forth.
1:30.3	So I hope everybody will bear with me on that.
1:33.3	I want to dive right in to today's topic.
1:35.9	And I reached out and put out the call basically for people to let me know about
1:40.3	sort of thoughts about topics related to the holidays. And you answered the call
1:46.8	and not surprisingly, the vast majority of people. The two big things were the kind of remember
1:52.6	the reason for the season and Christians opposed to the so-called war on Christmas. Those are
1:58.5	the ones that won out. And I'm going to spend the next, you know, at least three episodes or so this week, next couple weeks, sort of circulating
2:05.4	around those. And what I want to do today is lay out what I think is sort of a background
2:12.2	issue to those, to the notions of remember the reason for the season or, you know, keep Christ
	...

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