Make sure your “Merry Christmas” greeting is delivered with honesty and love, not wielded as a rhetorical weapon.

T he elderly man who scanned my purchases at Target this week concluded our brief interaction with the valediction “Merry Christmas!” There was just a touch of mischief in his voice; he seemed to delight in saying the phrase, especially as an employee of a corporation known for its progressive politics.

It seems that President Donald Trump would approve. He has alternately attracted scorn and approbation from the likely places for pointedly including the traditional greeting in public statements and encouraging others — especially retail workers — to do so as well. In fact, at an event in Utah, he recently declared that Christmas is “bigger and better than ever” on his watch.

Now, I don’t actually think that there has ever been a huge cohort of people who are gravely offended by hearing the words “Merry Christmas.” The politicization of holiday greetings has been a particularly silly proxy battle in the culture wars. It has been useful to both sides to pretend that mentioning the dominant winter holiday makes large numbers of marginalized people/adolescent snowflakes feel unwelcome, even if few ever express any real discomfort with it either way.

For the president, the traditional Christmas greeting is valuable not as a sharing of the glad tidings of the Savior’s birth, but only as a kind of rhetorical weapon whose purpose is to offend others’ sensitivities — to be “politically incorrect.”

“Merry Christmas” becomes, in this cynical understanding, exactly what oversensitive secularists have always claimed: an intentional affront. All the joy of the Incarnation and the love of the infant Jesus and the hope of salvation — that is, everything discernibly and beautifully Christian about Christmas and its traditions — are drained from the words. What is left is only a base expression of power: “I can say this to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I win. You lose. Ho ho ho.”

This, I implore my fellow Christians to see, is not how we bring about a renaissance of Christian culture. Say “Merry Christmas” if you want. Say “Happy holidays” if you want. (Don’t say “Season’s greetings,” unless you want to sound as sincere as a mass-produced greeting card.) But whatever you say, say it with honesty and love, not to put one over on the liberals.

This brings me back to my Target visit, where the slow old man impishly wished me a “Merry Christmas.”

Perhaps if American Christians were more preoccupied with why a septuagenarian feels compelled to work a stressful low-wage job, rather than the words he uses to greet his customers; if we articulated a faith that makes real, substantive demands on the world — rather than a faith that is an accessory to identity politics — we might be closer to conceiving of a culture where Jesus Christ reigns.

And not just in the seasonal aisle.