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The Right Invents a Biden ‘War on Easter’
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The Right Invents a Biden ‘War on Easter’

But leaves the Donald Trump-sized log in its own eye.

Cathy Young's avatar
Cathy Young
Apr 01, 2024
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A photo from last year’s Easter festivities in the White House: A costumed Easter bunny makes an appearance at the daily press briefing on April 10, 2023. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

AFTER TWO DECADES OF RIGHT-WING ALARM about a liberal “War on Christmas” (consisting mainly of secular holiday decorations and greetings), the backlash against the “War on Easter” has arrived. Over the weekend, there was an explosion of outrage at the revelation that President Joe Biden had recognized March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility. This year, March 31 also happened to be Easter Sunday. House Speaker Mike Johnson paired this news with another story about the Biden White House supposedly banning religious themes from an Easter egg art contest for children to charge that the administration had “betrayed . . . the resurrection of Jesus Christ” and affirmed LBGTQ activism as America’s de facto new religion.

Those two “news” items prompted a massive right-wing pile-on. Fox News and Newsmax each posted multiple items. Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference declared the supposed assault on Easter “disgraceful,” while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sputtered that “there is no length Biden and the Democrats won’t go to to [sic] mock your faith, and to thumb his [sic] nose at God.”

Donald Trump’s campaign cried blasphemy, deplored the Biden White House’s “years-long assault on the Christian faith,” and bizarrely urged an apology to “Catholics and Christians”—perhaps a dog whistle to those Trump supporters who believe Catholics not to be Christians.

Because this was a ragefest and not real concern, no tempers cooled after fact-checkers pointed out that Transgender Day of Visibility was not a Biden administration scheme to sideline or repurpose Easter Sunday. (Fact-checking is for libs, anyway.) March 31 was first designated by transgender rights activists as a “Trans Day of Visibility” in 2009; the founder chose the spring date to put it months away from both Pride Month (June) and the more somber Trans Day of Remembrance (November 20). The Biden White House has recognized it each year since 2021. One could conceivably argue that Biden ought to have skipped the proclamation this year or issued it after the fact to avoid antagonizing Christians who might consider the overlap offensive—but that’s an argument entirely different from pretending that the proclamation was a deliberate slap in the face to the Christian religion. (How many Christians might actually be offended by this situation is hard to say: White evangelicals are the only group in which a majority believes that transgender acceptance in the United States has “gone too far”—while Catholics are almost as likely, and black Protestants more likely, to say that it has “not gone far enough.”)

Not to mention, of course, that Easter Sunday has hardly been replaced at the White House. Not only did Joe Biden issue an Easter statement on Sunday, but it mentioned God, “the power of Christ’s resurrection,” and “Jesus’ sacrifice”—things you’d expect to be strictly taboo in Bidenland, if you get your information from right-wing media. And if you think Biden’s Easter statement was a face-saving move to neutralize the “Transgender Day of Visibility” storm, which began on Saturday, sorry to disappoint you: there were also Biden Easter statements last year and the year before that, and those statements are just as explicit about Easter being a celebration of Christ’s resurrection.

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And what was Biden’s Republican rival doing on Easter Sunday? Well, Donald Trump was very busy that morning, but not because he had to get to church. After offering a laconic “HAPPY EASTER” greeting (along with a staggering number—more than seventy—of more self-promoting posts unrelated to Easter, including one in which he bragged about beating Michelle Obama in a potential electoral matchup), Trump did finally get around to posting a detailed Easter statement. It was not really about Easter, per se, but that’s not exactly unusual for him.

That isn’t to say the divine wasn’t on his mind: Trump also shared two links to an article by talk show host Wayne Allyn Root touting “the Trump Miracle.” Root didn’t mean “miracle” in a metaphorical sense: “What’s happening is supernatural. . . . Trump is ‘the Chosen One.’ Trump is sent by God and blessed by God.”

Trump also shared a link to an article titled “The Crucifixion of Donald Trump.” These sorts of framings for Trump’s presidency are hardly new—some Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians have been making prophetic declarations about Trump being a special tool of God since well before he received the Republican nomination in 2016—but Trump sharing them on Easter Sunday arguably does more to take his believing supporters’ focus off the person of Christ than does the coincidental overlap of the holy day with Transgender Day of Visibility. Combine these posts with the former president’s recent endorsement of the “God Bless the USA” edition of the Bible, a volume that combines Scripture with this country’s founding documents, and I’d go so far as to say that “blasphemous” is a much better fit in Trump’s case.

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And the Easter egg outrage Speaker Johnson mentioned as further evidence of Biden’s “betrayal” of Easter? That turns out to be even more of a manufactured issue. Yes, guidelines for the contest in which kids submit decorated eggs for a White House display specify that the art “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.” But the Biden White House itself has precisely nothing to do with those rules. They come from the American Egg Board, which administers the contest and has confirmed that the guidelines have not changed since the late 1970s. The same rules were in place every Easter during Trump’s tenure, as well.

This recasting of a longstanding tradition as an anti-Christian progressive novelty is reminiscent of the “War on Christmas” rhetoric, which imagines a liberal conspiracy in secular holiday greetings that were common throughout the twentieth century. In both cases, the largely performative outrage over offenses detected in perfectly ordinary things resembles nothing so much as the behavior conservatives have so often mocked among perpetually offended “snowflake” leftists.

One can debate how much religion there should be in the public square. One can also debate the extent to which the Biden administration’s embrace of transgender advocacy papers over complicated moral and political questions related to gender identity on which most Americans hold complicated views. But there’s no serious debate to be had when administration critics blatantly distort the facts in the service of partisan faux outrage, or when trans acceptance is denounced as blasphemy by people who have no problem with hawking “Jesus is our savior and Trump is his weapon” t-shirts.

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