A White House Christmas tradition, no matter which party’s in office, has been to prominently display a nativity scene in the East Room. But, as Eric Metaxas discovered while reading The New York Times Sunday Styles section, it almost didn’t happen this year. Seems that Desirée Rogers, the White House social secretary who has been in the news lately because of a certain recent party crashing, stated at a luncheon with previous social secretaries that the White House would have a “non-religious” Christmas this year. The article reported:

The lunch conversation inevitably turned to whether the White House would display its crèche, customarily placed in a prominent spot in the East Room. Ms. Rogers, this participant said, replied that the Obamas did not intend to put the manger scene on display — a remark that drew an audible gasp from the tight-knit social secretary sisterhood. (A White House official confirmed that there had been internal discussions about making Christmas more inclusive and whether to display the crèche.)

Yet in the end, tradition won out; the executive mansion is now decorated for the Christmas holiday, and the crèche is in its usual East Room spot.

Metaxas writes:

[T]he fact that it was going to happen reveals a level of political tone-deafness in the current administration that is staggering. To most average Americans — who did not grow up in an Ivy-League, inside-the-Beltway hothouse governed by the rules of the French Revolution — the idea of keeping Jesus out of “the people’s house” at Christmas evokes disturbing images of the Holy Family being turned away from the Inn, or worse yet, images of Herod. But to a super-secular White House afraid to offend anyone — except for average Americans — it probably just seemed like another fab “progressive” innovation.

If President Obama wanted to fuel the fears of every serious Christian in America and actually prove that he is every bad thing they’ve ever heard about him on every crazy Web site, the idea of symbolically taking Jesus out of the White House at Christmas would be just the ticket!