There’s no bigger holiday in December than Christmas, and you can see inboxes & store aisles celebrating that fact every year. But a lot of the things that define the season today aren’t from the Nativity at all. They have nothing to do with the real Christmas story. Here are seven ways that modern Christmas has lost Christ, and the reasons behind such a loss.
1. More Americans say Christmas is cultural, not religious
The Pew Research Center has been particularly interested in how Americans view Christmas. They have conducted religious surveys for over a decade, and what they found was that only 46% describe the holiday as a religious one, not a cultural one. Fewer Americans also believe that the Nativity story in the Bible was a real historical event, even though these are the same people who celebrate Christmas each year.
2. Many Americans get the Nativity story wrong
Lots of Americans don’t know basic facts about the Nativity story, too, according to data from the Pew Research Center. That’s despite the fact that nine out of ten of them celebrate the holiday. The survey found that only 71% of Americans could correctly state that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and 25% either answered Nazareth or Jerusalem. Research from the Barna Group in the American Worldview Inventory 2025 has found that many people recognize Christian imagery, yet fail to understand the Gospel’s details or messages behind it.
3. The biggest holiday songs aren’t about Jesus
You don’t have to look far to see how Christ has disappeared from Christmas because streaming data says it all. Spotify’s holiday listening reports show that almost every year, secular songs are the most popular ones. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is popular every year, and so are other classics like Wham!’s “Last Christmas.” But songs that are explicitly Christian or clearly mention Jesus rarely top the charts, or go anywhere near it.
4. Christmas shows rarely include the Nativity story
It’s a similar issue with what’s on our TV screens. There are plenty of Christmas movies each year, but very few of them tell the story from the Gospels or even mention Jesus’s name. Snopes reported that the majority of holiday films aren’t actually religious. Christian narratives have mostly disappeared from Christmas media, which doesn’t make much sense given that the holiday exists solely because of Jesus’s birth.
5. Gift-giving is more important than the poor
There was once a time when people cared about giving to their local church or to unfortunate individuals around the festive period. Yet not anymore. The National Retail Federation has tracked holiday sales and found that holiday sales reach hundreds of billions of dollars each year, with predictions that it’ll reach $1 trillion in 2025. But data from the Wall Street Journal shows that the number of people giving to charity over the Christmas period has fallen. Most people plan their Christmas budgets around material goods, rather than helping those around them.
6. Fewer people visit church on Christmas Eve than on Easter
A 2024 survey from Lifeway Research found that fewer Americans visit church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day than during Easter. Christmas is still one of the most popular days for people to visit church. But 90% of pastors in the survey said that Easter was the day that had the highest attendance. They also found that the number of people attending church over Christmas fell from 84% to 81%.
7. Christmas language loses its religious meaning
Words matter far more than people give them credit for, and Christmas language has changed quite a bit. Terms like the “holiday season” and greetings like “Happy Holidays” have become more widespread, replacing explicitly Christian terms such as “Merry Christmas.” The goal is to be more inclusive and recognize that other holidays exist at this time, like Kwanzaa & Hanukkah. But it ignores the Christ part of Christmas.
The changes to Christmas aren’t necessarily always a bad thing. Some of these changes have come about directly from a greater understanding of other holidays during December. But really, that shouldn’t come at the cost of Christ, should it?
