THE MAYOR OF SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts, is sorry. Really sorry. He recently called the city's annual December celebration a "Christmas party." And we can't be having that. What he meant to say, he explained, is "holiday party," because the word "Christmas" contains . . . um, a word they don't use in Somerville, Massachusetts.

But wait a minute. Doesn't "holiday" also contain a reference to that which dare not speak its name? The city marketing director of Wichita, Kansas, noticed. She led a task force that decided to call their annual Winterfest installation a "community tree"--since otherwise Wichita's etymologically astute citizens might hear the "holy day" in "holiday" and tremble for their children's safety.

In fact, what are we doing with trees at all? A few years ago, the city manager of Eugene, Oregon, banned decorated trees on public property during the month of December. And rightly so. Even a secularized symbol for Christmas is still somehow implicated in it all, a co-conspirator in the attempt to turn America into a theocracy. You can't finally eradicate the religious suggestion lurking in the pines, just as you can't wring every last drop of St. Nicholas out of Santa Claus. And if we allow a tree with ornaments on public land, the next thing you know people will be calling out, "God bless us, every one!" and "Peace on earth, goodwill to men!" And then, of course, the Inquisition.

Officials in Plano, Texas, were merely following this logic to its natural conclusion this year when they prohibited

Such "attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless," Weekly Standard contributing editor Charles Krauthammer wrote last week in the Washington Post. And does no one notice how antiquated these attempts seem? How 1970s it all feels: disco shirts, and platform shoes, and the flurry of Christmas lawsuits from the ACLU? When the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared unconstitutional the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the decision felt not merely outrageous, but also curiously old-fashioned--dated and quaint, somehow, as though the superannuated judges couldn't see just how far a changed world had left them behind.

Since the November election, there has been much chatter among Democrats about the need to recapture some portion of America's religious vote. Hillary Clinton asked the left to use the Bible to help make its case. From her perch as House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi called on her fellow Democrats to be less publicly embarrassed about their private faith. Even while commentator after commentator fulminated in the liberal press about the victory of theocracy in the national election, a parade of candidates hoping to chair the Democratic party has passed through Washington, all insisting they know how to resanctify their party--which has grown ever more secularized and ever more defeated since the 1970s.