The war on Christmas is really a war on religion. What is at stake in that war is whether the goods we live by and cherish - the dignity of the individual, tolerance, freedom, and respect for life - will survive, or whether they will succumb to the materialist logic that makes each of our unique selves nothing but chemicals, without freedom or dignity or transcendent worth, someday to be swept away by chance or force. Such ideas that turn humans into material things have been the precondition for the worst horrors humans have inflicted on one another. An occasional public reminder that we are something more than mere flesh and bone, capable of self-sacrifice and unconditional love, is not too much to ask from a free society that in its Constitution formally guarantees the right to religious freedom.