Yes, Virginia, there is a media bias against orthodox Christianity (especially at Christmas and Easter), but it was tempered somewhat this year by the publication of strongly theological content in opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Granted the pieces were written by conservatives with ties to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but those connections do not diminish from the fact that newspapers widely reputed for their anti-conservative bias published the pieces. In fact, those connections ought to have made it less likely the pieces would be published, in light of conservative portrayals of the main stream media as hopelessly biased.

From Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:

Modern people, surrounded by violence and oppression, presented with morally conflicted choices, do not need an ethical system. They need hope. And that sets a limit on our own effort. “A prison cell like this,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

In the Christian view, the door was swung open by the incarnation, by a God who somehow became a defenseless child, a refugee, a teacher of good, a victim of injustice, left alone, tired, in doubt, to face a humiliating death. A God who — strangely, paradoxically, mysteriously — at the end felt abandoned by God. A God on our side. “God wants to always be with us,” Bonhoeffer said, “wherever we may be — in our sin, in our suffering and death. We are no longer alone: God is with us. We are no longer homeless; a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us.”

This, despite all our fears and doubts, is Christmas: a God secretly revealed as love.

From Pete Wehner in the New York Times:

Because the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions. It was through this story of divine enfleshment that much of our humanistic tradition was born.

For most Christians, the incarnation — the belief that God, in the person of Jesus, walked in our midst — is history’s hinge point. The incarnation’s most common theological take-away relates to the doctrine of redemption: the belief that salvation is made possible by the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus.