Gospel Nativity belief and "Merry Christmas"

According to the 20 Dec 2018 Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead Huffington Post article "What 'Make America Great Again' And 'Merry Christmas' Have In Common":

Christian theology, identity or faithfulness have nothing to do with an insistence on saying "Merry Christmas." To be more precise, when we analyzed public polling data, we found that there was no correlation between being an evangelical Christian, believing in the biblical Nativity story, attending church, or participating in charitable giving and rejecting "Season's Greetings" for "Merry Christmas." [emphasis added]

The referenced data are from a December 2013 Public Religion Research Initiative survey. Item Q5 is the "Merry Christmas" item:

Do you think stores and businesses should greet their customers with 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings' instead of 'Merry Christmas' out of respect for people of different faiths, or not? (Q5)

Item Q6 is the biblical Nativity belief item:

Do you believe the story of Christmas -- that is, the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the Shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East -- is historically accurate, or is it a theological story to affirm faith in Jesus? (Q6)

Here is the crosstab for the "Merry Christmas" item and the Nativity item:

Contra the article, these variables are correlated: ignoring the don't knows and refusals, 57 percent of participants who believe that the gospel Nativity story is historically accurate preferred the "Merry Christmas" response ("No, should not"), but only 41 percent of participants who believe that the gospel Nativity story is a theological story preferred the "Merry Christmas" response.

Here is a logit regression using the gospel Nativity responses (gospel) to predict the Merry Christmas responses (merry), removing from the analysis the participants who were coded as don't know or refusal for at least one of the items:

The p-value for the logit regression is also p<0.001 in weighted analyses.

The gospel predictor still has a p-value under p=0.05 when including the demographic controls below in unweighted analyses and in weighted analyses:

The gospel predictor still has a p-value under p=0.05 when including the demographic controls and controls for GOP partisanship and self-reported ideology in unweighted analyses:

There are specifications in which the p-value for the gospel predictor is above p=0.05, such as in a weighted analysis including the above controls for demographics, partisanship, and ideology. But the gospel predictor not being robust to every possible specification, especially specifications that control for factors such as GOP partisanship and charitable giving that are plausibly influenced by religious belief, isn't the impression that I received from "...we found that there was no correlation between...believing in the biblical Nativity story...and rejecting 'Season's Greetings' for 'Merry Christmas'".

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Here is another passage from the article:

What does this tell us? Ultimately, drawing lines in the sand over whether people say "Merry Christmas" over "Happy Holidays" has virtually nothing to do with Christian faithfulness or orthodoxy.  It has everything to do with the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel.

I didn't see anything in the reported analysis that permits the inference that "It has everything to do with the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel". Whites and conservatives being more likely than non-Whites and non-conservatives to prefer "Merry Christmas" doesn't require that this preference is due to "the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel" any more than a non-White or non-conservative preference for "Happy Holidays" and "Seasons Greetings" can be attributed without additional information to the cultural and political insecurity that non-White non-conservatives feel.

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NOTES:

1. Code here. Data here. Data acknowledgment: PRRI Religion & Politics Tracking Poll, December 2013; Principal Investigators Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox; Data were downloaded from the Association of Religion Data Archives, www.TheARDA.com [http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/PRRIRP1213.asp].

2. I had a Twitter discussion of the article and the data with co-author Samuel Perry, which can be accessed here.