Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Chains We Forge In Life, How Religious Is the US, and Hanukkah at the White House

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

A warning to anyone engaged in demeaning rhetoric: How do you want to be remembered after you’re gone? Like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, it’s not too late to change. Plus, Sharon is joined by political and data scientist, and stand-up comedian, Andrea Jones-Rooy for a fun discussion about data literacy. You’ll learn how to spot manipulation and political spin in headlines and news stories before they fool you.  And then, when did Hanukkah become a tradition in the White House? From the first outdoor menorah lighting, to a fire emergency in the Oval Office, you’ll hear the history of the holiday in the People’s House. If you’d like to submit a question for Sharon to answer, head to ThePreamble.com/podcast – we’d love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at ThePreamble.com – it’s free! Join the 350,000 people who still believe understanding is an act of hope. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. Christmas Eve settled over London with the kind of cold that bit straight through wool. The fog lay against the rooftops like a second skin, and by late afternoon, the daylight had already drained away, leaving the streets dim and the air full of thick smoke. Passers-by hurried home, their faces buried in scarves and collars.

Ebenezer Scrooge climbed the steps to his rooms, the fog. trailing in behind him before the door latched. A single candle gave off a thin circle of light, and Scrooge moved through the corridor with a sort of weariness that comes at the end of a long year or a meaningless life. The quiet was the first thing he noticed. The city itself carried a deep stillness,

no carts, no footsteps, not the shouts of children or the urging of vendors. Then the bell, on the wall, moved. It was a small vibration, so slight it might have been caused by a draft in the once grand home. The metal trembled again. Scrooge watched it tilt, the movement deliberate enough that he knew it hadn't been his imagination. In the next moment, the other bells in the house began to stir, soft, scattered, then gathering themselves into a single, rising sound that traveled through the stairwell and into the rooms beyond. The noise filled the house, the way the fog filled the streets outside.

Slowly, completely, without asking permission. Then the bells fell silent. The stillness that followed felt different from before as though something had entered the room without making a sound. From the floor below came a heavy scrape. The sound advanced step by step, climbing the stairs. Back to that story in just a moment. But first, welcome to the preamble podcast. Each week, you'll hear some of the most interesting stories from our weekly magazine, also called the preamble.

This edition is focused on faith, and I think you're really going to love what we have for you. In today's episode of the preamble podcast, I'm talking with Andrea Jones-Roy. She's one of our contributors and is a data scientist, stand-up comedian, and trained acrobat. Seriously, she is one of the most interesting people you'll ever meet. And later, Hanukkah just began. I'm going to tell you the history of the holiday at the White House. I'm Sharon McMahon, and this is the preamble podcast. Now, back to our story.

Scrooge sat frozen in disbelief as a figure apparated through the closed door. A long chain wound around his body, links crowded with iron boxes and keys and locks that shifted as they moved. Scrooge knew the man at once. He also knew that he had been buried in the cemetery years before. He had stood at a graveside and walked. watched the earth fall over that same set of features, pale and still. Yet here the man stood, looking at him with eyes that were very much awake. The figure stepped close to the hearth, the chain settling around him,

like the weight of a life accounted for. I wore the chain, I forged in life, he said, gesturing. at the representation of all he had been and all he had failed to be. Outside, the city lay under a blanket of cold and fog, waiting for the hope of mourning. Inside, Scrooge was now facing a truth he had managed to outrun until that fateful Christmas Eve. Across the ocean, in our own land and our own time,

the streets look different from 19th century London, but the season still has a way of pressing questions to the surface. The sanctuary lights glow, the nativity scenes are polished, choirs sing, for unto us a child is born, and wonderful counselor, the mighty god, the everlasting father, the prince of peace. Gifts are past, meals eaten, magic made. In the Dickens' class, Scrooge was shown a true accounting of all of his choices, the fiancé he emotionally abandoned when the love of money overtook his heart, the employee with a sick child to whom he provided no assistance, a family he refused to interact with, and a ledger book full, the accounting of the poor who owed him money.

I can't afford to make idle people marry, Scrooge said, adding that if there were those who couldn't make their own way in the world, they should die and decrease the surplus population. In America, some leaders and public figures, often those who co-opt the language of faith for political power and social clout, will someday have to reckon with the chains they are forging with the modern-day version of the workhouses of London. One Texas pastor encouraged his followers to, quote, make Jesus smile by using a gun to, quote, pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country. That is a godly, glorious endeavor, he said.

And it doesn't stop with dehumanizing those who cross the southern border illegally. It extends to anyone who happen to be born in a developing nation and to those who are Muslim. The highest profile political leaders in the United States now advocate for deporting everyone from third world countries, regardless of status, less, quote, society collapse. in the coming years. They are poisoning the blood of our country, is repeated from rally stages and into podcast microphones, clipped on social media and spread like a virus. Quote, in some cases they are not people.

These are animals, Americans are told. Those sentences travel. They leave the spotlight and the studio and arrive a few hours later in the soft-lit places where people practice religion in the ordinary way. a church lobby with a fraying Christmas garland looped around the welcome desk, a folding table stocked with name tags and pens that never quite work,

a crock pot warming something beige for the after-service meal. Someone stands with one thumb on their screen and one hand on a paper cup of coffee, scrolling a clip with captions turned on because the sanctuary is still full of lingering conversation. And then the clip gets forwarded into a small group threat, that also contains a link to the meal train for a woman who just had surgery and a reminder about the children's pageant rehearsal. On any given Sunday, that language has to pass by people who have already made a home in the church. A woman who grew up in Honduras sets out communion cups in a neat grid, her hands moving

quickly because she has done this for years. A man who was born in Nigeria runs the slides for the worship songs, cueing up silent night for the congregation. A teenager whose parents came from El Salvador stands in the back with a stack of bulletins glancing up every time the door opens. They hear the same phrases as everyone else. They go home to the same texts and clips. They understand that some of the country's most prominent voices speak about people like them as poison, as animals, as an invasion, as a surplus that needs to be reduced. It is one thing to hear those words on a rally stage, and it is another to hear them in the voices of people who hug you during the passing of the peace.

Marley and the phantoms who visit Scrooge gave him a glimpse of what that kind of life adds up to. Scrooge was shown how businessmen treated his death as a scheduling problem and a chance at a free lunch, he witnessed strangers pawning his bed curtains and blankets proud of the bargain they had wrung from a corpse. He viewed a gravestone that carried his name, with no mourners gathered to pay their last respects. Scrooge's greatest horror is not that he glimpses his own death. It is that he realizes that everyone around him was relieved when he passed. In the same way, The words some American leaders and houses of worship choose about immigrants will shape the stories told about them later, by their own children, by the communities they inhabit, by the believers who decide whether their faith still has room for the stranger. Scrooge woke up in his own bed with time left on the clock and a chance to do something different with his days.

Faith communities have that same chance. they can keep adding links to the chain by repeating the phrases that make other people easier to discard, or they can pick up a different kind of language, one that treats every person as a human being of infinite worth, one that takes seriously the idea that peace on earth goodwill to men should control how we speak about the people who arrive at our door. The chains we forge will not stay hidden forever. They become our reputation, our archive, our footage, our transcripts. One day when the sermons are searched and the clips replayed and the next generation goes looking for what we really believed about our neighbors, some of us will be remembered by the weight of the chains we chose.

But it's not too late. We can still, like Scrooge, have a change of heart. According to Dickens, quote, Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all and infinitely more. And to Tiny Tim who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as a good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh. And little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset, and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway. He thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes and grins and have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him. When we come back, my conversation with data scientist and stand-up comedian, Andrea Jones-Roy.

I'm joined now by Andrea Jones-Roy, and she is such a delight. She's a political and data scientist, a stand-up comedian, a trained acrobat, and she has this amazing way of blending science and art to help us think a little better. She also hosts the podcast behind the data, where she uncovers the hidden way data shapes our everyday lives. Thanks for making time to do this. I'm so excited to be here. I am thrilled. I want you to start by telling people what a data scientist even is. Ah, yes. The best part about being a data scientist is that nobody knows what a data scientist is,

which means you get to kind of make it up as you go along in the sense that I have a pretty inclusive definition of data scientist, which is someone who uses data, often computational techniques to either collect that data or analyze that data to then better understand something about the world or the universe. And some people would say, no, you're only a data scientist if you're doing deep learning and neural nets, or you're only a data scientist if you're predicting as opposed to explaining. But for me, if you are using quantitative methods to solve a problem in the world that helps you understand it in a fresh way with data and you're being rigorous about it and you're being thoughtful about it, then you're doing data science. So it's sort of regular science amped up with extra data and computational power, is how I would put it.

What would you say to somebody who's like, oh, well, that's just statistics. And you can make statistics say anything you want. You know those people who feel like you can just manipulate the data to say anything. And sometimes people are skilled at that. What would you say to that? Well, I would say two things. One, I would say if you want to argue about whether or not data science and statistics are just, the same thing. There is a thriving argument on the internet about the extent to which one is

different from the other. And if you use computational methods for statistics, is it statistics or data science and vice versa? And so that's actually a fun argument, unlike most on the internet. But as far as the piece about, you know, oh, you can just use numbers and make them say whatever you want, it is the case that you can use numbers in a lot of bad faith ways. And there's no shortage of examples on the internet of you kind of muck with a y-axis, never mind make up data outright. And that is one of the many reasons that, A, I advocate very strongly that we abandon the phrase, what does the data say or the data speaks for itself? Because we humans are interpreting the data. We're reading the data. We are ideally being

transparent about how we came to the conclusions with the data, where the data comes from, how it was collected, all that kind of stuff. And so it's not so much speaking for itself as it is, hey, here's what I looked at in the world, whether it's in a spreadsheet or somewhere else. here's what I did to it. Here's what I found. Now you put on your critical thinking lens and you read about it and you see if you think that is a sound conclusion given the data. And so if you're looking at data and you're just saying, well, this trend went up and this trend went down and you're not being transparent about how you measured those things and you're not kind of going out of your way to really see, am I wrong? Am I missing something?

Then you're misusing data and just trying to kind of make a case and then confirmation biasing your way. to the story by handpicking a bit of evidence. And so one of the things that I'm very, very passionate about and very outspoken about in data science is that absolutely everybody can and should learn to think like a data scientist gain data literacy. I think alongside things like media literacy, digital literacy. It's super important that we become empowered to say, hey, this is the claim, this is the chart, or this is the number that's being put in front of me, to know, like, well, where did it come from? And is there another way we could interpret this? Because it's way too easy to say that anything you want is data driven just because you handpicked a handful of numbers or you presented it in a way that's a little bit funny.

That's such a great point that we need to be learning data literacy because there are people in various aspects of political leadership, in thought leadership, government that ranges from local to all the way to the top, influencers who want to try to tell you that like, well, the data says the moon is made of green cheese. And here's my chart that proves it. Right. And all the scientists that for the last 100 years have said it's rocks, they have been hiding the real data from you that is actually green cheese. And if you have absolutely no skills in how to read any chart and as you said, muck with the y-axis or how to spot made up data, it's easy to get the wool pulled over your eyes. are believing random stuff like we should be looking for mold on the moon. Right. I mean, first of all, if there is mold on the moon, I would be fascinated to hear about it. And second of all, yeah, I mean, one of the things that's really frustrating and you're sort of

tapping into the kind of dark world of pseudoscience, which is, you know, things that seem like science and there are a lot of numbers and there is a lot of data maybe. And it's sort of strung together to look like we did the scientific method and we tested a hypothesis. And then clearly the moon is covered in mold and that's why it's green. I mean, part of the issue is that we need to always look at the entire body of research. There's no one single study in any area, whether it's health or politics or economics or whatever. There's no one single study that's like the definitive, this is what's going on. Maybe there is a pretty well-designed study out there that says the moon is green and it's because of mold.

But like you said, there's also thousands of studies that show otherwise. And so you could say, yeah, something funny happened and the camera picked up a thing. and the light came across like this, and it could be mold, I guess. We all have our hypotheses, and usually this route that I take is the fastest one to work or to school, but some days it isn't doesn't mean that we never go that route again. And so part of data literacy and part of scientific literacy is not over-indexing on one single study in any way. Obviously, we want to be critical of that study.

But even if the study is sound, it's never the case that there's going to be just one that kind of breaks things open. But just like with political polls, you don't want to look at just one and say, aha, this is what this number is. You're always taking into account the suite of polls where they're kind of all coming out with this number and that number. They're all coming out with this person ahead. And then kind of taking it in the aggregate is generally how you always want to approach this stuff. Right. Like that one poll that came out right before the 2024 election that had Kamala Harris up by 14 points or some insane number that people were like, what? And that ended up being an extraordinary outlier, even though that person was an experience in reputable pollster. It's a great example of why understanding the entire body of work is important and not just relying too heavily on a single study. I also have a lot of respect for that pollster, A, because I had followed her work for years and years and really is an outstanding, you know, well-documented transparent pollster.

But also there's this issue with polling and really with a lot of studies where there's something of a herd mentality where if you get a result that kind of feels far outside of what the consensus result is, you might be inclined to keep it to yourself because it was probably wrong. And maybe it was. But there's actually a lot to be said about saying like, look, this was the real data. And sometimes you're just going to have a bumper crop of people who think this as opposed to that. And that's just the way statistics works. And so, yeah, any single data point should be taken with 10,000 grains of salt. Yeah, I hear that. I think that's interesting. You know, you've been writing for the preamble for a while now. I always find your articles so interesting. So

eye-opening. They require me to engage with data that I, you know, maybe have only understood at a very cursory level, but you do it in such an accessible way. That's fun to read. I love your charts. And like, it's a very nerdy thing to be like, Andrea, I love your charts. I really appreciate that. That's like the finest compliment I've ever received. I really enjoy making those charts. So thank you. That's not me just saying nice things. It really is true. But one of the things you've written about recently is about Americans and religion. This is a very interesting topic for a variety of reasons. But I want to hear about your most recent article and about the direction the data points in when it comes to Americans and religion. What did you find? And

are Americans more religious than their counterparts and other developed nations? So I will say it's been lovely getting to do these. I'm always poking around. And then again, this goes to the data literacy pieces. Anytime you see something in the news, like a headline somewhere or something floating around on social media that says, religion's on the decline, Christians are on the way out or whatever, there is a lot of data out there that you can just look at and you can evaluate for yourself and say, how did they collect this data? And I'm going to look at this source and I'm going to look at that source. And so being able to do these is really a nice excuse for me to kind of poke around in some data that I was already curious about.

But yeah, I mean, one of the things that's so fascinating about religion in the United States is. is that depending on how you define religion, we are either very religious compared to other developed nations, particularly developed democracies. So we're thinking Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan. We're either way more religious or we're similarly religious, but we're all less religious than other parts of the world, or everyone is kind of religious everywhere.

So the data really speaks for itself, is what you're saying. It speaks for itself, and it says whatever you want it to say. If you look at that article, you could literally pick the first three charts. And if you just took those in a standalone, you'd be like, see, I told you were more religious or I told you were less religious. And that was one of the surprising things to me is I was like, what is the case? What I had heard is that Americans are more religious. So let me break this down a tiny bit. We are more religious on balance than other developed nations. If you ask people things like, to what extent does your religion serve as a guiding principle in your life? Or how important is religion to you in terms of your daily life? You know, so if you think about sort of the extent to which we are guided by religion or religion influences my life on a daily basis? And again, what do we mean by religion? What do you mean by influences? What do you mean by guides? You know, we're sort of leaving it open in these surveys for people to interpret as they wish. Americans do come out meaningfully more religious than other developed

democracies. But if you ask, do you have a religious affiliation? You know, do you identify as Christian or Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim or what have you? We come out to be relatively similar. So religion is more important in our daily lives, but we're just as likely as someone in Germany to say, yeah, I'm a Christian or yeah, I'm Jewish or yeah, whatever. Set all that aside, and this is dedicated to my mother whose religion, I believe, is mother nature. If you say, forget religion, let's just ask about spirituality. Do you believe in an afterlife? Do you believe that objects in nature have a spirit? There's a really fun survey from Pew that asks all kinds of fun questions. Like, do you carry crystals because you think they have meaning? And you're like,

I do want to know about that. We look. just like Europe. We look just like Canada. And we look a lot like the rest of the world, too. So people everywhere are just kind of equally spiritual. There's some variation. But in general, that's the trend. What do you make of that? As a political scientist who does a lot of data science around politics, what do you make of that trend, that Americans are similarly spiritual slash religious to the rest of the world? but that Americans rate the impact of their religious affiliation more highly than others. Yeah, so it's something that's been debated forever in the United States and in political science, religious studies, psychology, all of these sorts of things. I'm a little bit biased because my original training is in political science, so I will roll out and say, I think the political science take is really interesting. It's not my take, but there are a number of political scientists who have studied this. And a lot of the arguments come down to this idea that because the United States was originally founded on a principle of a separation of church and state, and we don't have a formal national religion, that churches early on, they were sort of free to innovate and adapt in a way that religions that were always tied to the government were just like, I'm the religion and the church is tied to the state and we're just kind of there and we're the default. We don't need to actually appeal to people in any big way because, of course, they'll be a part of this.

is it feels very American in a way, we're able to compete. One scholar puts it, compete for the souls of Americans, where it's like, hey, come join my church. Hey, come join my church. And remember that much of the United States was initially colonized by people coming from Europe who specifically wanted to practice their religion freely. So there was a plethora of religious interest and energy and then kind of this market freedom to say, hey, come join my church because not only are our beliefs X, Y, and Z, and they're going to guarantee you these wonderful moral authority things, but we're going to be a community center and we're going to be a place for, you know, Sunday ice cream socials, and this is going to be your support network. And so a lot of the arguments kind of are like, ironically,

the fact that the government said, hey, churches, go do whatever you want, allowed for this kind of supply and demand effect to come out. And the other piece of this, too, is if you're in the United States and you're looking around and you're saying, I'm not so happy with my church,

in many places where there's kind of one monolithic religion, you would say, all right, well, I guess I'm not in a church. But in the United States, you can say, well, I don't love, you know, this particular sub-branch of Protestantism, but across the street is this other church. So I'll just go to that one. And so church can continue to play a role because you sort of have more boxes of cereal on the shelf to choose from to completely conflate two very different things. No, that makes complete sense, though.

If you go to grocery stores even in Europe, they don't have multiple eight-foot-high aisles full of chips. Yeah. Have you seen what they're doing for cheese it? There are more flavors of cheeses. Yes. I'm like a bacon ranch cheese it. Who is asking for this? Clearly somebody or they wouldn't do it. These sort of like smaller neighborhood markets that exist in France. Nobody's shopping at a cost co in those kind of scenarios. And so choices are by default more constrained. It's the nature of the beast in many other places. It's such an interesting sort of correlation that Americans love choices. We love our choices. We love to have the choice. We love our free markets. Free market, really. in. Yeah. And we've gone through this sort of second grade awakening, you know, in 1820s, 1830s where a bunch of new religions developed. And then, you know, there's been various offshoots of those. So even as the centuries have gone on, we've continued to invent new things, new options, you know, new holiday spectaculars to get tickets for at the various churches. There's a book out there called something like a church of our own. I'm going to get that title a little

bit wrong. But basically in the 1980s and 90s, we saw a proliferation of churches that were specifically for the LGBT community. And so you get other kind of identity groups who maybe I don't have an issue with the broader faith. But why wouldn't I have a church of people more in my community? Yeah. In some ways, it's a beautiful thing. I think it's more beautiful than all the different kinds of cheeses, there I said, that you have this proliferation of choice. Right. And that people can make meaning of those choices, which ultimately is important to most people, that they are able to make meaning of their own lives. And faith is one way that people do that, of course. I can also just add on that is that we do see a bit of a decline over, say, the last 10 years

in terms of the percentage of Americans on a lot of surveys who say that religion is very important in my daily life. We're still above, you know, other developed democracies, but that number has gone down. But not necessarily because people are leaving religion altogether. It's kind of to your point. It's more to say, yeah, I'm still religious. Very few actually say they're atheist or agnostic. It's just that, well, I'm not formally affiliated. And so, So we've almost like, now we're making our own cheeses, you know, or practicing our spirituality or our faith, and even smaller, less formal pockets, but it's still there. I love that. We could keep talking for so many hours. And we have in the past. We've talked for many hours. You're very easy to talk to, very fun to talk to. But I want to give you a chance to give the listener something to tuck into their pocket. What do you hope somebody listening to this, reading some of your pieces, listening to your podcast? What do you want to say to them? What do you want to give them to tuck into their pocket and take with them? It's a very good question. I'm going to say a couple of things, but they're all pointing the same direction. So one is don't let your own limiting beliefs keep you from doing or exploring new things. And part of the reason I talk about this so much is that way too often I talk to smart, thoughtful, curious, interested people who care about this country, care about the world, care about their community, care about their friends, who then I say, well, great, why don't we work together and look at some data? They say, oh, no, no, I couldn't do that. I'm not a math person.

Like these boundaries, I think, really get in our way. And so one is there is no such thing as math people. There is no such thing as a flexible person. There's just people who try different things. And so allowing yourself to kind of put down those walls and explore something new is a big step towards a more fun life, but also towards learning more things. And then from there, the other kind of direction I want to come at this is data doesn't have to be something that is absolutely scary or that you have to have like six degrees in calculus in order to learn from. And I think that it increasingly, is maybe a place where in this country and maybe in the world, we can use data as a common language for issues maybe that we don't see eye to eye on or that we don't agree with. I'm not saying it's a curell, but I think a lot of our disagreements, whether it's politics or something else, is a different read on what we think is going on. And so if we can kind of look at data holistically and say, well, here are the trends in immigration and here are the trends in religion. And we can talk about how we measure that and some weaknesses.

But if we could agree on those trends, we can then have a conversation about what it is that concerns us or what we hope to see that's different. So I think a lot of this kind of walls around identities, also walls around like, I'm this political party. I wouldn't speak to someone of that political party. Like, the more we can dissolve these walls, the better our lives. And then also the more kind of curiosity and shared language we can build if we approach data with that same kind of humility. Put that on a fortune cookie. It's just going to be like a scroll. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for being here. I am delighted to know you. And I I love reading your pieces each week, and it has been so fun chatting. Thanks for being here.

It's totally my pleasure. I love everything that you're up to and hope to talk again soon. Thank you. You can learn more about Andrea Jones-Roy's work at JonesRoy.com, and be sure to check out her podcast behind the data wherever you get your podcasts. I've told you about Christmas at the White House, and now it's time for Hanukkah. When we come back, I'll explain how the holiday is celebrated and the crazy story. story of the first manora lighting inside the White House. If you stand on the ellipse in December, you can see a very particular kind of American December mashup. On one side, the National Christmas Tree, on the other, a 30-foot monora,

its branches outlined against the winter sky. They didn't arrive at the same time. The tree has been part of the landscape since the 1920s. The menorah is a relative newcomer. And the story of the White House menorah tells us a lot about who is seen, who is welcomed, and how the president's house has slowly learned to hold more than one kind of light in December. Today we're going to follow that story from Jimmy Carter walking out in the cold to light an electric menorah in Lafayette Park to George W. Bush announcing that for the first time a menorah would be lit inside the White House residence to a permanent Hanukkah lamp built from Truman Era Wood, now sitting in the

cross hall alongside Christmas trees and garlands. The Hanukkah story at the White House really begins on a cold night in 1979. Jimmy Carter was in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis, a presidency under an enormous strain. He had largely pulled back from public events staying inside the White House as his team tried to negotiate the release of dozens of Americans being held in Tehran. On December 17th, the fourth night of Hanukkah, he did something unusual. He walked out of the White House, crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, and stepped into Lafayette Park to light a manora. A local Habod group had applied for a permit to put a large electric menorah on federal land.

At first, some of Carter's own officials said, no, worried that a religious display in a U.S. park might cross a church state line. After internal debate, the permit was granted, and that December evening, Carter stood beside a tall silver menorah in a tuxedo. and overcoat, fresh from a state dinner with Margaret Thatcher, and flipped the switch to light it. Years later, Carter described why he thought that moment mattered. He said he wanted the United States to practice its commitment to religious pluralism by placing a menorah on land managed by the National Park Service. His hope was that Hanukkah would be seen as part of America's public life, not just of Jewish communal life. In his brief remarks that night, he talked about people being drawn closer to God in dark times and about the determination to hold on to life

and hope, even under persecution. At the time, the menorah was still outside the fence in Lafayette Park instead of the ellipse, but that small ceremony, a president leaving the building, walking into the cold, and lighting another kind of December light, is where Hanukkah at the White House really begins. For a while, that's where Hanukkah stayed outside the fence. The menorah was across the street from the White House, but not part of its December rhythm in the way the National Christmas Tree was. That begins to change in the early 1990s when Hanukkah slips through the gates and into the Oval Office. In 1993, a White House liaison called the D.C. Jewish Community Center looking for a group of children to come help the new president

mark his first Hanukkah in office. They ended up inviting a class of mostly four to six-year-olds from the JCC's after-school program. The kids spent a few days practicing the blessings, building a clay manora, and making a giant greeting card for the president. When they arrived at the White House, they were ushered through security into the Roosevelt room and finally into the Oval Office, where half the space was crammed with cameras, bright lights, and boom microphones. One little girl, six-year-old Ilana Katan, showed up in a bright pink Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's shirt. The kids helped Bill Clinton light the menorah and then turned around to face the press. Ilana was standing right in front of the candles. As everyone pivoted toward the cameras, she leaned back just a little and her ponytail swung into the flame.

In the video, you can see a wisp of smoke start to curl up. Bill Clinton is the first to see it and he shouts, watch out, grabs her ponytail with both hands and squashes out the fire and then pulls her again. against him and doesn't let go until he's sure she's all right. A secret service agent lunges forward. A staffer nudges the menorah farther back onto the resolute desk. Another aide moves it back again. And then because they're small children and this is still supposed to be fun, someone suggests it's time to play Dratel. What the scene doesn't show on its face is how deliberate the shift was. In earlier administrations, presidents had acknowledged Tonica by accepting minora's gifts or sending greetings while the public ceremony stayed outside on the ellipse.

Clinton's team made a different choice. They brought the ritual into the heart of the West Wing and built the whole event around children teaching the president how to light and bless the candles. The small menorah used that day was later added to the White House collection and eventually transferred to the Clinton Presidential Library. From then on, menorah lightings with school children in the Oval office became a regular feature of Clinton-era december's. Hanukkah was no longer something that happened only out on the lawn or in another building. It had a foothold inside the house. The moment when Hanukkah becomes a fixed part of the December White House calendar comes a few years later under George W. Bush. In the summer of 2001, as the White House Social Office began sketching out

that year's holiday receptions, Laura Bush's chief of staff, Andy Ball, called the new White House Jewish liaison Adam Goldman to ask what seemed like a simple question, should they add a Hanukkah event? Ball told Goldman that the president and first lady were worried that hosting a separate reception might make Jewish guests feel singled out or worse excluded from the rest of the Christmas festivities. Goldman later said he had to take a second before he answered and then told her, actually the opposite is true. Jewish communities wouldn't feel pushed aside by a Hanukkah party, they would see it as an honor that the White House considered their holiday worth its own night. On December 10th, 2001, three months after the September 11th attacks, just before sunset,

a group of guests gathered in the White House. On a table in the East Garden Room stood a heavy ornate silver menorah on loan from the Jewish Museum in New York. It had been made in the 19th century for a Jewish community in Ukraine and had survived the destruction of that community during the Holocaust. That evening, eight-year-old Talia Lefkowitz stood next to George and Laura Bush and helped light the candles. In his remarks, Bush pointed out that this was the first time a Hanukkah menorah had been lit as part of an official presidential ceremony in the executive residence. He framed it as a sign that the building was, in his words, the People's House, and it belonged to all Americans, including the families gathered there to recite the blessings in Hebrew and English. When the ceremony ended, the guests went upstairs to a reception with Latka's and other food prepared in a kitchen that for the first time had been made fully kosher for the event. From that year forward, the pattern repeated and expanded.

Every December, there is now a dedicated Hanukkah celebration at the White House, a menorah with a story, a group of guests whose lives intersect with that story, blessings sung in a state floor room, and a reception where the menu is planned. with rabbinic supervision. Hanukkah has moved from the park to the Oval Office and to the residence, and now on to the official holiday schedule alongside the Christmas tree lightings and receptions. It has a place on the calendar that no one has to argue for each year. The question is no longer, will we do something for Hanukkah? But what will this year's menorah mean? Before we end, it's worth noticing that the Hanukkah story at the White House doesn't jump straight

from Carter in the park to Clinton and the Oval Office and then to George W.B. Bush and the residents, there are smaller steps in between. Ronald Reagan never hosted a full-scale Hanukkah reception the way later presidents would, but he did treat Hanukkah as part of the public vocabulary of the presidency. In the early 1980s, his holiday messages began referring to the large menorah near the White House as the national menorah, putting it in the same symbolic family as the national Christmas tree. He welcomed rabbis and Jewish leaders into the Oval Office, posed with minora as they presented him and folded Hanukkah into his rhetoric about religious freedom and what he liked to call America's Judeo-Christian heritage.

George H.W. Bush nudged things further inside. He joined staff and families for Hanukkah observances in the old executive office building next door, and he accepted a menorah from a national Jewish organization that was later displayed at the White House during the season. Under Barack Obama, those Hanukkah gatherings continued every December. The minoras themselves carry the headlines. A lamp salvaged from a flooded sanctuary after Hurricane Katrina. A statue of Liberty menorah crafted by a German refugee, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and deployed service members called forward to light the candles.

By the time Donald Trump took office, Hanukkah at the White House had a recognizable shape, invitations, music, kosher food, and a menorah whose backstory matters. Invitations, music, and kosher food. But his connection to the holiday isn't just ceremonial, it's more personal. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before her marriage, and three of his grandchildren are being raised Jewish. So when he held his first Hanukkah reception in 2017, it's those grandchildren who stood beside the rabbi to help light a brass,

oil-burning menorah from a New York congregation that predates the American Revolution. And then the Bidens made a different kind of move. Instead of borrowing a menorah from a museum or synagogue, they decided the White House should have one of its own. In 2022, the residence carpenters took old beams salvaged from the Truman-era renovation, the structural bones of the building, and milled them into a menorah. They added simple silver candle cups and placed it in the cross hall as part of that year's We the People holiday decor. At the Hanukkah reception, Joe Biden pointed to it and talked about a house that has been taken apart and rebuilt, about Jewish communities that have survived centuries of attempts to erase them. If you zoom out from that one object, you can see the

whole arc. In our earlier episodes, we watched the White House struggle just to decide what to do about Christmas, from the Adams' quiet children's party in an unfinished mansion to the Harrison's first tree to Mamie Eisenhower's 26 trees and Jackie Kennedy's Nutcracker Suite, turning the blue room into a stage set. Hanukkah's curve is shorter, but it rhymes. It starts with a single electric menorah outside the fence, edges into the Oval Office with a bunch of nervous children, becomes a recurring ceremony in the residence, and finally ends up carved out of the house itself. Christmas is still the headliner, the trees, the gingerbread houses, the televised tours, the First Lady unveiling this year's theme, but somewhere in that same month now,

The lights are lowered in a stateroom floor, a menorah is carried in, and the blessing over the candles is sung. In a place that once hesitated over celebrating even one holiday, the fact that there's now room for more than one set of candles at the darkest time of year says something simple and important. The people's house is still learning who the people are. And every December, it gets one more chance to show us who it sees. If you'd like to submit a question, head to the preamble.com slash podcast. We'd love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at the preamble.com. It's free. Here is your personal invitation to join the hundreds of thousands of people who still believe understanding is an act of hope. This week, we are exploring faith. We have some great articles including why young men are turning from the Manosphere to Catholicism and a look at the super popular series, The Chosen. I know. so many of you are talking about that show. I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon.

If you enjoyed this show, please like, share, and subscribe these things, help podcasters out so much. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. I'll see you again soon.