For Western Christians, this last Sunday was Easter, the celebration of the supposed resurrection of the crucified Jesus.

Easter is, of course, one of those annoying holidays whose date varies. (I also find it annoying for other reasons, but let’s put those aside for now.) The holiday takes place on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, which this year fell on 31 March. Meanwhile, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been marked on the same fixed date since its inception in 2009, also falls on 31 March.

Because swathes of the United States are filled with culture-warring Christians whose virulent anti-trans bigotry has been wreaking large scale havoc on transgender Americans and our loved ones for the better part of the last decade, this mundane coincidence became the subject of tantrums from prominent religious leaders, commentators, politicians, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Never mind that there are trans Christians who celebrate Easter, or that Joe Biden’s presidential administration has recognised the Trans Day of Visibility with a pro forma proclamation on 31 March in every year of his tenure. America’s right-wingers screeched and whined about Biden’s “attack” on Easter and Christians and his promotion of “sin”.

As I have belaboured many times in previous columns, America’s conservative, mostly white Christians hold disproportionate political power in the United States due to a number of unfair advantages baked into our political system: for example, equal representation in the Senate by state (meaning a rural state with a tiny population has the same representation as New York or California), and the election of the president not directly by the people, but by the Electoral College, in which states have a certain number of votes, and in most states, the winner takes them all. (This ridiculous situation, which de facto cancels the votes of most people who vote against the candidate the majority supports in their state, could in theory skew things in either direction. In practice the Electoral College tends to favour Republicans and disenfranchise Democrats, as happened when Republican presidents George W Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but gained the White House.)

The disproportionate power held by the American right is one of the reasons bad-faith right-wing tantrums are difficult to ignore. Solving this problem, unfortunately, requires major reforms to which no clear path is immediately available. There is, however, another reason that the Christian right’s conspiratorial religious nonsense matters more than it should – that reason is Christian privilege. Addressing this second reason requires nothing nearly so difficult as passing a constitutional amendment. All it requires is for leftists, liberals, and pundits, journalists, and media gatekeepers to stop thoughtlessly propping up Christian privilege in their own rhetoric. Framing matters – and, sadly yet predictably, American media outlets failed to uphold a secular, democratic framing over the last week. Instead, as usual, they let the right frame the discussion.

For the American punditocracy, Trump’s personal hypocrisy relative to the Christian right’s espoused values has always been irresistible low-hanging fruit. That’s despite the obvious fact that America’s right-wing Christians support Trump not because of his personal piety, but because he does what they want – in his presidential term, he did more to fulfil their dystopian theocratic agenda than any previous president, including Bush.

Last week, when Trump endorsed an expensive “God Bless the USA” edition of the Bible that he will profit from, the pundits – and even experts who should know better – predictably pounced. And they apparently couldn’t just mock Trump for hawking Bibles, which honestly is pretty funny, and leave it at that; they had to frame the whole thing within relative Christian categories, making an essentially theological argument that progressive Christianity is the “true” version of the faith while Christian nationalism is “idolatry”. A number of these commentators called Trump’s move to sell Bibles during Western Christians’ Holy Week “blasphemy”. For its part, the Trump campaign called Biden’s recognition of Transgender Day of Visibility on the same day as Easter “blasphemous”.

“Blasphemy” and “idolatry” are not objective terms. They only make sense from within a particular religious framework, and when journalists, experts, and pundits employ these terms as if they reflect some objective, stable reality, they only legitimate a framing that should be meaningless for the purposes of public debate in a secular, democratic society. Democracy cannot exist on a foundation of authoritarian religious concepts fought over amongst the various sects and factions that make up a particular religion’s adherents. The whole slate of human rights that democracy is meant to uphold, including the freedom of religious belief and practice, cannot exist in a country that promotes one religion over others, or over non-belief.

American pundits – and Democratic politicians as well – have no difficulty seeing what’s wrong with treating “blasphemy” like an objective category when someone is threatened with execution in a Muslim-majority country under an oppressive blasphemy law. But far too often they fail to see how their own employment of similar categories within a Christian framework not only fails to counter right-wing Christian arguments in any way, but also undermines democracy itself. That’s how we get “both sides” obsessed journalists literally preaching the Christian gospel around Easter. Trump endorsing the “God Bless the USA” Bible sends a strong message that the “real America” is Christian. But when you think about it, that’s no less true of a liberal journalist on a news bulletin spouting the “true” meaning of Easter. And that’s a problem.