Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky wanted nothing more than a Jewish menorah displayed along with Christmas trees at the Seattle-Tacoma airport during this holiday season. What he got instead was an outpouring of venomous Yuletide e-mail from Christmas militants — and a promise from the government-owned facility of a more evenhanded celebration of America’s religious diversity next year.

Bogomilsky’s letter to the Port of Seattle, written after several fruitless weeks of quiet requests, threatened a federal lawsuit if the Hanukkah commemoration was turned down. But, as airport officials now acknowledge, the rabbi never asked them to take down the trees and send a bah-humbug message throughout the land.

With the trees now back up, many are asking whether the peace-on-earth season in the United States has to feature sectarian conflict every December. In a pluralistic country, interreligious frictions are inevitable. But the Christmas wars can be eased with mutual respect and a little common sense.

The responsibility for religious peace and true religious liberty rests with the Christian majority, however, not with other faiths or with secularists and non-believers. And the Supreme Court has pointed the way — less than artfully, perhaps — if only the uncompromising minority within that majority would let it.

The Supreme Court laid down rules for Christmastime displays in a pair of somewhat unsatisfying decisions two decades ago. The first, in 1984, upheld against an establishment-of-religion challenge to a display sponsored by the city of Pawtucket, R.I., that featured a crèche and an array of secular Christmas symbols, including a now-infamous plastic reindeer.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said Santa and the reindeer had a permissible secular purpose despite the religious nature of the crèche. In a crucial concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said a government-sponsored recognition of religion is permissible if — and only if — it does not amount to an “endorsement” of religion. Government endorsement runs afoul of the Constitution, she argued, by telling religious minorities that they are disfavored “outsiders” to the political community and simultaneously telling the religious majority that they are favored “insiders.”

Five years later, the court ruled in a fractured decision that a stand-alone crèche in a prominent location in Pittsburgh’s downtown courthouse was impermissible — but that an outside display with a Christmas tree, a menorah and a sign saluting liberty survived constitutional scrutiny. Together, the cases seemed to say that the government can include religious elements in a holiday display so long as a secular purpose can be found and overt religious preference is minimized.

Critics mock the court’s supposed “plastic reindeer” test. Logically, it might be easier to defend a rule that anything goes — or, as the church-state separationists argue, that nothing does. But to get to five, the justices had to craft a constitutional compromise.

The compromise has not been easy to put into effect. Religious Christmas carols in public schools pose a very close question. But over time, the court’s compromise seems to be gaining acceptance.

Here in Washington, a national menorah is lit in December, though with less fanfare than the national Christmas tree. Jews have mostly settled for that. But many Christians want more. In O’Connor’s terms, the advocates of “a Christian nation” believe that they are entitled to insider status.

So when the Christmas trees were crated in Seattle, Bogomilsky had to endure a media onslaught — “Rabbi Grinch,” CNN’s Lou Dobbs called him. Indignant letter writers criticized the government for bowing to political correctness and accused the rabbi of religious intolerance. “The majority is represented,” another writer protested, “not the minority.”

Winner-take-all is, in fact, the rule on religious issues in some countries, from anti-clerical France to theocratic Iran. The framers of the Constitution — most of them believers of one sort or another — gave this nation a different construct: freedom to exercise religion combined with no government establishment of religion.

Many Christians believe that Christianity is under assault in the United States today and see a political as well as religious need to use the organs of government to support it. And they protest when other believers want not endorsement but mere accommodation. Some Christian commentators complained, for example, when Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who is getting ready to become the first Muslim to serve in Congress, said he planned to swear the oath of office on his holy book, the Quran, instead of the Bible.

Majority Christians who ignore the coercive and exclusionary effects of putting the government on their side on religious issues dishonor the American tradition of religious liberty. In Seattle, airport officials promised to do better next year. One can hope — or pray. But for now the absent menorah casts a shadow over the bright seasonal promise of peace on earth and good will toward all.

Kenneth Jost is the Supreme Court editor for CQ Press.