Why is there no war on Easter?


Today is Good Friday and this coming Sunday is Easter Sunday, both major days in the Christian calendar. The so-called ‘war on Christmas’ is something that politicians have got a lot of mileage out of. In addition to feeding the persecution complex of some Christians who like to think of themselves as under siege for their faith in the US of all places, it is also used as a cudgel by them against those who oppose their attempts to impose Christianity and its practices on everyone, by having prayers and Christian symbols occupy the public sphere.

But why is there no corresponding ‘war on Easter’? Jonathan Merritt posed this question to Dr. Gerry Bowler, a historian who specializes in religion and popular culture. Bowler says that there has long been a ‘war on Christmas’ that was theologically based and involved far deeper issues than the current one about whether you can say ‘Merry Christmas’.

The first arguments about Christmas began in the early Christian Church when theologians disagreed as to the propriety of celebrating the Nativity of Jesus. Some thought this was the sort of thing best left to pagans. When the Church eventually decided that a celebration was proper, the next debate was over the proper date. Western churches opted for December 25 and the cities in the east preferred January 6.

Then arose a centuries-long struggle to keep pagan accretions out of the holiday, a struggle that was sometimes lost – thus the giving of gifts, the Yule log, and perhaps the Christmas tree – but which was successful against transvestism, riotous social inversion, and wearing animal costumes.

Today, the war rages around the world with opposition from atheists, hard-line Hindus and Muslims, and neo-Calvinists, and attempts by LGBT people, vegans, anti-consumerists, and nationalists to appropriate the season to their own ends.

Bowler discusses why there is less of a fuss about Easter than there is about Christmas. He says that there have been campaigns against Easter in the past.

Christmas is celebrated much more publicly and intensely than Easter, at least in North America and is marked by many who are not overtly religious. It is the biggest phenomenon on the planet, dwarfing any rock festival, sports tournament or other holiday. It occupies probably 10 percent of our lives in preparing for it, celebrating it, and paying for it.

That makes Christmas the obvious target of those who oppose any place for religion in the public sphere or those who oppose Christianity specifically. In those times when Christianity was suppressed such as the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, the USSR or the Mao era in China, Easter was victimized in the same way as Christmas.

Bowler seems to be suggesting that there is an actual war on Christmas by anti-Christians who see it as the most prominent symbol of Christianity and thus seek to discredit it as a means of undermining the religion.

I think he is wrong. What people are opposed to is the assumption by some Christians that they can force the symbols of their religion on everyone else, especially in schools and in government. It is that which is opposed, not Christmas itself. Actively seeking to maintain a separation between the religious world and the civic world is not a war on religion unless you think there should be no distinction.

Of course, the whole idea underlying Easter, the business of Jesus dying to free us from original sin, makes absolutely no sense, and it should be no surprise that Jesus had a lot of difficulty understanding the point.

Comments

  1. blf says

    Ah, but there is a “war on easter”. In the UK (The war on Easter eggs v the Archbishop of York — who will crack first? (reformatted (only partly marked))::

    John Sentamu says the National Trust egg hunt campaign is like ‘spitting on John Cadbury’s grave’

    [… Sentamu] has got wind of the fact that the National Trust has rebranded its hunts from “National Trust Easter Egg Trail Supported by Cadbury” to “The Cadbury Egg hunt at the National Trust”.

    [… I]t neglects to mention Easter. According to Sentamu, this rampant secularisation goes against everything founder John Cadbury stood for. […]

    [… T]he war on Easter is a real threat to this country’s values. It seems clear that this is a cynical ploy by a multinational corporation to undermine Christianity as we know it. Even [UK PM] Theresa May has called the rebrand “ridiculous”.

    […]

    Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post, Is there a war on Easter? Maybe there should be:

    […]
    How did the rabbit get involved? I don’t even want to know what the rabbit’s connection is to the crucifixion. What’s its connection to the eggs? Was the stork unavailable? This sounds like some sort of heathen cross-species adoption experiment that is the last kind of thing we should be encouraging.

    Easter is, in many ways, a war on Easter.

    There are two holidays going on. There is the Creepy Rabbit Hiding Eggs In Your Yard holiday, and there is the whole Actually Definitely The Holiest Day In The Christian Calendar holiday. They seem to bear no relation to each other. As Stan says on South Park, “Look, I’m just saying that somewhere between Jesus dying on the Cross and a giant bunny hiding eggs there seems to be a…a gap of information.”

    It’s so patently unconnected that, to fix it, a writer named Frrich Lewandowski wrote a book called The First Easter Bunny that implied the Easter Bunny had been present at the crucifixion and the resurrection. (“He saw that the man on the cross was the same man who rode the donkey in the parade a few days earlier. The rabbit was confused, but he remembered how the older rabbits always told the younger rabbits to beware of people because people can change their minds quickly.”) For the rabbit, things escalate quickly. (“And for evermore, whenever Easter comes and big people find joy in hearing the good news that Jesus lives, little children will hear that the first living creature to see the Risen Jesus was the Easter Bunny.”)

    […]

    […] All that’s left is some sort of pagan egg-hiding ritual, and the sooner we extract the religious from that, the less embarrassing for everyone.

    No wonder the War on Easter is so poorly amplified. If we started to insist that they put the “Easter” back in “Easter,” the whole thing would collapse under its own logic, like an ill-constructed cake. If you’re really serious about the holiday, perhaps a better solution would be to take Easter out of the Rabbit. How is a non-secular egg hunt any different or better or more Easter-like than what we have currently? [ask the knuckleheads in the UK –blf]

    […]

    Maybe it’s time we just admitted it’s the Baffling Secular Rabbit Of Spring and stopped trying to link the two. Shun the peeps. Shun the chocolate. Take Easter out of the Easter Bunny. It couldn’t make it any worse. Maybe the only thing sillier than removing it is having it there in the first place.

    And then something I didn’t really know until recently (despite living in France for many years). Apparently, here in France, traditionally, it’s not a chocolate rabbit laying chocolate eggs, but chocolate flying bells dropping chocolate eggs. All the church bells fly off to Italy for some reason — which is why no church bells ring in France starting on good friday until easter sunday, they’re all in Italy — and as they fly back, dropping chocolate eggs en route on the landscape. (A short France24 video, Flying Bells! How France celebrates Easter.)

  2. Acolyte of Sagan says

    blf, I’m sure that somewhere in the church bells story is a Luftwaffe joke just desperate to be made.

  3. says

    Pfff. Easter isn’t even a christian holiday. It’s the war on the feast lf Eostre/Ostara (the rite of spring, which sounds like it was a big drunken dance party and fuckfest)

  4. says

    It also helps that Easter doesn’t land in the middle of a whole other bunch of other holidays except Passover, doesn’t have as much of a secular component, and isn’t as in your face as Christmas.

    Personally I’d probably not even notice it if it weren’t for the return of Creme Egg advertising. I do get annoyed that I get Friday off instead of Monday.

  5. raven says

    There is a War on Easter.
    It’s mostly by xians who don’t like the name of the holiday,
    named after the Germanic goddess of spring and fertility.
    In other words, it is a Pagan holiday that xians keep trying to
    stuff jesus into.

    The fundies in my area keep trying to call Easter, Resurrection Sunday.
    No one much cares or bothers though.

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