Bob Vander Plaats is the president and CEO of The Family Leader, a social conservative organization, and a former national co-chair for Ted Cruz for President. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN) In the past week, both Erin Burnett of CNN and Katy Tur of MSNBC have engaged in a national conversation about evangelicals and forgiving a most controversial subject: Donald Trump.
Bob Vander Plaats
While there is value in these discussions, there is danger in looking at forgiveness and faith through the lens of politics. As we head into Easter weekend, I want us to look higher than headlines -- to look through God's eyes, rather than our own.
For God doesn't look at us like we look at each other, doesn't judge as we judge, and isn't swayed by politics. The Bible insists that God holds us all to the same standard: his own perfection. And against that standard, we all sin and fall short of his glory. None of us is righteous. None of us has merited his favor, and we all deserve his judgment. Worse yet, the Bible says, the judgment for our sin is death.
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Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.
But in North America and Europe, Easter has a diminished cultural force as a time for secular celebration — its wider cultural cachet hardly approaches that of Christmas. As Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wryly wrote for Slate, “Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending way too many Easter parties? ... Getting tired of those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think so.”
So why don’t we celebrate Easter the way we do Christmas? The answer tells us as much about the religious and social history of America as it does about either holiday. It reveals the way America’s holiday “traditions” as we conceive of them now are a much more recent and politically loaded invention than one might expect.
The Puritans weren’t fans of either holiday
Christmas and Easter were roughly equal in cultural importance for much of Christian history. But the Puritans who made up the preponderance of America’s early settlers objected to holidays altogether. Echoing an attitude shared by the English Puritans, who had come to short-lived political power in the 17th century under Oliver Cromwell, they decried Christmas and Easter alike as times of foolishness, drunkenness, and revelry.
Cotton Mather, among the most notable New England preachers, lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty ... by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” As historian Stephen Nissenbaum wrote in The Battle for Christmas, “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule’ a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity.”
Like other feasting days (such as the pre-Lent holiday we now call Mardi Gras), Christmas was a dangerous time in which social codes could be violated and social hierarchies upended. (Among the practices Puritans objected to was the popularity of the “Lord of Misrule,” a commoner allowed to preside as “king” over the festivities in noble houses for the day.)
The very nature of having a holiday, furthermore, was seen as problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, singling out any day for a “holiday” implied that celebrants thought of other days as less holy.
Easter, too, was singled out as a dangerous time. A Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislop, wrote a whole book about it: the 1853 pamphlet The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. Using questionable and vague sources, Hislop argued that the name of Easter derived from the pagan worship of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. (This claim has persisted into the present day, and is often cited by those who want us to make Easter more fun and secular. Still, the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system — a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries later — let alone actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is scant at best.)
Hislop decried Easter as a pagan invention, writing: “That Christians should ever think of introducing the Pagan abstinence of Lent was a sign of evil; it showed how low they had sunk, and it was also a cause of evil; it inevitably led to deeper degradation.” Even seemingly harmless rituals — food, eggs — were signs of demonic evil: “The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now,” he wrote. Bad history it may have been, but it made good propaganda.
What did the English Puritans, their American counterparts, and this Scottish Presbyterian have in common? As the title of Hislop’s pamphlet makes clear, they were all influenced by anti-Catholicism: a suspicion of rituals, rites, and liturgy they decried as worryingly pagan. The celebration of religious holidays was associated, for many of these preachers, with two suspicious groups of people: the poor (i.e., anyone whose holiday celebrations might be deemed dangerously licentious or uncontrolled) and “papists.” (Of course, in England and America alike, those two groups of people often overlapped.)
Christmas got reinvented, but Easter didn’t
So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized, domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. In his book, Nissenbaum goes into detail about the cultural creation of Christmas as a bourgeois, “civilized,” “traditional” holiday in the English-speaking world. Christmas, Nissenbaum argues, came to be identified with the preservation (and celebration) of childhood. Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept, one linked to the rise of a growing, prosperous middle class in an increasingly industrialized society, in which child labor was (at least for the bourgeois) no longer a necessity.
Popular writers helped create a new, tamer, model of Christmas: Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall stories, which referenced “ancient” Christmas traditions that were, in fact, Irving’s own invention; Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “The Night Before Christmas”; and, of course, Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. Nearly everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern image of Santa Claus to the Christmas tree, derives from the 19th century, specifically, Protestant sources, who redeemed Christmas by rendering it an appropriate, bourgeois family holiday.
But no such redemption happened for Easter. While it, too, received a minor family-friendly makeover — Easter eggs, traditionally an act of charity for the poor, became a treat for children — it didn’t have the literary PR machine behind it that Christmas did.
Instead, its theological significance intact, Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and — the Easter Bunny and eggs aside — largely avoided any wider cultural proliferation. A study by historian Mark Connelly found that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referred to the two more or less equally. By the 1860s, references to Easter were half that of Christmas, a trend that only continued. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often as Easter. Today, Christmas is a federal holiday in the US, as is the nearest weekday after, should Christmas fall on a weekend. But “Easter Monday” gets no such treatment.
Christmas is a more natural fit for a secular holiday than Easter
The reason that Christmas, rather than Easter, became the “cultural Christian” holiday may well be prosaic. Religion News Service’s Tobin Grant suggests that the need for something frivolous to break up the monotony and cold weather rendered the Christmas season, rather than early spring, the ideal time for a period of celebration.
Or it may be theological. Christmas, with its celebration of the birth of a child, is a natural fit for a secularized celebration. Dogmatic Christians and casual semibelievers alike can agree that Jesus Christ, whether divine or not, was probably a person whose birth was worth celebrating. Plus, the subject matter makes it ideal for a child-centered holiday. The centrality of family in Christmas imagery — the Nativity scene, portraits of the madonna and child — allows it to “translate” easily into a holiday centered around children and childhood.
But the message of Easter, that of an adult man who was horribly killed, only to rise from the dead, is much harder to secularize. Celebrating Easter demands celebrating something so miraculous that it cannot be reduced, as Christmas can, to a heartwarming story about motherhood; its supernatural elements are on display front and center. It’s a story about death and resurrection.
But the same qualities that make Easter so difficult to secularize are also what make it so profound. As Matthew Gambino writes at CatholicPhilly.com,“That [paradox] is why I love Easter far more than Christmas. That moveable springtime feast celebrates not the beginning of the God-man’s life but the conquering of his suffering and ours. Easter marks the transcendence of death, the road leading beyond this life into eternity with the Father.”
Christmas as we know it today in the English-speaking world is, for better or worse, tied up in wider cultural ideas about family and a specifically Victorian, Protestant iteration of “middle-class values.” But the mystery of Easter remains strange, profound, and — for some — off-putting. But as the debate over the “meaning of Christmas” rages on, it’s nice to have one holiday, at least, where the meaning is clear.
Australians love a good crucifixion, not least the one we commemorate at Easter; Christ challenging the ruling class, the mockery and the execution that followed. But we don’t only know this story from the religious tradition, we recognise it – even celebrate it – in the pattern of our political debate. The Passion play repeats whenever the powerful, prejudiced or privileged begin to feel uneasy.
A voice challenges the status quo but the public execution that follows distracts the baying crowds. The establishment’s anxiety is then allayed and structural injustice maintained.
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There was Yassmin Abdel-Magied who dared to, momentarily, suggest that perhaps on Anzac Day we should also remember others impacted by the horrors of war in Syria, Palestine and the refugees languishing in detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. Her town-square flaying continued for months, with Coalition MPs calling for her sacking from the ABC and her conduct attacked in both houses of parliament. In the aftermath, she received numerous death threats, was targeted by “alt-right” website Breitbart, and the attacks from right-wing commentators only quieted when Abdel-Magied moved to London. There was, of course, little reflection on the lives being destroyed here and overseas, our collective gaze easily averted from the suffering of the powerless.
Human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs was likewise nailed to a tree when she had the audacity to report on the horrors being experienced by children in Australian-run and funded detention centres. Coalition MPs called for her resignation, ignoring the actual report and the hundreds of recorded instances of children self-harming, suffering sexual assault and going on hunger strikes.
More recently we watched as Yigar Gunditjmara and Bindal woman Tarneen Onus-Williams was dragged through the streets towards Golgotha by conservative politicians and rightwing tabloids after an angry speech at an Invasion Day rally. It was the largest Indigenous rights demonstration in decades – organised by Indigenous women and attracting up to 60,000 people – but the politicians and tabloid pundits who dragged Onus-Williams along the Via Dolorosa were of course silent on Indigenous incarcerations and deaths. The injustices behind her anger were duly ignored as she was punished for her crimes against polite society.
We don’t only crucify the bleeding hearts, however. Whether it’s truck driver Duncan Storrar who dared to question the then assistant treasurer about tax breaks or Dylan Voller who testified against his treatment in Don Dale detention centre – all who challenge power and injustice can be certain public excoriation is on its way.
In the gospel narratives, Christ’s mockery and execution was the consequence of publicly challenging those in power (Mark 11:15-18). While plotting Christ’s death, one high priest stated “It is better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed” (John 11:50) – which could be interpreted as “It is better that one person die than that all my privilege perish.”
Australia may not be a very religious nation, but we know one truth for sure; if we hear a voice challenging the powerful, we will also hear the cries of “crucify them” soon after.
The spectacle of retribution that follows is not mere tabloid entertainment. It has political purpose – distraction and deterrence – and is as old as the Easter story itself.
As Christ faced trial, so the scriptures say, his disciple Peter infamously denied knowing him in order to avoid sharing the same torturous end (Mark 14:66-72). The threat of political execution works, silencing dissent and leaving the truth unspoken.
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We know the parts in this Passion play, and when we witness the public punishment of those who challenge injustice – whether they’re activists, truck drivers, or children who have worn shackles and spit hoods – we must ask the question: which role is ours?
When we see the wounds given to those who dared reveal an uncomfortable reality, do we stand with them in solidarity or, to save our skin, deny we heard the truth at all?
• Brad Chilcott is the founder of Welcome to Australia and the pastor of Activate Church in Adelaide
• Anthony N. Castle is an Adelaide-based writer
There are many ways you could celebrate spring and Easter, as far as cooking and eating goes. Brunch is one option: With a no-cook crab cocktail, custardy bread puddings and vegan waffles that taste like carrot cake (and mimosas, obviously). There’s also the classic duo of ham and potatoes. But when Easter sneaks up on us and feels a little earlier than normal, we opt for a menu that’s a little less complicated, with a few things we can make a day ahead and a few others that come together in a snap.
Lamb Chops With Scallions in a Cola Glaze, above. Featuring a little magic in the form of Coca-Cola*, which reduces to a sticky, not-too-sweet glaze that’s accented with some anise seed and scallions. (Save the scallion greens to make your own vegetable broth.) Note: If the lamb chops you find are on the larger side, like ours were when we recently made it, plan on one chop per serving, for a total of four (rather than eight). Make them just before serving, preferably — they only take about 30 minutes, including prep time.
*Yes, you can use Pepsi. No, sorry, you cannot use diet.
(Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
Braised Potatoes With Bay Leaves and Garlic. A clever way to cook small red or white potatoes: They become very flavorful, fragrant and tender as they cook in a covered pot with some liquid (a cooking technique known as braising). You can make these a day ahead, too — they’ll taste even better when reheated in a skillet.
(Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
Spring Polenta With Radishes. Are you tired of polenta yet? We hope not, because here’s another tasty way to serve it: topped with fresh springy vegetables, cooked until they’re just crisp-tender and some chickpeas for a little extra protein boost. (This dish would make a good main for vegetarians.) If you can’t find garlic scapes or green garlic, use chives or scallions; you can also substitute broccoli florets for the broccolini. (But in that case, we might add some sliced kale or mustard greens, just to lend a slight bitter note.) If you want to make this ahead of time, know that the polenta will thicken significantly as it cools — you can thin it out with some extra liquid as you reheat it in a pot, or embrace the firmness and cut it into slabs, drizzle them with oil and bake until crusty.
(Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
Orange + Radish Salad With Olive Dressing. This quick and beautiful salad will make your Easter spread really pop. (It would be even more lovely served atop a pile of tender greens.)
(Renee Comet for The Washington Post)
Sunrise Granita. Cheery, sunny and made in advance, this is a light dessert that’ll help balance out all the chocolate bunnies and jelly beans you’ll be snacking on. Serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, or drop a few spoonfuls into glasses of sparkling wine.
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