As a pastor, I often receive questions, concerns, or even rants and diatribes via email. I love to answer questions that come my way, and I think it’s healthy to share your questions or concerns with your pastor when you have them come up, respectfully. That last part is key, no one wants to be yelled at, even if it’s via email. For the most part, people are very respectful, and even feel bad for taking my time, which is ridiculous, because this is part of what I am here for. However, sometimes people do get a little heated or confrontational. There are two times of year that I can always expect to receive these types of emails: Christmas, and Easter.
Here’s how it often goes:
“I can’t believe you are willing to celebrate pagan traditions, don’t you know God will judge you for this?“
“How can you belittle what Jesus did for you by taking part in a practice that was designed to worship an idol?“
“In case you didn’t know, Easter is a pagan holiday, and you should have nothing to do with it. I read this book, and you should read it. It will enlighten you to X, Y, Z…”
“Easter is not about bunnies and eggs, it’s about Jesus, and you are wrong for allowing those things into your church.”
Now, I will still answer these types of emails, but you should know that this is not the way to start a communication if you want someone to listen to you. Proverbs 15:1 says: “A gentle answer deflects anger, but harsh words make tempers flare.” Our speech should be gracious, kind, merciful, seasoned with salt, and done in a way that endears us to our readers/hearers (Colossians 4:6). Otherwise, we are the ones in sin.
That said, these statements, as harsh as they are, are built on very valid questions that I have no problem addressing. We should not be actively participating in pagan practices and worshipping false gods. OK… so why is it OK for us to celebrate Christmas with Christmas Trees, and to have Easter egg hunts’ etc?
Well, I have researched this quite a bit, and I have some thoughts. This may seem random at first, but I assure you I am going somewhere with this, so please stick with me.
First, I agree regarding the Easter Bunny. My family does not celebrate the Easter Bunny, neither do we judge those who do. My wife and I simply feel that he is a distraction from Jesus and the resurrection. Our kids don’t need any more distractions from Jesus, they have quite enough. We feel the same way about Santa Claus, so we don’t celebrate him either. (Plus, I don’t want some fictional dude to get the credit for presents that I spent my time and money buying for my kids. Just sayin!) All joking aside, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are also lies. This is really what it comes down to for me, if my kids find out I’ve been lying to them about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, how will they know if I’ve been telling the truth about God and Jesus? Jen and I have made a firm decision that we will not lie to our kids for this reason.
Now, there are other traditions surrounding Easter and Christmas that we DO celebrate. So, why are those OK? Well, I’ll tell you.
Let’s start with Easter eggs. I have researched this pretty extensively because of questions like the ones above, and I have found some interesting and pretty awesome, evidence that Easter Eggs are very cool and we should reclaim for Jesus. The origin of using eggs to celebrate Easter/Resurrection Sunday comes out of the 2nd century Christian churches in Mesopotamia. As you may or may not know, the Jewish celebration of Passover (of which Jesus is the fulfillment – 1 Cor. 5:7) involves a white egg as a part of the Seder plate. Early Christians took the egg from the Seder meal and adapted it to presenting Christ as our Passover by dying the white egg red, symbolic of the blood of Christ. This tradition continued until after the council of Nicaea, which cemented the tradition of Lent in the church. As a result, Christians were forbidden to eat eggs during the lenten season, at the end of which, they would give eggs to each other as gifts, often dyed and ornately decorated. We see the remnants of this tradition all the way down to the Russian Faberge eggs of the 1800s. Pretty cool! So no, Easter eggs are not rooted in pagan tradition and therefore evil and wrong for Christians. In fact, the opposite is true, and we should reclaim the beautiful heritage of the Easter egg for Jesus.
Another comment I often receive has to do with the use of the word Easter, rather than Resurrection Sunday. Many people have told me over the years that Easter is the name of a pagan goddess with roots in eastern Europe, England, Babylon, etc., and is an inappropriate name to call the day of the resurrection of our Lord.
The problem is, people can’t get their story straight on the origin of this word. The word Easter has no such origins, at least not that we know of, and none of these places listed above has a goddess with this name. There is almost zero documented history that pagans ever had a goddess with a name similar to Easter. The very little evidence we do have comes from one guy (Bede) in the 8th century who was speculating about what happened generations before him with no actual historical context to back it up. There is no mention of Easter/Eostre anywhere in history before Bede. And everything after him only refers back to his one paragraph about her in his writing. This is hardly evidence to say that something truly has a pagan origin, and many historians have discounted his account because of the political motivation he had behind writing it in his account back to Rome. The most likely source of the name “easter” is the Saxons’ month called Eosturmononath (the month of April), denoting the season in which “Easter” or resurrection Sunday, occurs. Now, honestly, I prefer the term Resurrection Sunday, it has more to do with Jesus. But, most people know it as Easter.
That said, I don’t actually think it matters what the “origins” of the word or the eggs are. If we want to go down that rabbit-hole (pun intended) then we need to throw out EVERYTHING ELSE that could possibly have a pagan origin.
Here are just a few of the things that we widely practice and do today that have pagan origins:
The days of the week.
So, it turns out that we’re all pagans seven days a week–at least if we’re going by day names. For example, Friday comes from the name Freya–Norse goddess of love. Mondays are pagan. That word comes from “monandaeg”– the day of the moon goddess. Turns out, the name for every day of the week comes from some tradition of European paganism. Sunday comes from Old English “Sunnandæg,” which is derived from a Germanic interpretation of the Latin dies solis, “sun’s day.” Germanic and Norse mythology personifies the sun as a goddess named Sunna or Sól. If we hold that we should not do anything with pagan roots, we really need to come up with new names for our days of the week. Or at least Sunday. How can we call “The Lord’s Day” as the scripture calls it by the name of a sun goddess?
The months of the year.
Just like the names for the days of the week have pagan origins, so do our names for the 12 months on the calendar. For example, June is named after Juno–Roman queen of the gods and wife to Jupiter. Jews followed a lunar calendar – should Christians do that as well?
Covering your mouth to yawn.
Covering your mouth to yawn is just common courtesy, right? No one wants your warm breath on them! Turns out, that’s not entirely true–even covering your mouth to yawn has pagan origins. In pagan Rome, doctors had a theory about yawning and infant mortality. They noticed that lots of children died young, and they also noticed that babies were unable to cover their mouths when they yawned. Their diagnosis? Yawning allowed a person’s vital life essence to escape their body. The same thing goes for saying “God bless you” after someone sneezes, pagans believed that the person’s soul was trying to escape out of their body when they sneezed, and so they would say “(insert your deity name here) bless you” to prevent the soul from escape.
Wedding rings.
While wedding rings themselves are not explicitly pagan, the fact that we place them on our ring fingers most certainly is. In traditional Greek and Roman beliefs, your fourth or “ring” finger was thought to have a vein that ran directly to your heart. By placing your wedding ring here, you were making a strong and eternal commitment to love in the sight of the gods.
Bridesmaids.
The tradition of having bridesmaids was to trick evil spirits out of attacking the bride. In ancient times, bridesmaids wore identical dresses and veils to that of the bride so that the spirits couldn’t tell who the bride was.
Lady Justice.
In courthouses across the world, you can see depictions of lady justice with her blindfold and scales. These statues have a pagan origin. These are actually depictions of the ancient Roman goddess of justice, Justitia. Although the name may have changed over the years, her personification and meaning these days are nearly identical to those in Roman times.
The word “Christian”.
This name was coined by pagans and was meant as a derogatory insult.
Holiness.
The Greek word for Holy is Hagios… but the English word for Holy was derived from the Old English hālig, which means ‘wholeness’, or the Old High German hulis, meaning ‘holly’, which was considered a sacred plant to Pagans. (Interestingly, Holly is also used at Christmas time, yes, pagan origins there)
Ichthys (Fish) symbol.
The fish symbol is an ancient symbol used by other religions, such as Buddhism and Paganism. It was used by early Christians to identify themselves.
Prayer.
Our modern method of prayer, with bowed heads and closed eyes, is decidedly not biblical. The typical posture of prayer in the scriptures is eyes to heaven, and possibly hands outstretched unless one was prostrating oneself completely. Folding your hands to pray started with worship of the Sumerian sun god Shamash in the 8th century BC. Closing your eyes in prayer is not Biblical, it is borrowed from the practice of king and emperor worship in the pagan nations as you could not approach the throne with your eyes open, you would make a petition with your eyes closed or head bowed.
Church order of service.
Our modern worship services look very different from how the first-century church services looked. The service structure of the modern church is more similar to pagan and ancient greek worship rituals than what we see in the first-century church. Likely because of Constantine’s reforms to the church, and making Christianity a state religion. The church needed to be more familiar to those who were used to worshipping the greek and Roman pantheons.
I could go on and on with this because nearly everything in modern society and church has pagan roots. My point is this, something simply having pagan roots does not make it evil, and it does not make it wrong to engage in. If that were the case, all of the above examples must be taken seriously and all of our lives must look MUCH different than they do. So then, we must choose which cultural practices and institutions are acceptable for Christians to either co-opt or participate in. This decision must rest with each believer, preferably under the guidance of their spiritual elders. This takes much prayer, humility, and discernment.
Here is the general guideline I use: if something is primarily known currently and culturally as pagan or given in worship to evil or a foreign God, then I will not knowingly participate in it. For example, Halloween. My family and I do not celebrate Halloween. We will do costumes and maybe have a harvest festival outreach at our church, but we are very clear with our kids that the culture of today celebrates Halloween as a celebration of evil, and we will not celebrate evil, we will shine the light. So on Halloween every year, our family chooses to be light in the darkness in some form. Sometimes it’s handing out candy with church invitations, sometimes it’s not doing anything at all, sometimes it’s holding a harvest festival at church. Easter and Christmas (although there are secular celebrations of them) are not currently and primarily known or celebrated as worship of the false gods of paganism. In fact, the opposite is true, current culture views Easter and Christmas as Christian Holidays.
This all comes back to the idea of meat sacrificed to idols for me. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul encouraged the believers to not knowingly participate in something that was sacrificed to idols for conscience’s sake (not the believers’ conscience, but the non-believer or the weak believer). Paul clearly said there is freedom for believers in this, but they should be careful not to cause their brothers or a non-believer to stumble by making them think that the believer was celebrating the idol by eating the meat. This tells me that the use or celebration of pagan holidays, days, months, celebrations, rings, bridesmaids, covering your mouth, etc. is a matter of individual freedom in Christ, but that we should be careful in doing this that we don’t cause people to believe we are worshipping idols or false gods. For me, participating in Halloween gives the impression that we are fine celebrating evil. Participating in an Easter celebration does not, neither does Christmas. In fact, in our culture, these are to be expected of Christians, not pagans or Hindus, or Muslims.
One interesting note is that you and I eat meat sacrificed to idols nearly every time we eat meat. You may or may not know this, but most of the US meat supply is Halal, which is the Muslim form of “Kosher” and it is slaughtered only once it has been blessed with the Islamic prayer Bismillah, which is: “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” – wow, talk about participating in something evil. This makes me want to raise my meat! I don’t want food sacrificed to Allah. And yet, I have the freedom to do so, and Paul also said to eat whatever is given to you without raising the question of its origin, so there’s that.
I hope this has been a little bit enlightening for you, but if nothing else, I hope it at least explains the way I make decisions for my family and our church, as we navigate these types of situations.
God bless you and have a Happy Easter/Happy Resurrection Day!
(sources vary, references available on request, some wording borrowed from related articles.)
