We recently considered the less-than-pretty side of the “ecumenical” push to impose a common Easter. (See my post from two days ago.) That essay notes that most discussion focuses on three possible approaches: have the East adopt the Catholic approach; have the West adopt the Orthodox approach; or have both abandon the Nicene formula and its linkage to Passover by a wholly ex nihilo fixing of Easter to some April Sunday. It suggests that the first choice is highly unlikely to prevail in the East, particularly with the largest autocephalous church, the Russian; the second would likely be the fallback of the Catholic ecumenical class, always ready to compromise Western tradition; and the third would “honor” Nicaea by abandoning it. It indicates the practical “messes” the second proposal would generate, inserting a Julian Easter into a Catholic liturgical calendar which is built around the Gregorian.

That last essay focused on the intra- and inter-ecclesial implications of the common Easter scheme. Let us also consider its civil impact.

Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt introduced legislation (see here) to make Easter an American civil holiday. Federal holidays that fall on Sundays are observed the next day, thus, on Easter Monday. Schmitt is concerned about a phenomenon I call the “erasure of Easter” (see here). Similar to the “war on Christmas,” where the Nativity is hidden behind “the holidays” and its explicit religious elements marginalized or eliminated, Easter is arguably even more fully blocked out. As a moveable weekend holiday with a much smaller consumer footprint, Easter is relatively easy for a secularized culture to ignore. A cursory survey of modern American culture shows that if one depends on public indications to know Easter is coming, they are few and anemic — unless you are addicted to candy.

Secularism’s erasure of Easter is, to my mind, the far more serious challenge of our times than the late Pope Francis’s musings that Christian “witness” is “compromised” by East and West observing the Resurrection on different dates. Part of the problem is that influential circles in Western Europe and Vatican Catholicism have made their peace with secularism, sometimes even thinking the Church should “learn” from it. But let’s be brutally honest: the secular world does not care whether you have Easter on date X or date Y because it doesn’t care about Easter, period.

The facile riposte is: well, if Christians weren’t divided, it might be different. But would it? Those Orthodox countries where altar and throne remained in practice united and common religious practice largely unaffected by “Enlightenment” concerns succumbed to what was, from one angle, a worse form of secularism than the soft, incremental secularism of the West: atheistic communism, a system with which arguably the biggest autocephalous Orthodox Church — the Russian — made cozy official accommodation. The simplistic canard that “Christian division is the problem” only goes so far. Exchanging colored Easter eggs as a sign of “unity” papers over rather than resolves the serious theological issues of which the divergence of dates is but a symptom. Thinking this is some sort of counter to the juggernaut of unrelenting secularism (such as is manifested in the cultural erasure of Easter) is glib.

Now, let’s engage in a thought experiment with the “common Easter” idea. If Senator Schmitt’s civil Easter proposal were to move forward (and, with a Republican Congress and President, now’s your chance), what would be the likely reaction? The usual secularist disestablishmentarians would be up in arms about “an establishment of religion” and its incompatibility with “religiously pluralistic America” (which is still, in contrast to the United Kingdom, nominally majority Christian). But, under current conditions, where would the Orthodox come down? Given their calendrical issues, might they wind up alongside the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State? Of course, the ecumenical class would say: “See, that’s what comes from lack of unity!” But whose fault would such alignment be: Catholics, or Orthodox clinging to an outmoded calendar?

To be fair, diaspora Orthodox — even the Russian Orthodox diaspora in the West — have urged their churches to move on calendar reform because they experience the marginalization that clinging to the Julian calendar brings. But the diaspora’s bringing along the “mother church” is doubtful. To ROC mentality, the fact that these people are in the West rather than “spiritual Mother Russia” means they are probably already contaminated by “decadent Western ideas.”

If Catholics were, in the name of “unity,” to adopt Julian Easter, what would happen? Well, they’d culturally self-marginalize themselves and join the Orthodox calendar ghetto. Two outcomes are then possible.

One is that Easter remains reckoned by American Protestants the way it has been, i.e., the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring (astronomically and largely Gregorian) so that the U.S. civil Easter holiday becomes a “Protestant Easter.” It is frankly unimaginable that American Protestants, whose mechanisms to make binding decisions within and among their churches are arguably at least as bad as the Orthodox, would abandon the Gregorian Calendar. In many Protestant churches, the liturgical year is a shadow of its Catholic/Orthodox counterparts. Given what they have kept, it is unlikely they would adopt a fictional calendar just for calculating Easter. In other words, there would be another calendar split. Such an outcome would clearly be a worse situation than the status quo.

The other outcome is, with Catholics joining the Orthodox to marginalize themselves from the calendar the rest of society uses, the whole process simply facilitates the further erasure of Easter from U.S. civil life. Schmitt’s proposal is branded “religiously divisive” and set aside (or repealed). The opinion-making class decides sectarian Easter (and by “sectarian” they mean “religious,” period) is best “to-each-his-own,” off the public square.

The Jesuit review America sponsored a podcast (here) that acknowledges “problems” with a common Easter proposal, but was nevertheless upbeat about going forward. While the podcast is worth listening to for its positive spin, I honestly do not believe such sanguine interpretations of likely outcomes bear realistic relationship to the potential serious downsides of this proposal.

For the record, if we do not expect the Orthodox to make the “ecumenical move” and realize they adhere to an unscientific calendar that betrays Nicaea by pretending spring is a calendrical, rather than astronomical, event, then I am willing to entertain the idea proposed by the World Council of Churches’ Aleppo Statement (here). That statement calls for reckoning Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring as determined astronomically for Jerusalem. The Aleppo method is basically the current Western method with minor tweaks. It will likely differ from pure Gregorian calendar-based calculations maybe once or twice per century, compared to constant Julian non-synchronicity. It recognizes that Easter belongs on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the Nicene criterion that maintains continuity with Passover. It recognizes that calendars are essentially artifacts and that spring is an astronomical event that can vary (slightly) from when Nicaea thought 17 centuries ago that the vernal equinox occurred. Like Nicaea, it recognizes the astronomical component (Nicaea told Alexandrine astronomers to work on the question), thus respecting the faith/reason element. By setting Jerusalem as its “prime meridian,” it locks figuring Easter to the place where Easter began. In short, it preserves the essence of Nicaea while providing a basis for common reckoning and observance.

Whoever has forged his way to the end of these considerations recognizes the complexities lurking in perhaps good-intentioned desires to “do something” about a “common Easter.” As much as the ecumenical crowd may frown, this idea now in the world (including the geopolitical world) we are living in is premature. One can only hope that, in the name of some anniversary deliverable and desire to “honor” Francis’s “legacy,” precipitous choices at the dawn of a new pontificate are not made “from above.”