Let's go mad celebrating Easter next year -Aug 25, 2006


By Theo Hobson

For a year or so I have been mooting an unusual, and rather ambitious, idea. British Christian culture should find a new focus: a huge festival on Easter Day. It should be as big as the Notting Hill Carnival, and just as colourful and noisy.

Why? Because I feel that the church model of Christian culture cannot overcome the fundamental indifference, and indeed hostility, of mainstream culture. The average person is wary of the institutional character of traditional Christian culture. He or she senses that the churches still want to tell people what to do, exert authority, stifle freedom, and protect what remains of their own power. In some respects this image is unfair, but can anyone honestly say that it’s totally unfair?

I don’t think that Christians are working hard enough to shake off this image, to imagine new forms of Christian culture capable of interesting and exciting the contemporary secular mind. If institutionalism hinders the proclamation of the Gospel, perhaps we are called to move away from it.

Those employed by the churches don’t want to hear this; they want to believe that the institutions can turn the corner, and win back the faithful. Perhaps the laity must take the lead.

Something wholly new is needed, if Christianity is to recapture the cultural imagination. We need a new, post-institutional form of Christian culture. But how do we get it going? We need to create new practices, independent of the institutions. This is a hard thought to think: it means departing from centuries of Christian tradition. But it’s not impossible (all things are possible with God).

We must remember that Christianity did not originate in institutional form, but as a sort of gaseous movement – perhaps it must now regain that original formless freedom.

Perhaps it must imitate the freedom of art and music – no institutions are needed to ensure the playing of music – there is no need for an institution that claims to define and regulate True Musicality. We must try to imagine a new, free-style Christian culture, made up of many diverse practices. These will include large public events. There is already a model of this in place: the Mystery Plays.

The recent Manchester Passion demonstrated that mass urban theatre events, free of church control, can work.

A few years ago, after a rather underwhelming Easter service, it struck me that Easter is the anti-climax of Christian culture. It’s a non-event: the quiet orderly festival of a tradition-minded middle-class and also of a religious subculture.

After church, if you go, it’s a normal Sunday, on which you’ll probably see your family, eat chocolate and watch telly. The evening news will report the messages of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury – and that’s really the only intrusion of Easter into the public square.

The dullness of Easter is the clearest illustration of the failure of British Christian culture. We need a more outgoing and imaginative approach to the celebration of Easter, and to Christian culture in general. This is an opportunity to redefine Christian culture away from ‘going to church’ – and the means to a really fresh expression of Christianity.

We must try to move away from the impression that Christianity is the business of a dedicated club, and that either you’re in or you’re out. This is a bad model of Christian culture because it fails to communicate to the wider society, to challenge it, to interest it. So a new approach to Easter could be part of a wider project – to move Christian culture away from a rigid church model.

We must look to non-Christian forms of mass celebration. That means festivals, carnivals. The contemporary idiom of celebration is carnival. The Notting Hill Carnival is a supremely public event; it draws people in rather than shutting them out. Why can’t Christians organize this sort of joyous festival, at least at Easter? Another useful model is Chinese New Year, where thousands come to see the dancing dragons.

The idea is that millions of people who don’t go to church but are residually or privately Christian will have a new form of public expression.

My vision for Easter Festival 2007 is that huge numbers of people turn up in Hyde Park, or Trafalgar Square, or somewhere, on Easter Sunday. The event will have the backing of the main churches, but it will be independent of them – and it will also be backed by London’s secular authorities. There will be a stage or two, with music acts, and costumes, parades, and a sense of spectacle.

How about fancy dress as figures from Christian history? How about a huge launch of cross-shaped balloons? I hardly care what happens, as long as it makes a noise, and announces that Easter is not an ordinary day.

If we want this to happen, we had better get moving in time for next year. Let’s start organizing the transformation of Easter into the biggest of our national festivals, the ultimate victory celebration. If official permission is not forthcoming, by the way, we must be ready to plan an anarchic gathering, a huge joyous jamming session. Let the police try to muffle our, er, tambourines!

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NOTE: You can write to Theo about his idea for an 'Easter Rising' here.

Theo Hobson was born in West London. He studied English literature at York, then theology at Cambridge. He did his PhD thesis on Protestant theology and rhetoric; which became his first book - 'The Rhetorical Word: Protestant Theology and the Rhetoric of Authority' (Ashgate 2002). He worked as a teacher, then as a copywriter and journalist. He then started wanting to reform the Church of England, something he calls "perhaps the world’s most thankless task." Later he started a campaign for its disestablishment, and wrote a book - Against Establishment: an Anglican Polemic (DLT 2003). Theo Hobson announced that he was a post-Anglican. He explained that this meant he cannot feel at ease in his native tradition, while it is so steeped in nostalgia – yet can see no better form of church to which to move. Theo’s next book was on the ecclesiology of Rowan Williams - Anarchy, Church and Utopia: Rowan Williams on Church (DLT 2005). For a few years now Theo has been trying to ‘come out’ as a post-ecclesial Christian theologian. He says we have to reinvent this religion away from its institutional past. A truly postmodern theology will serve this end. So far, so-called postmodern theology has been neo-orthodox, a highly erudite dead-end. Theo Hobson is married with two loud children. He is an Ekklesia associate, in a pleasingly loose sort of way. If you search, you will find his stuff all over this site. Oh, and he writes for the Guardian newspaper, on Comment-Is-Free. Lots of people leave comments about his columns, sometimes proving that slightly-less-than rational anger is not the sole propriety of 'religious people'.