Rachel Cunliffe

Why has the Prime Minister waded into a fight about chocolate eggs?

Cadbury has changed the name of its annual ‘Easter Egg Trail’ to ‘Cadbury’s Great British Egg Hunt’, callously dropping any reference to the Christian festival celebrated by 31.5 million Brits. (Actually, the word ‘Easter’ appears multiple times in the marketing, but it’s out of the title, and that’s the important bit.) Theresa May has taken this as an opportunity to tell everyone yet again that she is the daughter of a vicar, calling the decision ‘absolutely ridiculous’ and reminding the country that Easter is ‘a very important festival for the Christian faith for millions across the world’.

So it is – far more so than the overhyped Christmas celebration. But if May remembers much about her religious education (which I am sure she does), she knows full well that there is nothing in the Bible which suggests children should be sent off to hunt for chocolate eggs. Her interjection is far more likely to be a signal to Christians that she shares their values than an actual religious objection. 

Almost every religion has a springtime festival of some kind, and the motif of an egg for rebirth and renewal is in no way specific to Christianity. It is true that, in the context of Easter, the egg can specifically symbolise the empty tomb of Christ, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many parents laying an Easter egg trail who make this link. In other religions and cultures, eggs are simply a symbol of new life – Egyptians, Cretans and Mesopotamians were decorating eggs to commentate death and rebirth thousands of years before Christianity. Many of the trappings of Easter – eggs, chicks and bunnies – are derived from the worship of the Germanic spring goddess Ēostre, from whose name we get the word Easter in the first place.

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