As Left Turn Its Back on Christians, Easter Message Remains as Crucial as Ever

As Americans prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday—the annual commemoration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead and triumph over sin—every practicing Christian and person of faith can likely expect Joe Biden and other prominent liberals to once again distort the sacred Easter message in favor of vague secular jargon and spiritually-tinted leftist talking points.

But even as the culture attempts to reduce the Easter miracle to a secular spring event devoid of any religious meaning, it is more important than ever for Christians to outwardly embrace the true meaning of the holy day. Now as much as ever, Easter serves as an eternal reminder that God has conquered evil and death, and teaches us that, with His help, we too can overcome the forces of evil, corruption, and decay plaguing our nation and gutting our culture.

For every Easter in recent memory, Democrat officials have like clockwork rushed to their social media pages to issue watered-down Easter statements that proclaim not the good news of Christ’s resurrection or humanity’s liberation from the shackles of sin, but instead nonreligious virtue-signaling that whitewashes the true meaning of the holiday.

In his remarks at last year’s White House Easter Egg Roll, for instance, Joe Biden – who purports to be a practicing Catholic – made no mention of Jesus Christ, no acknowledgement of the Christian faith, and no gesture toward the resurrection. Instead, he suggested the Easter season is simply “a time to remember… the beauty of spring.”

The previous year, Biden barely acknowledged the Easter holiday in the first place, turning instead to broad language of “joy” and “laughter.”

And in his first Easter message in 2021, Biden twisted Christian terms like “resurrection” and “renewal” to justify his administration’s draconian COVID-19 mandates and insist that “the virus is not gone”—all alongside a masked Easter bunny.

Of course, this political distortion of the Easter message is not limited to Biden. In Easter 2021, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who campaigned on his status as a Christian pastor (even as he supports unfettered access to abortion) infamously tweeted that the real “meaning” of the day is “more transcendent than the resurrection of Christ.” Easter’s true meaning, he suggested, derives not from Christ’s sacrifice and the miracle of the resurrection, but instead from “a commitment to helping others,” by which we can ultimately “save ourselves.”

The idea that human beings can “save ourselves” is, of course, completely antithetical to the Gospel. As Ephesians reminds us, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

This trend of gutting Easter of its significance to Christians isn’t new. In 2010, former President Barack Obama spoke of “the shared spirit of humanity that inhabits us all, Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, believers and nonbelievers alike”—seemingly diminishing the day’s special importance to Christians.

In Obama’s 2014 Easter message, after briefly acknowledging the Christian origins of the holiday, he also went on to describe Easter as being representative of a secular “universal mission” embracing a “common thread of humanity that connects us all.” Obama and other Democrats were also criticized for referring to Christians as “Easter Worshippers” in 2019.

But every time Biden and other Democrats choose to dodge the rich spiritual meaning of the Easter season in favor of vapid leftist rhetoric, they are doing a major disservice not only to the faith and the millions of Christians who celebrate Easter, but also to our national culture, which remains in desperate need of the Easter message as it devolves further into social, cultural, and political turmoil.

In fact, in an age in which the federal government is actively persecuting some Christians, pro-life activists, and other traditionally-minded American believers, the need for a strong and authentic Christian witness is greater than ever.

Several dominant Christian leaders of the past have outlined why the hope, beauty, and joy of the Easter message becomes more, not less, relevant in times of spiritual and cultural unrest like our nation faces today.

“It is the death of the Eternal Word of God made flesh, which is our great lesson how to think and how to speak of this world,” St. John Henry Newman, an English theologian, Catholic cardinal, and widely respected religious figure of the 19th century, outlined in a widely-read sermon. “It has brought together and made consistent all that seemed discordant and aimless. It has taught us how to live, how to use this world, what to expect, what to desire, what to hope. It is the tone into which all the strains of this world’s music are ultimately to be resolved.”

As Newman reminds us, it is the Easter miracle—not the news of the day or left-wing culture war antics—that ultimately bestows higher meaning upon our lives and the world around us.

Or as Pope John Paul II powerfully stated in his Easter Vigil homily at the turn of the century, the fundamental and timeless need for an authentic Christian witness in the world remains urgent: “Yes, Christ is truly risen, and we are witnesses of this. We proclaim this witness to the world, so that the joy which is ours will reach countless other hearts, kindling in them the light of the hope which does not disappoint.”

As such, even in spite of the left’s evident desire to craft a loosely defined godless religion that fails to acknowledge Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection, Christians should not be surprised or discouraged by the inevitable onslaught of watered-down statements, speeches, and social media posts that subtly seek to separate the holiest day of the year from its ultimate source, meaning, and hope in Jesus Christ.

This Easter, may every American Christian warmly embrace the true source of our Easter joy and let it radiate for all to see.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.