KEY POINTS:
This Easter, the arguments about shop trading hours will again be taken out of the cupboard and given an airing. And with the same predictability, they will soon afterwards be returned, with no compromise in sight from either side.
The majority of our politicians favour a loosening of
current restrictions, and differ only in the degree to which extended trading hours ought to impinge on religious holidays.
In the other corner, a variety of church leaders will denounce any measures which allow open commercial slather, especially on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. For the most part, however, it will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Certainly, though, both sides have marshalled some impressive ideological arguments to support their positions. The separation of church and state, and the rights of individuals (ideas which, ironically, Protestant churches first promulgated with such force in the 17th century) will be reiterated with some sanctimony by those favouring liberalisation of the current regime.
Meanwhile, a smattering of clerics will push for their desire to preserve the public sanctity of their holy days with references to the need for New Zealand families to have some time together, and will remind us about the spiritual perils of unfettered greed.
Both groups have sound cases, and neither necessarily cancels out the validity of the other's.
The difficulty with the churches' position, however, is that although they have God on their side - the same cannot be said for history.
We need to be very clear on this point: Easter, like Christmas, is not a Christian festival. Yes, both were grafted on to the religion while it was still growing, but for generations after Christ's death, the celebration in parts of Europe of the fertility goddess Eostre (from which Easter derives), and its December counterpart in the Roman world - Saturnalia (Christmas' forerunner) - were wholly pagan.
Neither is there any injunction in the Bible for Christians to celebrate the birth, or death and resurrection of Christ. These were later innovations adopted by conniving church politicians to help win over converts.
So although the New Testament requires Christians to keep separate from infidels, some church leaders in the first millennium saw adopting pagan ceremonies and rites as making good strategic sense, and consequently averted their gaze from such Biblical prohibitions.
In England, the first shafts of common sense regarding Easter and Christmas started to shine through during the mid-17th century, when the Puritans (forerunners of today's Baptists and Congregationalists) had the good judgment to outlaw these celebrations - a move that had the support of arguably the most devout and enlightened Christian leader in England's history, Oliver Cromwell.
However, following the restoration of the monarchy, and under intense pressure from a newly muscular Anglican church, most Protestant denominations relapsed into celebrating Easter and Christmas, and in the process became more doctrinally impoverished for doing so.
Now, just 3 1/2 centuries later, these two festivities are being extolled by some churches as so sacred that to breach them by opening shops is somehow sacrilegious. It manifestly is not.
And amid the din of disapproval from these churches lies a greater irony: that while they are so vociferous in defending their pseudo-Christian festivities, they long ago threw in the towel when it came to the one day that both the Old and New Testaments required be kept sacred: the sabbath. Maybe this Easter, those same church leaders might take up the challenge to offer us some doctrinal honesty and moral clarity, and perhaps be 'less ecumenical with the truth'. After all, bad history can never make good theology.
* Paul Moon is a professor of history at AUT University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
