Worth reading for this alone: “without the aid of the supermarkets, who won’t stock an explicitly religious egg”

The author comments on the Easter Egg as “an innocent indulgence, supplied by men whose Quaker conscience dictated that they combine its manufacture with good works”.

The Easter Egg may have lost much of its Christian symbolism but it is less capitalism that has weakened the impulse to do good works as the Welfare State.

In providing so much of the infrastructure of life through compulsory taxation the welfare state has taken over much of the good works that Christian capitalists saw as their moral obligation. Christian charity is reduced to filling in the gaps that open up in the bureaucratic state’s largesse – to attempting to ameliorate the lives not simply of their fellow men and women but to grapple with more intractable and untypical areas of poverty. Inevitably in addition Christian Charity must be weakened when shareholders can’t be assumed to have Christian Quaker consciences.

The impulse to give to ameliorate the lives of others still exists but is increasingly shouldered aside by government using taxation to pump money into favoured Charities that have themselves in many cases become bureaucratised businesses. Many now turn to local genuinely voluntary charities to satisfy the need to help others.

It is interesting that the author sees the decline of Quakerism in the UK as an example of the decline of public Christianity more broadly, as if Quakerism were just another Christian denomination. I think the connection is more complicated there.
Quakerism was one of the first Protestant sects to embrace the ‘just do good’ Social Gospel message that overwhelmed the larger denominations in the 20th century. And once you had replaced the Gospel with the Social Gospel (turning the message of Christianity on its head, from ‘you can’t do good’ to ‘you must do good’), you were left with just another good works club which asked little, which gave little, and which ultimately had little reason to exist. So now people that were Quakers 150 years ago are more likely to be passionately involved with secular charities.
As an American living in the UK, I remember the first time I saw a TV commercial here for a donkey charity, something which has no public profile in the US. I thought, in this country people send money to international charities to make old donkeys feel better in remote places… but you can’t pray on the street corner outside an abortion clinic lest you make a pregnant woman reflect on the weight of her decisions.
Is there any better example of the fundamental, underlying religious instinct of all humans, now squeezed through the narrow ideological limits of Modern Western Liberalism (you know: self-expression, authenticity, freedom, pleasure, “the pursuit of happiness”)?

Though the author doesn’t present it as such, I’ve rarely seen a more succinct summation of how globalism is destroying our civilization, a little bit at a time. Small to medium sized companies still owned by a single family, companies with their own traditions and histories are gobbled up by faceless, nameless, and soulless international conglomerates, thereby permanently uprooting them from the culture they originally sprung from, and placing them into a one-size-fits-all cost minimized flower pot. Even Easter candy has been subjected to the scouring cloth of globalism that scrubs away culture, values, and meaning from everything it touches. It sickens me to think this is what our civilization has come to, the money changers in the temple, using God as a tool for profit and pretending righteousness through publicized self-glorifying forms of charity. Makes me want to overturn some tables.

I did the old Law Society Finals in the College of Law in York in 1990-91. I had no ideas there was a chocolate factory there. On my first night, I borrowed my landlady’s lamp-less shopping bicycle and cycled around York. At one point, I thought I was going mad, as I could smell strawberry-flavoured chocolate.  I then read up about the Quakers and what they did in the York area. I’m not religious, in an organised sense, but always admired the Quakers.

Most enjoyable read. My childhood in England was in the 50’s and early 60’s. At that time, and perhaps for several years after, I think it could be said that although the majority of English were not church-going Christians, we all knew and enjoyed the heritage,traditions, customs,and festivals that Christianity offered. The older generation still do. However, my parents and relatives never went to church except to get baptized, married and buried. Yet, at Easter we were all completely aware of why it was celebrated and what it represented. Therefore, the Easter Egg was seen much more as a symbol of something much much bigger than simply a chocolate treat. Today, when I look at my granddaughters, for example, they have zero clue as to the “meaning” of Easter. It’s just chocolate eggs and bunnies. Its a paradox that although I am not at all religious in the big R sense, I still feel a large regret of what Easter has become. The transition to a “liquid, rootless, profit-maximizing present”, as the author puts it, was inevitable. Everything else can be characterized in this way – why not chocolate eggs? What I regret is the loss of an opportunity for folks, especially the children, to have an opportunity to see the world as larger than themselves, if only for a day.

Hmmm… If we’d stuck to marking the cycles of the sun and moon and venerating Mother Nature, I think the world would have turned out better. And we could have still celebrated the spring equinox with chocolate eggs.