Is the Easter Bunny Supposed to Replace Jesus?

It’s easy to take Jesus out of Christmas and celebrate it anyway. You can still have the tree and the gifts and the holiday cheer, just don’t set out the old Nativity Set anymore. Easy!

For me, Easter is different. This isn’t my first Easter spent without Jesus living in my heart, but it’s the first one having put a lot of distance between my Bible-thumping days and where I’m at now. Easter is usually a day spent at church celebrating the miraculous resurrection of Jesus after his death on the cross three days earlier. Growing up, my family spent Easter evening watching The Passion of the Christ, always crying during the scenes leading up to Jesus’ brutal crucifixion. Truthfully, I hated the tradition because it was so traumatic to watch. And to think it was me and my little sins who put Jesus up on that cross to die his slow, excruciating death! Imagine watching gory footage of the war in Ukraine as a child and being told, “This really happened, and it’s partly your fault. Even if you were the only bad person on earth, Jesus still would have died for you like this.” This was my annual dose of nightmare fuel, and my reminder that I should feel immense guilt for the suffering that I have caused an innocent man.

“Wow,” my parents would breathe out when the credits rolled. Mom would wipe her eyes and say, “It’s just unbelievable how much Jesus loves us.”

Ah, yes, I’m such a terrible person for nailing Jesus to the cross, but he loves me so much! Wow! I love you too, Jesus! Talk about emotional whiplash.

Sure, we did Easter-egg hunts too, and sometimes we dyed boiled eggs if we felt extra festive. There’s a picture of four-year-old Liam crying his eyes out sitting on the Easter Bunny’s lap somewhere in a scrapbook at my parents house. There were cutesy Peter Rabbit-esc bunnies and baby chicks dressed in pastel-colored outfits that mom would display on our piano to decorate around Easter-time. But mostly, Easter’s significance was about Jesus dying for our sins.

I no longer believe that Jesus is the son of God. Jesus appears in enough historic documents that I think he was probably a real person, and he might have died on a cross, but I don’t believe he rose from the dead. I’ve been reading Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart D. Erhman and learned that the gospels in the New Testament–where Christian’s mainly study and source their proof of Jesus’ life and death–were written anonymously 40-70 years (or more) after Jesus’ death, and the stories in those gospels were orally passed from person to person in the interim. When they were finally written, they were written in a different language from the one that Jesus and his followers most-likely spoke. Given this information, I find it hard to believe that the Bible is without error.

So, this Easter Sunday, I worked. Then I spent time with family and friends, and wondered what the people who I know are not religious meant when they wished me a happy Easter.

Last week I asked my husband, “What will we celebrate on Easter with our children someday, if we don’t believe in Jesus?”

He thought about this and shrugged. Will Easter become another non-holiday to me? You know, like Saint Patrick’s Day or Groundhog Day or April Fool’s Day? I don’t know how I feel about that. Easter has always been kind of a big holiday in my family, and I don’t like the idea of purging my life of beliefs and traditions so that I walk away with less than I had before.

Even with Easter aside, I struggle with feeling empty after Jesus packed his metaphorical bags and moved out of his home in my heart. I certainly do not want to replace Jesus with another spiritual entity to rule over me, but I do miss the substance that once took up so much room in my life. Religion gave me reasons for why bad things happened to good people, and it gave me ways to resist crippling fear. It gave my life a purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. It provided a built-in community. It told me that it’s us versus them and that we had to save the world from the enemy, Satan. It gave me a reason not to work on Sunday.

It also gave me lots of awful things like trauma, shame, and guilt, which were ultimately the reasons why I decided that religion did more harm than good for me, and why I walked away.

Now, I’m rebuilding. On Sundays I can do what I want, and that’s fine. During Christmas, I do a lot of baking and decorating, and that’s also fine. But finding community is more challenging now. And my life philosophies are still small and vague, and I keep nearly concluding that my life doesn’t matter at all. And when I die, will I stay in the ground or will I go somewhere else non-heaven-y? What does a non-heaven look like? All of it just feels like less than my Christian version did.

I also feel annoyed with myself. Part of my frustration with religion is how obsessed Christians are with having all the answers and finding intention behind everything. Don’t some things just happen and mean nothing? Can’t there be some I Don’t Knows? At first, walking away from religion was permission not to know or care, and that felt like breathing freely. After getting my fill of air and nonchalance, now I am looking for meaning all over again.

Yes, I know, the search for meaning is part of the human experience. Humans are pattern-noticing, deep-thinking, existential-crisis-prone creatures, and we crave significance. Our brains want reasons and conclusions. And our hearts want us to matter.

The question boils down to: do we weave ourselves stories to satisfy our human desires for significance and meaning, or is there really something out there to find? Can we even find it? Or will realizing our meaning inevitably require the invention of religion every time?