"We Don't Force Our Religion!"

I know I've been touching on religion a lot recently on this blog. It's never really had a fixed theme – the description's literally "I ramble, enjoy" – but it usually leans more tech than anything else, so I'm aware this is a bit of a run on a different subject. Bear with me, because this one's been sitting in my drafts since this morning and I need to actually say it.

It's the 24th of July. I just watched a Christmas advert.

Not a leak, not a mistake, not some algorithm confusing my watch history for a time traveller's. A proper seasonal advert, scheduled and shot and signed off by someone whose actual job is deciding when "the season" starts, and apparently the answer this year is five months early.

I sat there doing the maths on my fingers like an idiot, because surely I'd misread the date somewhere, and no, it's July. It's warm outside. Nobody's bought a single Christmas card yet and a company has already decided I need to start feeling festive about it.

That's the thing that actually set this post off, if I'm honest, more than any one bad-faith reply in my mentions – though I've had those too, someone telling me, genuinely, that they "don't force their religion" on anyone, under a post about a shop assistant wishing me a merry Christmas when I'd rather they hadn't bothered. Not aggressively. Genuinely, I think, as though it were self-evidently true and I'd simply failed to notice the world around me.

I'd like to walk them round England for a week. And then show them the advert I just watched, in July, and ask them to explain that one with a straight face.

The Ones That Actually Ask Me to Join

Before the calendar and the architecture, though, there's a more direct example, and it's the one that makes "we don't force our religion" genuinely funny to me rather than just tiresome: I get Mormon adverts on YouTube. Regularly.

Not vague brand-awareness stuff either – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has run paid advertising asking people to convert for decades now, and I'm apparently squarely in whatever audience they're currently buying.

Three Different Beliefs, One Constant Advert

And I don't mean recently. I've been getting these ads for years, long enough that they've outlasted an entire religious journey of mine. They were showing up when I was an atheist. They kept showing up through the stretch where I called myself spiritual without any fixed practice attached to it. They're still showing up now that I'm a Hellenic-Celtic pagan devoted to Selene, marking Samhain and Ostara on their own dates rather than anyone else's.

Three completely different relationships to religion, spanning years, and the one constant background hum through all of them has been a specific American church quietly buying ad space to ask me to reconsider.

That consistency is the bit that actually gets me. It's not that the algorithm guessed wrong once. It's that whatever targeting logic decided I was worth advertising to has stayed confident about it across a period where my own beliefs changed twice over.

A Long-Running, Well-Documented Campaign

This isn't new for them, which is what makes it worth naming rather than shrugging off as one odd algorithm quirk. The "I'm a Mormon" campaign ran across American TV, billboards, and buses from 2010 to 2018, expanding into a dozen US cities plus international markets specifically to soften the Church's image and get non-members talking to missionaries, as the campaign's own history lays out.

NPR covered the same campaign scaling up in 2011, spreading to new battleground states with the explicit goal of getting the wider public to actually engage with the faith rather than dismiss it, in their reporting at the time. And the Church is still running paid TV and digital spots today, tracked the same way any other advertiser's campaigns are, which is how I know this isn't a one-off blip in my feed but an actual ongoing media buy, per iSpot's current ad tracking for the Church.

I want to be fair here, because targeted advertising isn't unique to religion, and I don't think every Mormon ad I get served is some sinister plot aimed at me personally – it's just what a well-funded institution with a recruitment goal does with modern ad infrastructure, the same as any company selling a product does.

But that's exactly my point back to the person who told me nobody forces religion on anyone. An advert asking you, directly, to consider a specific faith, bought and placed in front of you whether you asked for it or not, is a more literal example of forcing than a coffee cup ever was. It's not persuasion happening to exist near you. It's persuasion aimed at you, on purpose, paid for.

Then There's the Version With an Actual Person Attached

The algorithm's at least got an excuse, of sorts – it's guessing, badly, based on data. People don't have that excuse.

The Online Pulpit

I've lost count of the number of times I've watched a completely unrelated conversation online get derailed by someone deciding it was the moment to start preaching. Doesn't matter what the thread was actually about. A joke, a tech question, a post about someone's dog.

Somewhere in the replies, without fail, there's a person who's decided this was the opening they were waiting for, and suddenly everyone's being told about salvation. I've seen it happen so many times now that I can spot the shape of it a mile off – the reply that doesn't engage with a single word of the actual thread, just uses it as a doorway to walk through with a sermon already prepared.

The Man at the Train Station

That's the online version. The one that actually stuck with me happened in person, outside my local train station of all places, a man with a microphone and a portable speaker preaching to a queue of commuters who very visibly just wanted to get to work.

Nobody asked him to be there. Nobody stopped to engage with him either, as far as I could see – people just filed past, the way you'd walk round a puddle. He kept going anyway, because the point was never really the commuters listening. The point was doing it loudly enough, in a public enough spot, that it happened at people regardless of whether they wanted it to.

He didn't just settle for volume, either. As I was actually leaving the station, on my way to the pub in the city, he stepped into my path and pushed a pamphlet at me directly – not offered, pushed, the kind of insistence where saying no would have meant making a scene I didn't have the time or the inclination for.

So I took it. And the second I was round the corner and out of his eyeline, I put it straight in the nearest bin. That's the whole transaction, really: not a conversation, not persuasion in any real sense, just a small piece of paper forced into my hand because standing still and refusing it would have cost more than just taking it and throwing it away.

That's the bit I keep coming back to with "we don't force our religion." It's not abstract for me. It's a specific man with a specific speaker outside a specific train station, a pamphlet I never wanted binned round the corner, and a specific pattern of strangers turning my replies into a pulpit for a conversation I never started.

Nobody's frog-marching anyone into a church, no, but forcing doesn't require a gun to the back. It just requires deciding your message gets to interrupt someone else's day whether they consented to hearing it or not, and doing it often enough that it stops registering as an interruption to the people doing it.

The Test I'd Actually Run

The Calendar We Don't Question

Start with the calendar itself, since that's the least arguable part. Bank holidays cluster around Easter and Christmas. The school year breaks for both. Sunday, not any other day, is the one shops still can't open fully on.

None of that is framed as religious practice anymore – it's just "how the week works" – but it didn't get that way by accident, and it didn't get that way by consulting anyone who wasn't Christian first.

Every Date I Write Is a Countdown From Him

And that's before you even get to what the calendar's actually counting. Every date I write on this blog, every year I've referenced in every post, is numbered from a monk's sixth-century guess at when Jesus was born.

Dionysius Exiguus set the whole Anno Domini system running in around 525 CE, specifically so Christendom could stop dating its years from the reign of Diocletian, a Roman emperor who'd persecuted Christians, as Encyclopedia.com's biography of Dionysius explains. The Venerable Bede popularised it in the eighth century, Charlemagne made it standard across his empire not long after, and it's the same scaffolding the Gregorian calendar was built on top of in 1582 and the one the whole world still runs on now, whether or not you call it AD or swap in the supposedly neutral CE, because CE counts from exactly the same starting point under a different label, as Jesus.net's own explainer is happy to point out.

You can strip the letters of their explicit reference to Christ. You can't strip the year zero of what it's actually zeroed against. Every single date I've ever written down, religious or not, is secretly a countdown from an event one specific faith decided mattered more than any other in history.

At Least Someone Tried to Fix It

At least someone's tried to fix that. The scientist Cesare Emiliani proposed the Holocene calendar back in 1993, adding a flat ten thousand years to the existing count so that year zero lands near the start of the Holocene epoch and the rise of agriculture and settled civilisation, rather than one preacher's birth in one province of one empire, as the Holocene calendar's own history sets out.

Kurzgesagt picked the idea up properly, rebranded it the Human Era, and has been putting out a yearly Human Era calendar ever since, arguing plainly that measuring time from the rise of farming and cities gives the whole arc of civilisation the room it actually deserves rather than lopping off everything before one specific religion's founding moment, as their shop page for it explains. By that count this is 12026, not 2026.

It's still an arbitrary line in the sand, same as Dionysius's was, but at least it's a line drawn around something every human on the planet had a stake in, rather than one that only makes sense if you already accept whose birth was worth building a clock around.

Even the Months and Days Weren't Safe

It's not only the year count that went through this, either. The months and the weekdays themselves carry the same history, and there were real, documented attempts to strip the pagan names out of both, not just leave them standing unnoticed.

Quakers refused outright to use them – no Sunday, no Tuesday, no March, no June, since all of those trace straight back to Roman and Norse gods – and used numbered days and months instead, "First Day" for Sunday and "Third Month" for March, a practice Swarthmore's Quaker calendar guide documents as running from the earliest Friends through to 1752 and beyond.

It wasn't a fringe eccentricity, either. Portuguese and Mirandese still number Monday through Friday rather than naming them for gods, keeping only Sunday as "the Lord's Day" and Saturday for the Sabbath, and Greek does something similar, numbering several weekdays by their place in the liturgical week rather than after any deity, as Wikipedia's overview of weekday names across languages sets out.

English just happens to be one of the languages where the attempt never took. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday are still quietly naming the sun, the moon, and four Norse gods, out loud, every single week, whether or not anyone clocks it.

The Architecture Nobody Moved

Then there's the architecture. Church spires sit at the centre of most old English towns because the church used to be the centre of most old English towns, and nobody's moved it since. Crosses on ambulances, on graves, on the flag itself – St George's cross, a Christian martyr's symbol, flown as the national one.

None of this is subtle once you're looking for it. It's only invisible if you've never had a reason to look.

That's the actual shape of "we don't force our religion." It's not that nobody's forcing anything. It's that the forcing happened so long ago and so thoroughly that it stopped looking like force and started looking like furniture.

They Didn't Even Get the Season Right

Here's the bit I find almost funny, once you sit with it: even by Christianity's own internal account, the date it's built the loudest, most calendar-dominating holiday around isn't the date anything happened.

Luke's gospel has shepherds out in open fields at night watching their flocks when the birth is announced, and in Judea that's not a winter scene. Shepherds moved flocks in from the hills by around mid-October specifically to get them through the cold, rainy season that followed, going by the ancient Jewish custom of sending flocks out around Passover in spring and bringing them home at the first rains, which several commentaries and historical sources lay out as the actual seasonal calendar shepherds worked to, as this rundown of the biblical evidence details.

If the flocks were still out overnight, October hadn't started yet, which points toward autumn at the latest and rules out December outright. A UK-based Bible study resource makes the same case independently, noting that the Roman census Joseph and Mary were travelling for also wouldn't have been scheduled for midwinter, when the roads were bad and the weather actively hostile to moving large numbers of people around an empire, as they explain here.

So the actual reason December the 25th got picked wasn't scripture, wasn't astronomy, wasn't a shepherd's diary. It was Rome already having a winter solstice festival worth converting, and the Church choosing the date that would land on top of it rather than the date the text it was theoretically operating from actually supports.

Christmas isn't just built on Yule's bones. It's built on a fabricated date for its own founding event, chosen specifically to overwrite someone else's older one, which makes "we don't force our religion" a genuinely strange thing to say about a holiday whose entire timing exists because an earlier religion needed overwriting.

Yule Didn't Disappear. It Got Absorbed

Christmas is the clearest case of the pattern, because the history isn't contested – it's just not widely known outside people who had a reason to go looking, and I had a reason.

Yule was a Germanic and Norse midwinter festival, marking the solstice with feasting, evergreen boughs brought indoors, and a log burned through the darkest nights of the year, according to EBSCO's research starter on the festival.

When Germanic Europe converted, the Church didn't stamp Yule out so much as fold it whole into the new December 25th holiday – the tree, the log, the evergreens, the light in the depths of winter, all relabelled rather than removed, as History Cooperative lays out in detail. Rome ran the same move on its own midwinter festival, Saturnalia: gift-giving, candles, feasting, and singing had all been absorbed into Christmas before the fourth century was out, per HISTORY's own writeup of Saturnalia.

The date itself, the 25th of December, wasn't handed down by scripture – HISTORY's Christmas explainer is blunt that the Church settled on it specifically because it sat on top of the solstice festivals it was trying to replace, on the theory that people convert more easily when they get to keep their party and just change what the party's for.

I still keep Yule. Quietly, on the actual solstice, with the actual reasons those traditions existed before someone else's god got attached to them. And every December I watch the tree and the evergreens and the light-in-the-dark get sold back to me under a different name, as though the version with the manger bolted on is the original and mine's the knock-off.

It's the reverse of what actually happened, and almost nobody clocks it, because the absorption worked exactly as well as it was designed to.

Samhain Got the Same Treatment, Just With a Different Coat of Paint

Christmas isn't the only one running this playbook. I keep Samhain too – it's one of the actual rites I've written about on here before, the offerings to the dead among them – and it went through the exact same absorption Yule did, just with the join more visible if you know where to look.

Samhain was a Gaelic fire festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year, held on the belief that the boundary between the living and the dead thinned on that one night, with bonfires lit and disguises worn to move safely through it, as HISTORY's own piece on the festival explains.

The Church didn't leave that alone any more than it left Yule alone. Pope Boniface first tried relocating the Christian feast for saints and martyrs to May, in the fifth century, and it didn't take – the autumn fire festivals kept running regardless of what Rome had scheduled instead, according to HISTORY's writeup on Samhain specifically.

It took Pope Gregory III, in the eighth century, moving All Saints' Day to the 1st of November to actually make the overlap stick, landing the new Christian holiday directly on top of the old pagan one rather than beside it, per the Library of Congress's rundown of the tradition.

That's where the name comes from, and it's the part I find almost funny once you notice it: October 31st became the evening before All Hallows' – the saints – and "All Hallows' Evening" wore down over the centuries into Hallowe'en, and then Halloween, which is a Christian label sitting on top of a festival the Church spent hundreds of years trying and failing to relocate away from its actual date, as Fox Weather traces through the rebranding.

The costumes, the bonfires, the food left out for the dead – none of that got removed either. It got reframed, the same way Yule's evergreens and Saturnalia's gift-giving did, with the offerings to spirits becoming charity to the poor and the disguises against ghosts becoming fancy dress, a shift Time's history of the holiday walks through in more detail than I've got room for here.

So Halloween gets to sit in the calendar today as the "secular" one, the holiday everyone treats as safely detached from religion because it's mostly plastic skeletons and discount sweets now. It isn't detached from anything.

It's a Celtic pagan festival wearing a Christian name that was specifically manufactured to cover it, and the fact that both halves of that history have been scrubbed out of the average conversation about pumpkin carving is exactly the same trick Christmas pulled on Yule. Absorb it, rename it, wait a thousand years, and then act baffled when the person who actually still practices the original rite points out where the pieces came from.

Ostara Didn't Even Get to Keep Its Own Name

Easter is the one where the Church didn't just borrow the date and the decorations – it borrowed the actual name and then let everyone forget where the name came from.

Ostara is the spring equinox festival, and the word Easter is widely thought to trace back to Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon dawn goddess the season was named for – the historian Bede recorded the name in the eighth century, and philologists since have argued he had no obvious reason to invent a goddess nobody had heard of, especially given the cluster of English place names, Eastry in Kent among them, that still carry her name today, as The Field's history of the festival sets out.

Jacob Grimm made the same case in the nineteenth century, arguing her worship was rooted deeply enough that early Christian teachers tolerated the name and simply reassigned it to their own biggest anniversary rather than fight it, a point this piece on Eostre and Easter's rebranding traces back to Grimm directly.

The rest followed the same absorption pattern as Yule and Samhain – the hare and the egg, both fertility symbols tied to Eostre's festival, got folded straight into Easter as the bunny and the Easter egg, and the timing itself, set by the first full moon after the spring equinox, still runs on the lunar-solar rhythm the older festival used, rather than any date scripture actually specifies, as Wyrd Books' rundown of Ostara's absorption explains.

So the one Christian holiday most people would call the most Christian – the resurrection, the actual centre of the faith – is sitting on a spring goddess's name, her symbols, and her calendar, and most of the people colouring eggs for it every year have never once been told whose festival they're colouring them for.

Beltane Got the Rougher Treatment

Not every one of these went as smoothly as Yule or Ostara, and Beltane's the honest exception worth naming, because it shows the absorption trick has limits.

Beltane is the Gaelic fire festival marking the start of summer, on the 1st of May, built around bonfires, fertility rites, and a level of open sexuality the Church never worked out how to rebrand – an overview of Beltane's history is blunt that where Yule became Christmas and Ostara became Easter, Beltane's bonfires and greenwood marriages were harder to sanitise into anything the Church wanted its name on.

So instead of absorbing it, they mostly just tried to kill it. The maypole itself got a rival name out of that effort – Roodmas, the medieval church's attempt to redirect people's attachment from the pole toward the cross instead – a rebrand that, tellingly, never actually stuck the way "Hallowe'en" or "Easter" did, according to this history of the Beltane sabbat. The Puritans went further still, banning maypoles outright in 1644 and specifically targeting the tradition of couples spending the night in the woods together, which the same source lays out in detail.

May Day survived anyway, stripped down to children dancing round a ribboned pole in a school playground, with the fire and the fertility and the reason any of it started quietly edited out of the version that made it through. That's the version I grew up seeing too, before I had any reason to know what it used to be underneath the ribbons.

I find that one almost more telling than the holidays that got smoothly absorbed, if I'm honest. Christmas and Easter show what happens when the Church successfully rewrites a festival. Beltane shows what happens when it can't quite manage the rewrite and has to settle for suppression instead – and even then, the thing it was trying to erase still made it to a primary school playground near you every May, just with all the parts that made it dangerous filed off.

Then Christmas Started Eating the Rest of the Calendar

Here's the bit that actually got me writing this, though – it's not just that Christmas swallowed Yule once, centuries ago. It's still swallowing.

This time it's not eating other faiths' holidays, it's eating the rest of the year, and it's doing it in front of us in real time.

Christmas Creep, By the Numbers

"Christmas creep" is the retail industry's own term for this, which tells you they're not even pretending it's an accident – CBS News has been tracking the phenomenon as it gets a little more pronounced most years.

Deloitte's most recent holiday survey, covered here, put nearly 40% of American shoppers starting their Christmas shopping before November even begins. In the UK, Forbes reports on a Bazaarvoice study finding close to half of consumers were shopping for it by early November, a meaningful chunk of them starting in October.

Retailers aren't shy about why, either: that same CBS piece quotes a retail analyst pointing out that discounted stock sells at better margins in October than it does during the Black Friday panic, so getting the tinsel up early is a pricing strategy wearing a jumper.

None of this is new, to be fair – American newspapers were complaining that the shopping season starts earlier every year as far back as 1883, a detail this history of the phenomenon digs up from an old Washington Evening Star piece. What's new is how much further "earlier" can stretch when the whole apparatus of algorithmic retail is pointed at doing it on purpose, every year, a little more than the last.

The Advert That Started All This

Which is where the advert I opened this post with actually sits. Deloitte and Bazaarvoice are measuring shoppers starting in September, October, early November – and I watched a full seasonal Christmas advert land in the height of summer, months before even the earliest of those figures kick in.

That's not creep anymore. That's the season eating its own run-up.

So you get the thing where a holiday that already ate one pagan solstice festival is now working its way backwards through Halloween, through Thanksgiving where that applies, through whatever autumn used to be for, one seasonal aisle reset at a time. Christmas didn't stay a day, or even a season. It became the default state of the calendar, with everything else treated as a brief interruption to it.

Why This Is the Bit That Actually Bothers Me

I want to be precise about what I'm annoyed at, because it isn't people enjoying Christmas. I don't begrudge anyone a tree, a dinner, a fortnight off work with their family. That's not the complaint.

And it isn't every Christian, either, obviously. Most of the Christians I actually know aren't the ones doing this. It's typically the same loud minority – the pamphlet-pushers, the train-station preachers, the ones who show up in unrelated threads – and it's noticeable how often that minority skews right-wing too, though that's genuinely a whole separate conversation I'm not trying to open here. It's also the same sort who'll class my actual practice as demonic or satanic, and my existence, as I am, as somehow wrong for my character – not a disagreement about theology, but a verdict on me.

I also know how this reads to some people before I've even finished the sentence: paganism has its own history, and not all of it is clean. Worth saying plainly, though: "paganism" isn't one thing with one history. It's an umbrella term covering a whole range of distinct religions – Celtic, Hellenic, Norse, Slavic, and plenty more besides, each with its own gods, its own practices, its own past, and its own relationship to harm done in its name. Mine draws on Hellenic and Celtic traditions specifically, woven together into something syncretic rather than kept as two separate boxes. Different centuries, different traditions, different sets of people entirely – none of it undoes the fact that I'm not asking anyone to convert, fund anything, or reorganise their calendar around Selene. I'm asking for the same thing everyone else already has without having to ask for it: to mark my own dates, quietly, without a pamphlet pushed into my hand for the trouble. That's the whole ask. Existing, not converting anyone.

The complaint is the specific combination of "we don't force our religion" and a calendar that's been rearranged around that religion twice over – once by absorbing everyone else's midwinter festival into itself, and again by commercial interests stretching what's left of it across a third of the year.

Nobody voted for either of those things. Nobody had to. A symbol only needs to sit at the centre of a culture long enough, and eventually the people standing furthest from it are the only ones who can still see it's there at all.

I'll keep marking my solstice on my own date, with my own reasons, whether or not the shop windows agree with me about whose holiday this originally was. That's not a protest. It's just Tuesday, in a country that forgot it used to be a different one.