This progressive encroachment suggests two questions: What protection, if any, should Governments and business give Good Friday? How will the public marginalisation of Good Friday lead Christians to see and celebrate the day?
Changes in the public celebration of Good Friday have been significant. Sixty years ago shops did not open, few people worked, trains and buses hardly ran, there was no public entertainment. It was a long, quiet, heavy day. It reflected the historically large attendance at Christian churches and the place of Christian faith in the public space.
Now Good Friday is still largely a day free of work. But in a mobile Australia where Christian allegiance and practice are no longer taken for granted, it is a day for shopping, still restricted, and diversion. But when businesses like football, gaming and supermarkets test the waters of public response as they seek to exploit Good Friday, they now find their toes nibbled rather than bitten off.
The arguments for maintaining the exclusions associated with Good Friday are generally based on one of two considerations: respect for Christians to whom the day is sacred, and the benefits to society of maintaining a day free from pressure to work and to spend.
Neither argument is conclusive. The decline in meaningful Christian allegiance, and the growing number of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim Australians may lead us to ask why a Christian holy day should be especially protected. Even conceding the public benefit of days free from pressure, too, we may ask why Good Friday should continue to be such a day.
Perhaps it is helpful to ask the more radical question: why should there be any stable public holidays at all? Public holidays constantly forget or embroider their origins. They recall events which were significant to different groups in Australian society, even after the significance is no longer shared.
For many Australians the anniversary of the arrival of the first English settlers in Australia is no longer an occasion for joy, but it remains important to remember for its influence on Australia. Similarly, few remember the stonemasons' strike that in Victoria gives the date to Labour Day, but it rightly enshrines the importance of workers' struggle.
Anzac Day, too, has changed its character but like the other public holidays, its celebration prevents forgetfulness. Holidays recall the experience of particular groups of Australians, but can be celebrated by all as shaping the nation.
From this perspective the preservation of Good Friday marks the importance of Christian faith in Australian settlement and culture. This faith and its varying practices formed one of the factors that helped shape Australian institutions for better or worse. To lose it as a holiday would be to forget something significant.
As a public celebration, however, Good Friday can be expected to change as Australian culture and habits evolve. All holidays do. We should ask, then, whether the non-commercial aspects of the holiday are important in preserving its character and its relationship to the religious traditions that it recalls.
This kind of argument has been made with some success for the celebration of Anzac Day. It could also be made for Good Friday. But it would need to take into account the way in which Australians generally wish to celebrate holidays.
The changing face of Good Friday will surely change the way Christians see and celebrate it. Even if it is a holiday, it will no longer be a de facto public religious feast.
That could be helpful for Christians if it returns them to the nature of the event they recall. Jesus was put to death on a weekday. The soldiers who did the job gambled their time away. He was killed shortly after he challenged the commercialisation of the Temple and the corporatisation of religious faith. His trial and executions were the day's public entertainment.
Being exposed to Australian public values is quite a good context for entering the events that Good Friday remembers.
About Author: Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.
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