I.
I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world’s biggest Easter celebration. I wasn’t even there for Easter. I was three weeks early. But already the roads were choked with pre-parties, practice parades, and centurion cosplayers.
I couldn’t go out and grab dinner at 9 PM because all the streets looked like this
Day. Night. The hours of the morning when tourists are trying to sleep and don’t want loud Spanish singing outside their hotel windows. It didn’t stop. Some people bore the floats on their backs (they weren’t motorized, they had to be carried like a sedan chair). Other people crowded into empty lots and backyards, putting finishing touches on art or costumes or paraphernalia. Children and teenagers ran around in Easter purple, jockeying for the best spots on the parade routes. Civic dignitaries stood around, practicing looking important for their turn in the celebrations.
I missed the scene in the Bible where a winged mechanical lion drags the body of Christ in an intricate silver juggernaut, but the Guatemalans definitely didn’t.
This was around the time I was reading about cultural evolution, so I couldn’t help rehearsing some familiar conservative arguments. A shared religion binds people together. For a day, everyone is on the same side. That builds social trust and helps turn a city into a community. It was hard to argue with that. I’m no expert in Guatemala. I don’t even speak Spanish. But for a little while, everybody, old and young, rich or poor, whatever one Guatemalan political party is and whatever the other Guatemalan political party is, were caught up in the same great wave, swept together by the glory of the Easter narrative.
It was the sort of thing, I thought sadly to myself, that would never happen back in America, where we didn’t have the same kind of shared religious purpose, where the liberal traditions like the separation of church and state prevented the same kind of all-consuming state-sponsored dedication to a single narrative. Right?
