Easter is hardly unique in being reduced to its secular symbols.

Christmas, for many, is first a day of Santa Claus and presents rather than the Nativity. Halloween, too, has largely been severed from its religious roots in the public mind and become a festival of costumes, monsters, and candy. In each case, the secular image is vivid, emotionally resonant, and easy to grasp.

Santa is an immortal, jolly gift-giver who oversees the making of toys for the world’s children and delivers them all in a single night. Halloween offers ghosts, monsters, darkness, and playful fear. These are compelling stories and images. They readily capture the imagination.

Easter’s secular imagery is much thinner by comparison. A rabbit delivering chocolate eggs has never had the same narrative power or coherence. That is part of why Easter remains, of these three holidays, the most recognizably religious in the public mind. Its sentimental and cultural pull still depends much more heavily on the Christian story beneath it.

And yet even here secularization is obvious. Many people who rarely attend church still feel drawn to Easter, just as they do to Christmas. The religious core persists, but often in softened, occasional, or merely symbolic form. These holidays remain culturally powerful not because secularization has erased religion, but because religion still lingers beneath the secular forms people now most readily recognize.

But to many of these secular people, Easter is simply about chocolate eggs rather than the Resurrection. They speak from that cultural milieu, not from a place of hostility. In the same way, Christmas is often about Santa, and Halloween about costumes and playful fear.

To interpret that as a deliberate slight against Christians is to project a religious frame onto people who are not operating within it. It mistakes a difference in meaning for an act of disrespect.

For many, that is simply what the day is and no more.