“‘The image of the Catholic Lent must be polished. The fact that we use a Muslim term is related to the fact that Ramadan is a better-known concept among young people than Lent”[…][Dutch Catholic] organisers hope that by linking the festival to Ramadan they can remind Christians who may be less observant than Muslims of the ‘spirituality and sobriety’ of Lent. ‘The agreements are more striking than the differences. Both for Muslims and Catholic faithful the values of frugality and spirituality play a central role in this tradition.’” –Lent Fast rebranded as ‘Christian Ramadan’, The Telegraph, 2/26/08

What might it mean for Dutch Catholics to use the language of Islam to talk about Christianity? Using language from the other Abrahamic religions is hardly a new phenomena. The Jewish holiday Yom Kippur may have been the origin of the Christian season of Lent as well as the Islamic month of Ramadan. All three religious events involve discipline, fasting, and holiness. To deny the similarities among them would be to deny the complex historical interchanges among the three religions.

However, using Islamic language to rebrand (a word with unfortunate economic resonances) a Christian holiday may be something else entirely. Perhaps most importantly, it denies the religions of their particularity, pushing them closer towards some “all religions are one” perspective and pulling them away from what they are actually about. Furthermore, it invites a comparison between Lent and Ramadan which may simply be invalid. Comparing Christ’s death and resurrection to the revelation of the Quar’an simply doesn’t make sense, at least to me. Certainly they are both holy historical occurrences, but they are still very different sorts of celebrations. The Catholic blog Insight Scoop aptly demonstrates the absurdity of using the language of secularism or other religions to describe Christian particularities.

That said, I am tentatively for this redescription of Lent. If the language of Ramadan is the only available contemporary example of Dutch religious devotion, why not use that language to signify the intensity Lent offers? Once people take Lent seriously, they ought to realize the important differences between it and Ramadan, which ought to point them towards the differences between Christianity and Islam.