As nearly 10,000 runners took to the streets of Jersey City, New Jersey, on Sunday for the city’s annual marathon, churchgoers in the area struggled to find parking spots.
Since this year’s race fell on Palm Sunday, a popular religious service that starts the Holy Week journey to Easter, it was more disruptive than usual for the churches situated along the race route.
Christian leaders and their congregants spent weeks this winter fighting for changes to the marathon plan, which they said would cause unacceptable disruptions to a sacred event.
City officials acknowledged the frustration, but said, when scheduling the marathon, it was essentially impossible to avoid overlapping with a holiday of some kind.
“We are somewhat a victim of Jersey City’s rich cultural and religious traditions and heritage,” said marathon organizer Steve Lipski during a city council meeting in March, according to the Jersey City Times.
Although anyone who’s organized a spring event likely sympathizes with Lipski’s perspective, there’s a growing sense among churchgoing Christians that the practice of pausing regularly scheduled programming during Holy Week has fallen out of style.
It was once common for schools, sports clubs and other community organizations to acknowledge and accommodate religious aspects of the Easter season.
Now, after major shifts in the U.S. religious landscape and, in the case of public schools, some legal battles, it’s increasingly left up to Christians to carve out the time they need for Easter around secular events.
To be fair, Christian attitudes about churchgoing likely helped drive the change. These days, even committed church members often feel comfortable missing worship services to sleep in, go on a hike or watch sporting events, said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, which conducts surveys on faith and culture.
“Even on Easter, there’s no longer this expectation that literally everybody’s going to be there,” he said.
Easter scheduling conflicts
The way McConnell sees it, an uptick in scheduling conflicts around Easter is a natural result of recent religious trends.
Since 2007, the share of adults in the United States who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%, according to Pew Research Center.
Today, just one-third of Americans say they attend religious services in person at least once a month. Nearly half (49%) say they seldom or never attend worship over the course of a typical year.
To be clear, it’s still common for Christians to attend church on Easter, and most Protestant pastors say the holiday is among the best attended Sundays of the year, as Lifeway Research reported in 2024.
But Easter attendance has declined as church attendance overall has declined, and it’s created a situation in which secular event organizers have more leeway to schedule competing events.
“Culturally, it feels like we’re beyond the point” where organizations take Easter breaks, McConnell said.
How is Easter determined?
Another factor fueling scheduling conflicts this year is that Easter falls about as late on the calendar as the holiday ever does.
Unlike Christmas, Easter is not celebrated on a fixed date. It’s also not linked to a specific week in a specific month, as Thanksgiving is.
Instead, Easter’s date shifts each year because it’s determined by a full moon. It generally lands between March 22 and April 25.
“The simplest way to explain the date of Easter is that it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the spring equinox,” according to USA Today.
Last year, Easter was on March 31. This year, it’s on April 20. Next year, it’ll be on April 5 before moving back into March in 2027.
While Easter jumps around, many secular events that happen each spring do not. That’s why the NCAA’s March Madness often involves a handful of Easter games, and why the Boston Marathon, held each year on the third Monday of April, falls on Easter Monday this year.
When Easter lands in mid-April or late April, it’s less likely for it to match up with spring break.
Some schools still offer long weekends for Easter each year, but others have abandoned the practice in response to lower demand for time off or lawsuits claiming that public school holidays on Good Friday violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Easter accommodations
The emerging norm in some schools is for Christian students to receive a religious accommodation to miss class for a Good Friday church service or some other Easter-related event.
In other words, Christian families are taking the same approach used by non-Christian families who celebrate holidays that aren’t widely observed in the U.S.
Families can also ask to be excused during Holy Week from other types of community organizations, such as soccer clubs. It’s unlikely there will be pushback, especially when around 8 in 10 Americans still celebrate Easter in some way, whether with chocolate bunnies or church services — or both.
“As American culture grows increasingly secular, big Christian holidays are still going to be within everybody’s consciousness, and so Americans are not going to be surprised if someone is celebrating Easter or Christmas,” McConnell said. “But there won’t be a cultural expectation to cancel sporting events, work or other things happening.”
Without cancellations, tough choices will sometimes have to be made.
For example, Christian athletes who qualified for this week’s NCAA gymnastics championships will have no choice but to spend Good Friday in Fort Worth if they earn a spot in Saturday’s finals.
Gymnasts from the University of Utah who are missing their typical Holy Week traditions are planning to create new ones in Texas by spending Good Friday doing charitable work.
Utah gymnast Jaylene Gilstrap said she always leans on her faith during competitions, and that this weekend will be no exception.
“When I compete I really bring the Lord into it everything I do, with prayer and everything. So it’s just another chance to show appreciation (to the Lord), to preach and give prayer, giving him a little extra love and support,” she said.
An Easter comeback?
For Christians who are frustrated by the current state of affairs, there are at least two reasons for hope that Easter weekend schedules may be more open in the future.
First, some large retailers are showing interest in giving their employees additional time off. More than two dozen major stores, including Target, Lowe’s and Costco, will be closed on Easter Sunday this year, a slight uptick from recent years, according to The Washington Post.
Those closures likely have more to do with the rise of online shopping than renewed enthusiasm for the religious holiday, but the push to prevent worker burnout could still pay off for churchgoing Christians moving forward.
Second, the situation in Jersey City shows that change is possible when Christians speak up. Although this year’s marathon wasn’t moved from Palm Sunday, community leaders have committed to holding the race in early May from now on.
“I want to make it the best for our community as well as the best for runners,” said Lipski, the marathon organizer, about avoiding religious conflicts in the future.
Contributing: Trent Wood