Vladimir Nabokov once said of James Joyce that he left his religion but not it’s categories. I’ve sometimes wondered the same of Punk legend Ian Mackaye^[1]Pronounced the same as our own David O. McKay., whose solidly Scottish-Gaelic surname argues a strong Catholic ancestry (his father reportedly is still a practicing Episcopalian–which is about as Catholic as a Protestant sect can get). Certainly his persistent refusal to ever sign with a major label–even famously rejecting a $10 million offer from Atlantic at the height of the early-90s Alt-Rock boom–felt in tune with the medieval Catholic tradition of monastic withdrawal from the wealth and vanities of the world (“Out of Step (With the World)” is the name of both an early Minor Threat song and their only LP), dating back to such mendicant orders as the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Likewise, his entire Straight Edge ethos of no drugs, no alcohol, and no meat (which is what every good Catholic does on Fridays anyways), always felt like he was taking holy vows into a monastic order himself.

I previously argued that his seminal band Fugazi found such a welcoming home among LDS kids in Utah (of all places) because the band’s egalitarian politics and business practices, Straight Edge philosophy, and DIY ethic resonated with Mormonism’s own Law of Consecration, Word of Wisdom, and frontiersman self-reliance. But my intention was never to insinuate Mackaye was some sort of closet Latter-day Saint or what not, only to point out how there is much more overlap between those old mendicant orders and the restored Gospel than we generally acknowledge.

I’m reminded of this possible religious influence upon Mackaye every Easter when I remember to put on Egg Hunt, a one-off project that Mackaye recorded with his old Minor Threat bandmate Jeff Nelson on a lark during Easter season of 1986. The project only yielded one 7″ single–A-side “Me and You” and B-side “We All Fall Down”–and though by all accounts they had fun recording it and even considered continuing the project, nevertheless Mackaye in the end elected to continue with his new band Fugazi instead, while Nelson moved onto other projects as well.

Besides the historical interest of the single itself (bridging as it does the gap between the thrashing Hardcore of Minor Threat with the more thoughtful Post-Punk of Fugazi), the two songs on the Egg Hunt single are genuinely fun in and of themselves, and hint at an alternate timeline of where Mackaye might have gone instead.

Yet the sheer fact that he named this one-off for the Easter season is also of interest to me, simply because it indicates that Easter was even on his mind in the first place. Because Punk rockers observing Easter is not a given; heck, observing Easter generally is not a given. As others have argued, Easter, despite ostensibly being the holiest date on the Christian calendar, nevertheless still tends to play second-fiddle to Christmas more broadly. There is no Charlie Brown Easter special; Hallmark and Netflix do not release a glut of Easter rom-coms each year; there is no major Easter shopping season; no Easter carols take over the radio for two months; we attend no ugly sweater Easter parties.

For that matter, there is no First Presidency Easter devotional; there are no Tab Choir Easter albums; the ward Easter program is always much more of an afterthought than the Christmas one; and whenever General Conference falls on Easter Sunday, it is always the latter that gets shunted, never the former. Indeed, when I first moved to Salt Lake for grad school, I had an atheist roommate from Baltimore walk in on me watching April Conference one Easter Sunday. “Oh, do Mormons not observe Easter?” he asked sincerely. “What? Of course we do!” I protested. “I don’t know, it kinda looks like ya don’t,” he said, and I really didn’t have much of a counter-argument.

Arguably, this culture-wide preference for Christmas over Easter comes about largely because, between Santa Claus, the trees, the shopping, and all those Virgin Mary maternity figures, it is actually fairly easy to separate the religious from the secular in our Yuletide celebrations. Such is not the case, however, with Easter: the bloody torture on the cross, the awful weight of the Atonement and the miracle of the Resurrection that left even the Apostles “sore afraid,” all make too big of religious claims to be easily assimilated by a wider secular audience. (That’s not to say, between the Easter baskets, chocolate bunnies, and yes, egg hunts, that late-capitalism hasn’t tried; only that Easter has overall done a better job at resisting mass-commercialization than Christmas).

Perhaps that resistance to commercialization is why Easter appealed to the Fugazi frontman in the first place. And when one considers how the Christ whom Easter commemorates was the same man who drove the money-changers from the Temple, told the rich young man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, healed the sick and fed the 5,000 without money and without price, and inspired an egalitarian society of “neither rich nor poor” on the Day of Pentecost, one can perhaps get an inkling for why a leftist Punk rocker like Ian Mackaye might still retain some lingering affection for the Easter season.

Happy Easter, by the way–and may you do yourself a favor this Holy Week by taking just 6-and-a-half-minutes to enjoy the complete discography of Egg Hunt.