Washing His Hands of the Calendar
Why hiding Jesus from our timekeeping is the least inclusive thing we could do
The Sanitised Clock
Somewhere in the last few decades of academic and institutional life, a quiet substitution was made. The labels BC and AD — Before Christ and Anno Domini, Latin for In the Year of the Lord — were replaced in scholarly writing, textbooks, and official documents with BCE and CE: Before Common Era and Common Era. The stated motivation was inclusivity. The actual effect was something closer to a conjuring trick — Jesus disappeared from the calendar, while the calendar itself remained entirely unchanged.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The numbering system is identical. The year that was 2000 AD is still 2000 CE. The year that was 500 BC is still 500 BCE. Not a single day was moved, added, or removed. The hinge point of all human recorded history — the birth of Jesus Christ — remains exactly where it always was, silently anchoring every date on Earth. We simply stopped saying his name.
The question worth asking is: does this make the calendar more inclusive, or does it make us less honest about whose calendar it actually is?
I’ll keep exploring the topic further through several posts. Next article: