Is Lent becoming too commercialised?

Lent is no longer just for the religious. Many 'do Lent' as a dieting fad or technology detox
Does Easter have to be such a gluttonous occasion?
Lent is going the way of Easter and being commercialized, argues Kristina Chew. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I'm betting you know a few people celebrating Lent, and a few of them probably aren't even religious. Lent was traditionally a season of penance, prayer, and fasting in the six weeks leading up to Easter. Now it is becoming commercialized.

Today, you can "do Lent" simply, it seems, by giving something up. You don't even have to be Catholic, Christian or religiously inclined. On the Huffington Post, a self-described atheist writes about how he is practicing a "secular Lent" this year. The lifestyle site describes how you can do the "Lent diet" and also the "Orthodox Lenten diet". Even Beliefnet, a religious website, tells us there are 6 Reasons to Observe Lent (Even If You're Not Catholic).

In contemporary western society, many (though hardly all) of us have ready access to food and drink of endless varieties, so a self-instituted withdrawal is seen as the only way to get away from our daily round of unhealthy pleasures. Many also give up that other mainstay of modern life, technology, as proof of their self-control. The campus ministry office at Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee, calls on its campus community to embark on a "technology fast" and "stop – take a minute or two each day, and realize the world around [you]." The editors of the Jesuit magazine, America, encourage Catholics to wean themselves from (in the words of the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola), the "disordered attachment" of our 24/7 addiction to checking texts and tweets.

This equating of Lent with self-denial in the pursuit of self-improvement strips the season of its actual purpose. As the editors of America write, early Christian theologians emphasized that fasting in Lent must be connected to something else, namely, almsgiving: the food that you are giving up should be given away to someone else. Unless accompanied by acts of charity, fasting is "avaricious," according to St Augustine.

Certainly, fasting and withdrawal from bodily pleasures are hardly exclusive to Christianity. Muslims fast for a month during Ramadan. In Judaism, a 25-hour fast occurs during Yom Kippur. In ancient Greece, fasting was part of a number of purification rites undergone prior to communicating with the divine. What's different about today's calls, by believers and non-believers, to observe Lent is the emphasis on giving up things and on abstinence as a practice in and of itself that can foster self-improvement. In other words, just giving something up is spiritual.

With public health experts speaking so often of an "obesity epidemic", we know ought to repent of our excessive indulgences. Yet it's still seen as unorthodox or even a bit crazy to forego coffee or meat. By "doing Lent," we can invoke a higher-order principle to back up our temporary fast, lest our self-denial be labeled pathological and as a kind of temporary anorexia. After all, by only refraining for the 40 days of Lent, we are not, like Gwyneth Paltrow not feeding her children any carbohydrates – or, like someone who is fasting to the point of starvation and endangering their life– completely denying ourselves of something.

Based on the decorations and candy sold around Easter, you might associate it with coloring eggs and pastel-hued rabbits and chicks in baskets rather than (as my husband, growing up in an extremely devout Irish Catholic family in the 1960s and 1970s, does) with the drawn-out, dour season of Lent beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending with church services for days in a row until Easter Sunday finally arrived and the resurrection of Jesus Christ was celebrated.

In a culture obsessed with body image, dieting and health, Lent has also been secularized. We have turned a period of religious observance into a time of purging ourselves of things we think we can't live without for just long enough. After we've proved we can be virtuous and do this, we feel all the more justified to return to our daily addictions. To make up for that period of abstinence, we may even allow ourselves to go on a bit of a binge. We've been good and deserve to, don't we?