Redhand
Banned
Very true. A great example of paganism that has survived to this day is Easter. The holiday is meant to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, but how does the Easter bunny and Easter eggs fit into that? The answer is they don't, not at all. They are purely pagan. Easter is in the spring, and spring was regarded as a time of fertility by pagans, and rabbits and eggs are widespread symbols of fertility, thus the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.
The church basically had two options when it came to a lot of these traditions: accept them, and try to make as many of them as christian as they could, or piss off all the people and face a pagan resurgence.
In fact, there were a few pagan resurgences in history, and I think it's quite likely they happened because the church tried to tell the people they couldn't keep doing all their old pagan practices. Eventually the church learned they couldn't stop these practices, so they tried to incorporate them into christianity.
Early church doctrine was based on the spread of the faith and the idea that Christianity and the entire basis of salvation was something that could be met halfway on in terms of ritualistic practices but not core beliefs. If people who had Pagan like traditions used them to express worship and proper sentiment for Christ simply because they were Germans or Picts then that was okay because they realize that not everyone was from the Hellenized Eastern Mediterranean
and they had their own traditions.
If you get Christianity to for whatever reason decide not to proselytize and stay limited to the Judaic chosen people model, that is the best way to keep Paganism alive in Europe.