Our Savior Jesus Christ tells the woman at the well in Samaria, “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him” (John 4:23). As the first great commandment (Matthew 22:37-38) suggests, true worship of God and agape love are entwined.

In flagrant contrast, most people in this world celebrate their holidays, not in spirit, truth, and love, but in fleshly practices, lies, and in the case of Saint Valentine’s Day, lust. Sexual immorality has always been the essential ingredient in the observance of Valentine’s Day—in direct contrast to the seventh commandment. How did such an anti-God celebration become so accepted in mainstream Christianity?

Origins

History substantiates that the origins of Valentine’s Day predate Christianity. The Roman god Lupercus is of the same origin as the Greek god Pan. The Phoenicians and Semites called him “Bal” or “Baal.”

The original biblical name for the central figure of Valentine’s Day was “Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), a man who was decidedly not a saint. A better rendering of his description in Genesis 10 is that he was “a fearless hunter in defiance of the LORD” (International Standard Version; emphasis ours). He lived and taught a way of life in opposition to God’s way of love. According to secular history, Nimrod was a vicious murderer and an abuser of women.

Nimrod’s birth date was believed to be January 6 (which, by the way, was chosen in ancient times as Jesus’ birthday, a custom still held in the Eastern Orthodox Church; it has no foundation in fact). According to tradition, his mother presented herself for purification forty days later, on February 15. On this date, pagan Rome celebrated—beginning the evening before, February 14—a sensuous festival of idolatrous worship in honor of Lupercus, the deified “hero-hunter of wolves.” This festival was known as the Lupercalia.

The ancient Roman practice especially encouraged young people who were attracted to each other to indulge in licentious acts of sexual immorality. Roman church leaders in the fifth century AD eventually included the Lupercalia in the church’s liturgical calendar due to its immense popularity among the Roman citizenry. The Catholic Church introduced this pagan festival into Christianity wholesale except for the more extreme sensual observances. Seeking to infuse a more Christian element into the festival, church authorities renamed it “Saint Valentine’s Day.”

This practice of fusing differing beliefs into a single religious system is called syncretism. We see this same kind of blending in the celebrations of Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween, all of which scholarship has traced back to various pre-Christian superstitions and practices. Some members of the greater church of God have naively followed the world’s form of Christianity on these matters.

Lupercalia

The “Valentine’s Day” of Roman times was less refined than its modern counterpart. After the sacrifice of goats and a dog, the priests (called Luperci) traditionally split into two bands and ran a marked course around the city on this day, scantily dressed only in goatskin girdles. They carried strips of goatskin to strike women, supposedly to remove their infertility. The strips bore the name februa, a word connected with februare, meaning “to purify.” Therefore, the day was called Februatus, and the month, Februarius.

Lupercalia was, or became, connected with the legendary she-wolf (in Latin, lupus means “wolf”) who suckled Remus and Romulus, the traditional founders of Rome. In Rome, “wolf” was slang for a sexually available woman. In this way, the day became connected with Venus, goddess of sexual “love.”

Venus’ son, Cupid, also played a central part in this “love feast” (or, more correctly, lust feast). Roman mythology ascribes to mother and son the power to instill sexual passion in people. By using their love potion, they supposedly could also make love cease.

Artwork often portrays Cupid shooting arrows into the hearts of his victims. Usually naked, winged, and armed with a bow and arrow, cupids are still portrayed in modern times on Valentine’s cards, in theater décor, and so on. As can well be imagined, a lewd festival of sex and lust was popular with the Romans, much as it is today. Our society’s celebration may not be as overtly sexual, but it is just as popular.

The Path of Syncretism

Once the Roman emperors embraced counterfeit Christianity, the Catholic Church exploded across the empire. To “convert” the pagan populace as quickly as possible, Roman church leaders felt that they should not be too strict with prospective members. Some reasoned that if Christianity was to conquer the world, it could best do so by relaxing the principles of Christ’s teachings, as they knew their converts would perceive them as much too rigid. The same thinking infested the church of God more than once in recent memory.

The Catholic leadership found that an effective way of gaining members was to blend or syncretize popular pagan beliefs and practices with Christian ones. Realizing that they could not persuade the masses to relinquish their superstitious customs, they attempted to overlay Christian concepts on the existing pagan feasts. The historical development of the Roman church shows that, for almost every heathen celebration, some Christian rite was superimposed.

Thus, the Roman populace could still attend their “love feast,” but it was no longer dedicated to Venus, the goddess of love, but to the Virgin Mary and the saints. In AD 496, Pope Gelasius, bishop of Rome, officially “Christianized” the pagan Lupercalia by renaming it “Saint Valentine’s Day,” moving the day of observance from the fifteenth to the fourteenth of February. On each February 14, Roman church members were now to center their attention on “Christian saints.” People could still draw lots for their “Valentines,” but with the names of saints written on them instead.

After the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Saint Valentine fell into the background since Protestants did not believe saints to be worthy of veneration. People returned to drawing names of ordinary young men and women as Valentines, in this way choosing themselves partners for the festival.

In subsequent centuries, neither saints nor Christian teachings were significant parts of Valentine’s Day. However, Cupid was still there, and so were his arrowed hearts. People still drew lots as chance directed. Despite the years, the day was still the original Roman celebration with a few modifications, and it was as popular and pagan as ever.

An Unbiblical Holiday

The Bible neither mentions nor espouses Valentine’s Day or its practices. However, God informs ancient Israel in Deuteronomy 12:29-31 that He had chosen them to represent true religion, and He warns them not to mix pagan customs with worshipping Him as the one true God:

When the LORD your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, “How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.” You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way; for every abomination to the LORD which He hates they have done to their gods.

In I Corinthians 10:19-21, the apostle Paul compares mixing paganism with Christianity—syncretism—to worshipping demons:

What am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols is anything? Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cups of demons; you cannot partake of the Lord’s table and of the table of demons.

This principle includes giving one’s time or interest to things of pagan origin.

Beyond their obvious heathen origins, holidays like Saint Valentine’s Day continually secularize, transforming into reflections of the world’s present culture and falsifying the religions from which they sprang. Most people in this world, becoming increasingly materialistic, could not care less if Valentine’s Day originated in the Roman Lupercalia or early Roman church doctrines. Religion—true, syncretized, or pagan—has little influence on them. All they care about is whether they enjoy the celebration. This apathy about how to worship the true God and its corresponding moral decay is the result of watering down truth, minimizing its authority, and appealing to people’s base desires, that is, their human nature (Romans 8:7; I John 2:16).

Even some Christians who reject religious holidays with roots in paganism, like Christmas and Easter, see nothing wrong with holidays like New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween despite their pagan origin. Their faulty human reasoning—their rationalization or justification for it—goes like this:

Christmas and Easter must be rejected because they attempt to worship God with pagan customs. The other holidays, though, while people may have once used them to worship God, are now deemed entirely secular. And since God actually forbids using pagan customs to worship Him, we are free to practice pagan worship customs if we are not now using them for worship purposes.

Yet, this bit of twisted logic ignores the fact that God tells the Israelites to eradicate all vestiges of pagan worship from their presence (Deuteronomy 12:2-4), not merely from their worship of Him. Moreover, the New Testament teaches that a Christian’s life is to be one of worshipping and honoring God in all we do (I Peter 4:11).

We should see the things in which we participate in the context of bringing glory to Him. This does not mean we cannot have fun; God wants us to enjoy life. But our fun should not be independent of Him (see the principle in Ecclesiastes 11:9). All that we think, say, and do should be to the glory of God (I Corinthians 10:31)!

No true Christian in good conscience would want to be someone’s Valentine, and he certainly would not wish someone a “Happy Valentine’s Day!” We must speak the truth in godly love (Ephesians 4:15), not carnal lust. In its fleshly and sensual practices, Valentine’s Day falls far short of “worship[ping] the Father in spirit and truth.”