Our uncomfortable Carnival choices

Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival, the so-called Greatest Show on Earth, is often described as the nation’s most honest mirror. In it, we see our creativity, resilience, humour, and communal joy. But we also see excess, distortion, and the quiet surrender of meaning to money and spectacle.

Once again, this Sunday’s Gospel passage is so timely, offering a sharp lens through which to view that tension. Jesus does not abolish the law; He deepens it. He insists that faith is not about technical compliance but about the orientation of the heart.

That challenge is uncomfortably relevant to our Carnival.

Our national festival began as resistance and remembrance. It was a space where the formerly enslaved reclaimed dignity, mocked power, preserved African rhythms and asserted freedom through art. Its traditions—mas, Calypso, steelpan—were never morally neutral, but they were purposeful. They spoke to history, identity, and communal survival.

Over time, however, the festival has been aggressively commercialised and hyper sexualised. What was once expression is now product. What was once playful satire is often reduced to vulgar display. The question is no longer whether Carnival is sacred or profane, but whether we are willing to tell the truth about what we have allowed it to become.

Jesus’ words in the Gospel cut past surface behaviour. “Anyone who looks lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart.” This is not prudishness; it is moral realism.

Carnival culture increasingly normalises the reduction of the human body—especially the female body—to an object for consumption. That has consequences, particularly for our impressionable boys and girls, who learn values long before they can articulate them.

When hyper-sexualised imagery or an item in a masquerader’s gift bag is presented as harmless adult “fun”, and dissent from religious leaders and the faithful is categorically dismissed as “backward” or “anti-culture”, we are teaching lessons whether we admit it or not.

Ethical cost

Matthew’s Gospel also warns against a shallow righteousness. “If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.” Translated into our context, this challenges the hypocrisy of celebrating “we culture” while ignoring its ethical cost.

It’s easy to defend Carnival as “tradition” while refusing to ask what kind of people it is forming. It’s easy to speak of “freedom” while quietly accepting exploitation, coercive marketing, and the sexualisation as collateral damage.

Jesus’ insistence on integrity—“Let your ‘Yes’ be yes and your ‘No’ be no”—demands clarity.

We cannot claim to value children while exposing them indiscriminately to adult content. We cannot claim to honour our women—International Women’s Day is but three weeks away—while building an economy around their objectification, with women’s blind participation in their own exploitation.

And we cannot claim “cultural pride” while outsourcing meaning to sponsors, alcohol brands and imported aesthetics that hollow out local art.

Maintaining Carnival’s traditions without succumbing to its ugliest distortions requires deliberate choices.

It means drawing boundaries, not out of fear, but out of responsibility.

It means investing in mas, music and storytelling that are imaginative rather than explicit.

It means adults accepting that not everything labelled “Carnival” is appropriate for every space.

Last Sunday’s Gospel (Mt 5:13–16) called on Christians to be salt and light. Jesus doesn’t call for withdrawal from the world, but for conversion within it.

Carnival doesn’t need to be abolished. It needs to be completed—reconnected to purpose, restraint and truth. Without that, our national festival risks becoming exactly what Christ warned against: outwardly vibrant, but inwardly empty. Santimanitay.