What Does the Bible Say About Valentine’s Day?

The New Testament of the Bible mentions saints around 100 times, depending on the version you’re reading. However, the term typically refers to Christians or the church, rather than a specific saint, according to the online Christian resource Got Questions Ministries. Although this might be why the namesake of St. Valentine’s Day is not mentioned in the Bible, the religious ties to the February holiday are even more complicated.

St. Valentine is not mentioned in the Bible, but there is a special prayer that was to be said on his feast day, says Elizabeth White Nelson, an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the author of Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in 19th-Century America.

Pope Gelasius I established February 14 as the feast of St. Valentine in A.D. 496. What we now know as Valentine’s Day had nothing to do with lovers or cards back then. Instead, it was an occasion to honor the martyrdom of St. Valentine. (One modern misconception is that the feast was meant to be a Christian-centered version of the Roman festival Lupercalia, though there’s little evidence to support this.)

“St. Valentine once upon a time was a serious Christian figure in the Catholic Church,” Nelson explains, adding that his importance hasn’t translated to today.

In 1969, the Catholic Church removed the feast of St. Valentine from its calendar. The move followed the 1963 issuance of the Sacrosanctum Concilium, or the Second Vatican Council’s constitution, that called for the church to only recognize the feasts of saints “who are truly of universal importance.” As the Christian news outlet Aleteia has reported, it’s possible that confusion about St. Valentine’s true identity led to his feast’s removal.

Meanwhile, the Anglican Church kept St. Valentine as a revered figure after the Reformation. Nelson explains that decision could have been fueled by the holiday. “We wanted it to have a long, important history,” Nelson says. “That’s why we like the story of the saint.”

In England, Valentine’s Day eventually got embroiled in the ongoing power struggle between the Anglican and Catholic churches. It was even called into question whether Christians should be allowed to celebrate it given that one Valentine’s tradition of the era was drawing lots—essentially fortune-telling—which many Christians consider unsavory, Nelson explains.

Even among Christians, Valentine’s Day is now typically celebrated in the modern, commercial way—with cards and flowers—rather than as a religious holiday.

Medieval poetry, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Parliament of Fowls” from the early 1380s, is the first time St. Valentine’s Day is associated with love. Chaucer wrote of birds choosing their mates on the holiday, which fell at the start of spring according to the medieval calendar.

Over time, Valentine’s Day became a folk holiday celebrated in rural English communities. By the 1660s, the well-known London diarist Samuel Pepys recorded a celebration of St. Valentine’s Day in the city, indicating the romantic holiday was becoming more widespread. Sending cards and other modern traditions didn’t take root until the emergence of the middle class in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Nelson explains.

“Is it a Christian holiday? Honestly, no,” Nelson says. “Christians sometimes claim it in a really general cultural way, [but] I don’t think it’s ever a religious holiday [today].”