Is Halloween just innocent fun, or a spiritual nightmare?

UnHalloween
Pastor Larry L. Long

I don’t like Halloween; it bothers me that so many Christians apparently do.

Now I have to tell you that admitting this is not easy. It embarrasses me when I end up saying the very things I used to mock when I was younger. It means I have to admit I was wrong, which is just as hard for me to do as it is for you.

Such is the case with what I now have to say about Halloween. Others have said it before me and I always thought them silly, out of touch, and overblown. But now that I am getting older (and dare I say a bit wiser?), I find myself agreeing with the very people I used to dismiss so easily. Now that’s scary!

Why this change of heart? It’s because I’ve come to understand that Halloween is a religious holiday with spiritual entanglements that stand opposed to the Christian worldview.

Unfortunately, I’ve also come to understand that few people (even few Christians!) share my perspective—most view Halloween as nothing more than harmless fun. How else does one explain the time, effort, and money that so many people put into decorating their houses and faces with evil-evoking images such as ghosts, witches, and demons? More significantly, how else do you explain the fact that our public schools (normally fastidious watch-dogs against all intrusions of Christianity by word or symbol in their unhallowed halls) often have no qualms about pasting up the evil and irreligious symbols of Halloween? How has it come to be that the Wiccan religion of witches, ghosts, and demons is more welcome in our public schools than the Christian religion?

Now I suspect that the reason why so many don’t see Halloween the way I do is because they don’t really know what it’s all about—or they just don’t care. Perhaps this is because the historical background of Halloween is both good and bad.

The word Halloween, for example, means holy (hallow) eve (een). It refers to the night before All Saints Day when many Christians traditionally remember the dead in Christ who have gone before them. Just as Christmas Eve is the holy night before the holy day (holiday) of Christmas, so Halloween—for those who celebrate All Saints Day—is the holy night before the holy day. As is the case with several other Christian holidays, however, an element of paganism has been introduced to make Halloween an unholy eve. The technical name for this is syncretism. It refers to an unfortunate method of evangelism widely used by the early church as it expanded into the pagan cultures of the world.

Take Christmas and Easter, for example. Christmas has its mistletoe and yule logs; Easter has its egg-laying bunnies and newborn chicks. Most Christians are unaware that these symbols of the holiday have nothing at all to do with the Christian meaning of these events, being instead symbols found in the pagan religious celebrations of the first millennium. As the Holy Roman Empire conquered surrounding nations and cultures, these symbols of pagan religious significance were simply borrowed from the pagan cultures and attached to the Christian holidays in an attempt to Christianize the pagans. For better or worse, they have pretty much become a part of Christmas and Easter, without most Christians being the wiser. In the end they have probably done more to paganize Christians than Christianize pagans. This has convinced some Christians to forgo the holidays altogether, which I think is unnecessary.

In a similar but much more sinister way, the same thing happened to Halloween. For while the joining together of the pagan and the Christian at Halloween may not differ in kind from that done at Christmas and Easter, it most certainly does differ by degree. The pagan side of Halloween is obviously and unabashedly evil, and this is the side so widely celebrated in our society today.

This fixation on evil was present from the beginning when All Hallow’s Eve was incorporated into the Celtic festival of Sambain, which was a pagan festival celebrated on October 31. Revelers believed this night to be a time when the souls of the dead were supposed to revisit their homes. It reflected a very sinister worldview of haunting ghosts, spell-casting witches, hobgoblins, black cats, fairies, and demons of all kinds. The evening was believed to be the most favorable time of the year to contact the supernatural forces of the underworld through divination. It was the only time when it was considered acceptable to do so.

Thirty years ago, when I was a kid, none of this seemed to matter much. The only time I remember dressing up in something “scary” was the year my mother ruined several bed sheets by cutting them into strips so that I could be wrapped like a mummy. Talk about a neat costume! I think that was the same year Ray Martinez came to school dressed like a gangster—real cigar and all! He got to keep the cigar as part of the costume because it was wrapped in plastic (can’t imagine that happening today, eh?). Before day’s-end, however, the plastic was off and Ray—sick as a dog—had to go home. It all seemed like innocent enough fun at the time. Many religious groups even held Halloween parties and sponsored “haunted houses” as fund-raisers.

Maybe we were just naïve back then. Maybe we just didn’t understand then what we understand today. Maybe too our understanding of evil was a bit more innocent (if that’s possible). But whatever Halloween used to be, it is time to wake up and realize that evil has “come out of the closet.”

Halloween has now become a blatant celebration (and perhaps even for some a glorification) of all that is evil and sinister, grotesque and ugly. Our “innocence” has been lost. For now we see on the nightly news the reality behind the mask, and it scares us—or at least it should. Chainsaw massacres, satanic rituals, occult slayings, cannibalistic murders—the make-believe of Halloween has become all too real.

Perhaps that’s why the Halloweens of old seemed so innocent. We had forgotten (or at least we were better able to ignore) the reality of evil that lay behind them. Little Johnny dressed up like a devil—red tail, horns, pitchfork, and all—was nothing but cute. Never mind the fact that the devil is real and is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for some little Johnny to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Never mind the fact that gangsters rape, murder, and steal. Never mind the fact that witches and Satanists work their black magic to summon, if not the dead, then the devil himself.

Am I overreacting? I once would have thought so, but now I am convinced that there is a concerted effort to make Satanism not only acceptable but even attractive to our world today, and especially to our youth. Some years ago, for example, my wife and I rented a Scooby-Doo video for our girls. I well remembered the innocent fun of those cartoons and how the heroes unmasked the bad guys and all the superstitions that enabled them to do their evil deeds. That’s what I thought we were renting for our girls.

Unfortunately, what we got instead was a highly propagandized video with the message that the Wiccan religion is not about witchcraft at all; rather, it’s about holistic healing, which was presented as a good thing. Needless to say, I was horrified to know that most children don’t know enough to know better, and most parents probably don’t either. And you don’t need to rent a video to bring this kind of deception into your home. This same “good witch” teaching abounds in books like Harry Potter, and on TV programs like Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, and even Bewitched, which most of us watched when we were kids.

That’s not even the worst of it. Back when my oldest daughter was in Kindergarten she came home with a homework assignment that read:

Dear Parent(s):

Today we talked about why it is important to listen. We read a story about a good witch called Strega Nona and her helper Big Anthony. Big Anthony was not a very good listener.

Ask your child to retell the story he/she heard today and what happened to Big Anthony.

As a Christian parent and minister whose life is dedicated to proclaiming the truth about good and evil, I was more than a little taken-a-back. A “good witch?!” Is there really such a thing? Or is this just another example of a politically correct oxymoron being subtly shoved down our throats? I happen to know a little something about witches and witchcraft, and a “good witch” I have never met. How does one even know which witch is which?

So, what’s the big deal? Well, if there is no such thing as real witches, or if in fact there could be such a thing as a “good witch,” then nothing is wrong with it (just as there would be nothing wrong with Halloween). But according to the Bible, which I believe is true, there is such a thing as real witches, but they are never good (cf. Deut. 18:10; 2 Chr. 33:6; Acts 13:6-10; and Gal. 5:20).

So let me ask you: What place do Christians have being involved with such activities, even if done as “innocent fun?” Evil is serious business. It should never be toyed with; by doing so we run the risk of taking its deadly reality too lightly. To me the potential spiritual harm of playing with Halloween is a lot like playing with a gun. Even when we “know for sure” the gun isn’t loaded, most of us have sense enough not to point it at someone, even if in jest. Too many accidents have happened to remind us that “empty” guns can kill. Carelessness can set in, and it only takes a second for someone dear to be dead.

In the same way, Halloween is loaded with too much deadly reality to be taken so lightly.