Without a doubt, the holiday that consistently provokes the most misplaced ire for Christians is Halloween. If you know anything about me, you know that I unfathomably adore this day and the month in which it is spookily ensconced, but holy moly, all the sanctimonious hand-wringing steals the fun out of the season. So, that it may become clear that Halloween and the love of all things spooky is based and not cringe, I humbly present the following five theses on Halloween for disputation.
1. Behold, I tell you a mystery: October 31st is not a harvest festival, which is a vastly more pagan idea than Halloween ever was — and don’t let modern pagans tell you otherwise. Pagans usually omit the glaring fact that their practices are contemporary reconstructions from fragmentary (often at best) evidence and more like LARPing than real devotion. And while it is Reformation Day, get real: people don’t trick-or-treat because Martin Luther posted 95 fire comments at the porchway to the castle church. Come on now. That trail was already blazed by Dark Age hoodrats filled with the Spirit and filled with the spooks.
2. Halloween accords with a theologia crucis in pulling popular norms of goodness, beauty, and truth up short. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is no stranger to darkness, death, and dismay: he has made his home in the midst of the things vulgar theology believes is below him. The devil, conversely, routinely shows up and shows off as an angel of light, fooling everyone who thinks they know what God is like because they ignore what God is like.
Given this, Halloween unmasks the normalcy of the other eleven months of the year as sham godliness, fake piety, and self-indulgent hope that this is the best of all possible worlds. It isn’t. It’s just the world we are given, and its weirdness is part of its goodness and wonder.
3. Halloween shows us that identity isn’t as fixed and intractable as we portray it. We enthusiastically abandon the versions of ourselves we present to the world and think are who we are to take on another name, another reputation, another set of signifiers. Whatever we may, through the filter of ideology, say to the contrary, something within us chafes at the rigidification of identity and on one day a year many of us don’t feel something fundamental is threatened when we stop being “ourselves” and act out being another person.
4. Halloween shows us that the impulse to be something wilder, more chaotic, perhaps even more manifestly evil, than who we are the rest of the year doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. This is what we always are and for the most part we have to pretend to be otherwise. What always makes people afraid here is they assume saying this amounts to endorsing these appetites and drives, but this really isn’t the case.
Repression doesn’t aid holiness: it makes it impossible. We don’t help ourselves by denying that this or that desire exists. Deception only begets more deception, and if we pretend an inclination that exists doesn’t we won’t be prepared or honest enough to withstand and sublimate temptation. Moreover, dressing up as Michael Meyers doesn’t lead to actually murdering people any more than dressing up as a witch leads to actual witchcraft. Of course not! It simply testifies to how we are not the innocents we make ourselves out to be the other 364 days of the year. And if you insist that you are, it will call you a liar to your face and demand more candy!
5. Halloween shows us what death looks like, and this is good for a secular culture that lives and spends in denial of death as well as for a church culture that sanitizes death and pretends it is only salvation and rest. It is this, for faith, but never only this, as death never stops being repugnant and fearful. On Good Friday the death of Jesus takes center stage, but what about pondering our own demise? Christians too often pretend death is rendered not-horrendous because of Jesus’ triumph but we simply are not telling the truth when we portray it this way. Halloween, however, calls a thing what it is: it’s nasty, it’s grim, but it’s also kind of fascinating. And if you think any fascination of this sort whatsoever is unsaintly, well, take another gander at Thesis 4 and then let’s talk about what you stopped to look at for too long this week!
A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil, because it doesn’t move beyond the immediately sensible, the immediately pleasant and nice. When it sees the cross it cannot call it good even though God is there, and when it sees the antiseptic, anodyne facade that we uncritically accept as “real life” it calls it nice and wholesome even though God is not in it. A theology of glory, then, cannot but call Halloween evil, the work of and celebration of the Devil, because it’s just so un-nice. And accordingly they will not taste and see that Halloween is good.
You will see devils this Halloween, but this time does not belong to him. You will see skeletons and devices of death, but Halloween gives life. You will see villains this Halloween because some will simply admit what is beneath all of our everyday pretenses. And if you have eyes to see, you will recognize how Halloween drives us away from repression and denial and instead provides a sanctioned and sanctified time to resist the dreariness of “normalcy” by making light of what scares us.
For all the rancor over Spooky Season, I humbly submit that Halloween is in fact a Christian holiday. Here I stand, trick-or-treat bucket in hand, I can do no other. God help me and happy Halloween!
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Ian, friend, this is a masterfully written article! You provide a thought-provoking apologia for Halloween and your prose contains both humor and gravitas. Impeccable timing with this piece too! Thanks for giving me and other spooky saints a resource that we can refer to when defending our love of all things scary.