Halloween is On Our Side

The picture above is not a picture of me celebrating Halloween. But here on the right is a picture of me not celebrating Halloween when I was 10ish. Because only pagans celebrate Halloween. Christians do Fall Festivals, “A Christ-centered alternative to Halloween.”*

But I contend that Christians should celebrate Halloween. In fact, I think Christians should absolutely dominate Halloween.

Before we move to why, I want to very briefly address the common arguments for why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Halloween so that when I get to my reasons, you aren’t all “But what about . . .” the whole time.

Argument #1: Many from my past argued that Halloween “comes out of paganism.” But that sounds a little inconsistent since Christmas and Easter both “come out of paganism” as well. Why do we still get to celebrate Easter with bunnies (a symbol of fertility based on the ancient pagan rituals) but can’t dress up on Halloween?

Argument #2: There are others who would argue that we should not celebrate Halloween because “it celebrates evil.” The problem with this is that Halloween is not a person. “It” doesn’t celebrate anything. The reason we are okay with celebrating Easter and Christmas, even though they are based on pagan festivals, is because the ancient Church just changed the meaning of the holiday. Holidays don’t “mean” anything; they have different meanings for different people.

If you are a Christian, Christmas means something to your Christianity. But if you are not a Christian, Christmas means something completely different. I do not own the calendar. If people want to celebrate family on the day that I celebrate the birth of Jesus they are allowed. There is no “objective” meaning to Christmas (as evidenced by the fact that December 25 was not chosen because it was the date that Jesus was actually born as well as the fact that it wasn’t celebrated for the first several centuries of the Church), it is a cultural phenomenon. I celebrate it because it means something to me. This also means, on the “opposite” end, as holidays go, there is no “objective” meaning to Halloween. I am free to celebrate it however I wish. If I am a Christian, I will celebrate it Christianly. If I am a pagan, I will celebrate it paganly. If I am a kid, I will probably celebrate it with candy.

But my main point is not just that Christians should “tolerate” Halloween. Instead of giving our kids the uneasy “okay” to visit our neighbors to ask for candy — as long as they dress up like Jesus/Peter/Noah/Jonah/David (see above – most Bible character costumes look exactly the same), we should be the champions of Halloween.

I say this based on one idea: the primary enemy of Christianity in our culture is no longer other religions but a lack of imagination.** 

What worries me more than that my kids end up sacrificing rabbits to Satan is that they will grow up without imagination; the inability to see “the possibility of another world.” Along with the beauty of science often comes a mindset of cold determinism where mystery is something to be attacked and eradicated, not celebrated. A worldview where there is nothing more to love than firing neurons and chemical imbalances. That all there is to poetry is the evolution of language.

For me, Halloween is the celebration of the possible. For one day we get to live in a world where orcs and hobbits exist, where The Force is real and evil will one day be vanquished. The entire culture gets reminded that maybe not everything in our lives can be explained away and controlled.

And if this is true, then Halloween is on our side.

As Christians, we meet weekly to remind ourselves that the world of “what we see” is not the world “of all there is.” But the broader culture has no such meetings. Halloween is the one day our culture is allowed to be imaginative without being called naïve, to put away our skepticism and pretend to believe.

Yes, as Christians we should be some of the biggest supporters of Halloween, believing on behalf of an unbelieving culture what a growing number of us only reluctantly admit from time to time: that maybe, just maybe, our story really is bigger and better than meets the eye.

*If you still aren’t convinced, please feel free to use this as your tagline for your Fall Festival posters.

** Which ironically, many Christians suffer from as well.