I don’t believe Christians have to avoid Halloween - darkness has no power to harm us

It was one year ago today that I read an article on Woman Alive about Halloween. It was written by the lovely Lizzie Hutchison and it sparked me to want to pen the Halloween article for the next year. Request logged and now, here we are. It’s that time again. The original article was generally sane and balanced. But what caught my eye was a phrase in the subtitle (which was almost certainly not written by Lizzie, but by one of the editors). It said: “How she navigated the non-Christian event [italics mine] as a Christian woman.”

Non-Christian event? Halloween is, as the name implies, the eve of the Christian festival of All Hallows, or All Saints, after which hundreds of churches are named, and which has been celebrated by the Church since time immemorial. You know, the festival on which we sing that gorgeous stirring hymn For All the Saints, which is so good we really ought to sing it more than once a year. 

I think this “festival” much derided by Christians, has something basic to say about human nature and human fears.

True, in recent decades, and especially under American influence, Halloween has turned into a sort of secular “Dia de los Muertes”, a “Day of the Dead” in which children and adolescents dress up in spooktacular costumes and take the opportunity to collect some sweets at the same time. The thing is, I think this “festival” much derided by Christians, has something basic to say about human nature and human fears. And I think we, as Christians, have the perfect answer.

It is natural to fear death, and even more to fear the return of the dead in some scary and powerful form. Therefore it is natural to find ways to mock death by donning skeleton costumes or zombie masks, thus taking away its terrifying power. But we Christians have the ultimate reason to mock death, because it, “the last enemy”, has been defeated in the Resurrection of Jesus. Nor need we fear any power of the dead to harm us, since we know they are sleeping in the care of God till the great Day of Resurrection when they will all be raised to eternal life or to final destruction.

 It is natural to find ways to mock death by donning skeleton costumes or zombie masks, thus taking away its terrifying power. 

If therefore, we recoil in horror at Halloween high jinks, and live in terror that they could induce evil spirits to come and live in ourselves or our children, are we not denying the good news of resurrection, and instead remaining in the fear of death from which Christ has liberated us? Surely when our friends hold Halloween parties for their children, or take them trick-or-treating (and children should never go trick-or-treating unaccompanied), we should seek to re-Christianize what was originally a Christian festival, and ask those deeper questions that it addresses: are we afraid of death? Why should we be? Why shouldn’t we be? Let’s make Halloween an occasion not to avoid our fears with “light parties”, but to confront them in the name of Christ. The darkness has no power to harm us. Let’s dress up, if we want, as ghouls, along with our friends, and laugh at death, because it is already defeated.