The Need for Halloween

 

A recent YouTube panel had three women debating whether Christians should celebrate Hallowe’en.

The Protestant panelist of course saw it all as the work of the devil. The puritans used to think the same of Christmas. 

But even the Catholic and Orthodox panelists thought that paganism had taken over the holiday; that children should stop going around dressed as demons, and should instead dress as saints. We needed as Christians, they said, to “reclaim the holiday.”

This sounds perfectly delusional to me. It illustrates how easy it is for people to go mad in groups. It is as Scott Adams, or Goebbels, says: if enough people say the same thing often enough, it becomes generally accepted as truth.

The idea that the feast and its traditions is pagan has become so ingrained that people stop seeing the evidence of their eyes.

Do children currently go around dressed as demons? I did a mental inventory of the demons who showed up at my door last Friday. There was Captain America. The Three Little Pigs. A dog. A cat. A clown with a scythe. Venom, a villain from Marvel. A skeleton. A girl wearing a pink suit and tie. Stitch from Lilo and Stitch.

Where were the demons? I saw no demons.

Actually, what would a demon even look like? I guess a red suit, horns and a tail.

I checked an online store selling Halloween costumes. “halloweencostumes.ca” Halloween Costumes for Adults and Kids | HalloweenCostumes.ca

First row of images: Alice in Wonderland. Superheroes. Transformers.

Second row: Star Wars. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 1940s-era suits and ties. A skeleton for “décor.”

If this is supposed to be about demons, a lot of people are missing the plot.

But it is supposed to be about demons. That is the Christian message. But there is nothing pagan about that, and it has nothing to do with demon worship. Any more than you go to a horror movie to root for the ghoul.

Halloween is supposed to remind you of death and the dangers of hell. Because, I suppose, actual thoughts of hell and death are too scary, that has morphed it into “something scary”; movie monsters and fairy tale witches were substituted. And when even that seemed too scary, it has morphed into just dressing up in a costume.

Dressing up as saints would be the final betrayal of the true meaning of Halloween. 

This euphemistic objection that Halloween is “pagan” is another case of the ostrich philosophy; of “happy happy joy joy” Christianity. It is based on a desire to deny that death, hell, and demons exist. If I deny sin, then God will not punish me. If I do not think of death, I will never die.

This is in a sense the original sin. Eating the fruit was inevitable. We were meant to have free will, and to know good and evil. The Fall became irreversible when Adam and Eve hid in the bushes.

Let us be clear here: you cannot be a Christian, and you cannot be saved, if you only believe that God exists, and not the Devil.