Checkmate Christians
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Many Christians don’t care, but the ones that do aren’t so concerned about the origins but rather the substance of what is being celebrated.
Fear, horror, violence, murder, suicide, resentment, revenge, paganism, witchcraft, sorcery, superstition, the occult, demons, monsters… these things are all associated with Halloween. For a non-believer these are just silly bits of fanciful fiction but for a Christian these things are very real and very evil.
For a Christian, seeing these things celebrated is like grandparents who escaped from Stalinist Russia seeing their grandchildren supporting communism. You know they’re doing it out of naive ignorance and they don’t actually have a clue what they’re supporting, but it grieves your heart to see them supporting it nonetheless.
My understanding is that the festival tradition of dressing up originally developed as a way to scare away any evil spirits and hide behind masks to avoid them, not to celebrate them. Now it's been taken over by non-Christians, so no one remembers the original festival.
One Halloween in the early 2000's I was at Lake Como in Italy and the Halloween parade consisted of people largely dressed normally, carrying candles through the town while distributing candy to the kids, and ended up in the church itself for midnight mass. Some people in costume joined in, but the main thing was the walk to the church.
After all it is All Hallows' Eve. It's not a super important day for Catholics. The next day and the day after that are far more important days to them. November 1st, which is All Saints Day and especially November 2nd, which is The Feast of All Souls. The three days together are known as Allhallowtide and all three are holy days of obligation.
All Souls is such an important feast in Catholicism that one of the early colleges at Oxford, for example, was called All Souls, founded in the 1438 (its full name is The College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed). Back when they named organisations and institutions they valued in ways they thought would bless all who would be involved with it.
Even then, I think there's something to making light of such imagery so it doesn't control us. A Skeleton is a fairly morbid thing, when you really think about what it is. But nowadays, we associate them with goofy monsters and cartoony rattling. It takes some of the bite out of mortality and helps you relax.
That's not to say that you should treat darkness and evil like a toy, but a designated time of year to think about spooky things and defang them seems like a healthy thing overall. Especially going into the winter months when life was at it's most dangerous back in the day.
Fair point. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to have lighthearted fun with spooky stuff, but most people have no idea what they’re dealing with so they can take it way too far.
Gruesome stories of murder and torture, spirits of the dead, demons, witchcraft. These aren’t things that should be taken lightly like skeletons or the typical depiction of ghosts (essentially flying bed sheets). People who feel at ease with or even fascinated by such things may find no problem engaging with them further.
Like many things, girls are particularly susceptible to these things. Many young girls and even women find witchcraft and curses and all types of superstitions fascinating and exciting. There’s a reason why there’s a cottage industry of astrology, fortune telling and mediums all oriented towards women. More women than you would expect get into paganism and witchcraft these days. Unfortunately, when it comes to many slippery slopes, women are the first to begin sliding.
Back to your point though, I don’t think spooky fun is necessarily bad, but as a Christian I just want to avoid anything that glorifies such things, especially to children.