halloween...

Many Christians find themselves asking the question...is it okay if I participate in Halloween, or to what extent can I participate? Here is an interesting article, read it and then think about it...then make your decision, you might find that it will change. Remember we are to glorify God in all we do.

""Everything is permissible"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible"—but not everything is constructive." ---1 Corinthians 10:23

Halloween for Christians?

Gregory Koukl

Find out what Greg thinks about celebrating Halloween. How does this differ from Christmas and Easter?

Halloween is coming up in a few days and I always get a spate of calls on that weekend from people who want to know if they should let their children participate in Halloween or not.

I actually have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, this is a bit of genuine Americana. It's part of our heritage, the culture we grew up in. It's not really seen as a religious thing anymore. Never was, really, by Americans, at least. It started out that way, apparently, in Europe, and a lot of things associated with Halloween - the occult themes, the Jack-o-lanterns, the costumes, the trick-or-treating, the giving of candy - all of these seem to have their origins in occult rituals of the past, many going back to the ancient Celts in Great Britain. So many Christians are, understandably, uncomfortable with the notion of letting their children participate.

Yet at the same time this is a holiday kids really look forward to. I did. In fact, I used to keep my candy all the way through to Easter, or longer. I'd just nurse it along, hang onto it, hide it away, and nibble on it forever. I especially looked forward to those great places, and we knew the houses that give you real, full-sized candy bars. Not just the puny wrapped candy bar chunks. You know what I mean, the real McCoy. Boy, we loved that kind of stuff.

Apparently, all the rumors of razor blades in apples and poisoned candy all that stuff, statistically doesn't actually happen much. It was a big fear in the past, but I think it might have been an urban legend, but it's not a concern today. That kind of thing almost never happens.

So someone might say, "Look, I had a great time with Halloween when I was a kid. I have great memories. It was a chance to get my hands on some great candy our family couldn't afford. And it was fun walking through the neighborhood with the other kids. Why should I rob my kids of that experience? It seems cruel to punish our kids for some empty religious superstition. What do I tell my neighbors? When I say, 'I'm not going to let my kids celebrate that occult holiday,' I start looking some kind of a nut. And your kids are looking up at you asking, 'Why do you take all the fun out of life?'"

I guess that I would have to say that I'm somewhat middle of the road on this issue. But I have to clarify what I mean by that.

On the one hand, there are a lot of holidays we celebrate now, like Christmas in December, that are holidays linked on the calendar with some pagan event. Christmas corresponded with the saturnalia, a pagan holiday.

The Church has had a habit over the years of flourishing in pagan environments by robbing the pagans of their holidays, in a sense, and investing them with new religious content. Frankly, I think that's a great idea. By the way, the Jews did the same thing with circumcision. The Egyptians practiced it for other reasons before them. God Himself gave it a new circumcision application.

I was trained as a missionary and I've been in a number of different countries doing missionary work in one capacity or another. One of the things that we learned is that it is a good idea to take a cultural form that is meaningful to the people, strip it of its negative content, its religiously offensive elements, and invest it with Christian value and Christian meaning.

The book Peace Child by Don Richardson, is a great example of that. Richardson used a cultural form, the concept of the "peace child," as a springboard for the gospel. He used it with the aboriginal people in Irian Jaya to communicate truth about the gospel and to bring them to Christ in a way he never would have been able to do otherwise. This is called a redemptive analogy. In fact, it really was the turning point, the thing that opened that tribe up to Christ.

Now you¹re asking, "How can that be done with an occult holiday like Halloween?" I'm not sure that there is a way we can capture Halloween as a way of communicating the gospel, per se. But certainly it seems possible to me for us to capture the date and use aspects of the celebrations that are not a problem for Christianity, say, celebrating with a party with the kids and dressing up in costumes, getting candy and having fun. I'm fully open to that. I don't believe that just because kids celebrate with costumes on October 31st they're participating in something evil.

By the way, did you know that October 31 is Reformation Day? See, there's all kinds of things you can celebrate on that day and not be involved in the occult. On October 31st in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the University Church in Wittenberg, Germany. That was "officially" the beginning of the Reformation, though there were lots of things happening prior to that that led up to the Reformation.

So, you can celebrate Reformation Day on October 31st, and I guess in Lutheran churches around the country you'll have people singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" and "Onward Christian Soldiers" and all those great Lutheran hymns.

But even if you're not Lutheran, I think that there is a legitimacy to robbing the pagans of Halloween, so to speak. But we have to be careful.

There is a difference, I think, between celebrating on Halloween night in some "sanctified" sense, and celebrating Christmas or Easter.

All three of them are associated in some way with pagan holidays. Jesus wasn't born on December 25. It's not His birthday. He was probably born some time in the spring. I don't even know if He rose from the dead in the spring around the time of Easter. But that's inconsequential. We're celebrating the event, not the date.

The date is meant to coincide with the dates of the other pagan holidays to give an alternative for those pagan holidays. When we put up a Christmas tree and we give presents to each other, there is a different meaning for us than when they celebrated the saturnalia in pagan rituals in the past. We have invested entirely new meaning to the day.

The same with Easter. I am not at all bothered by giving Easter eggs, although I understand people used to do Easter eggs as a fertility ritual with a bunny rabbit. But that's not what we're about. We're celebrating the resurrection of Christ and the eggs are somewhat incidental.

But Halloween is different because it's not a Christian celebration on a pagan holiday. It's actually a pagan event itself. Therefore, I don't think I would send my kids out trick or treating and I'll tell you why. In Halloween there is a participation not just in the date, but in the specific forms of the pagan enterprise. Virtually all the ghoulish kinds of things that are represented and playfully celebrated on Halloween represent something occult, and I am not comfortable with that.

The second thing is that one wonders why it is that many people in our culture simply do not take the occult seriously. It strikes me it may be that we spend one evening a year going out of our way making light of the occult, and that might have something to do with it. So you ask people about Satan and they say, "That's the guy with the red tights and the pitchfork, right?" They don't realize that Satan is a real, powerful spiritual force that makes a difference in the lives of people and in the lives of nations every single day. It's hard to take the devil seriously when we picture him this way. So a celebration of Halloween in that fashion I think makes light of the occult, and when that happens people take lightly a very serious and dangerous thing.

So where's the balance? Here's what I suggest. I'll tell you what I would do with my kids on Halloween. I'd have a celebration of some kind. Frankly, many churches have them and they call them Harvest Celebrations. They have a place where you can bring the children dressed up in costumes with the only limitation that there are no occult themes. The kids go walk from booth to booth competing in games, some invented and constructed by members of the church. It's not classic carnival stuff where you knock down the bottles and you get a prize or something. It's different, usually, more creative. The church spends a couple of weeks preparing for it and building the booths and it's a lot of fun. It's fun for the family. You can get your kids' pictures are taken on a bale of hay, and when you go from booth to booth, the kids get candy or something to fill their bags with. You get all the good stuff in a very wholesome environment and none of the nasty stuff. Perfect.

By the way, you don't have to be a Christian to attend these. Usually the churches that do these affairs make them wide open to the community. This gives an added advantage to Harvest Parties because there are folks not associated with Christianity who are just a little uncomfortable with Halloween, who also want to find a place to take their kids where it's safe and wholesome. This gives the opportunity for people who aren't normally involved with church to mix with Christians and possibly hear something that they hadn't heard before that Jesus cares for them, and that He has forgiveness for their sins, and that they can lead a new life with Him.

Sure, in some cultures harvest celebrations were a time of thanking pagan gods. But that doesn't matter. You can thank God without thanking the "gods." You can have a Harvest Celebration and thank the true Lord of the Harvest, the one who actually provided the earth, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the rain, and the wind, and the seeds, and all of the harvest that you get from what He has given you.