Holiday Hysteria (a Christian defense of Halloween)

Catholic Exchange ^ | October 31, 2008 | Rod Bennett

[NYer]

Today is Halloween — and, as you may have noticed, many of our Evangelical friends now shun America’s October spook festival altogether. They tell their children that Halloween is “the devil’s holiday” and that trick-or-treating is little better than dabbling with a Ouija board or consulting an astrologer.

Contemplating the Idea of Death

Though such extremism might seem odd or funny to many of us, it’s really, in one sense, quite admirable. If I thought Halloween was what they think it is, I’d keep my kids away from it, too — no matter how odd it might seem to others. But I’m afraid that if our separated brethren don’t stop for a moment and listen to some good old-fashioned Catholic wisdom on this subject, they’ll all be forced to become Jehovah’s Witnesses before long. And that, I think you’ll agree, would be terrible. Let’s try to spare them that fate, at least.

What exactly is Halloween all about?

Basically Halloween is our local manifestation of one of mankind’s oldest and most basic impulses: the impulse to contemplate — and even to celebrate — the idea of death during the fall of the year.

After all, the natural world itself dies in the autumn, and that death (along with our sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection for it next spring) has always set human beings to contemplating their own impending date with mortality. The pre-Christian world was positively overflowing with these local death festivals. Whether it was the turning of the leaves along the Danube or the first frost on the haystacks of Burgundy, the pagans who lived in Europe before the coming of Christianity found something driving them to tell ghost stories around the end of October, to dress in creepy costumes, and to build bonfires against a new (and not entirely unpleasant) chill in the air. In some places, dances were held to drive away evil spirits; in others, it was believed that the shades of departed loved ones might take a holiday from Hades on this particular night, and could turn up at your doorstep for a spooky reunion.

Inculturation Is an Old Tradition

Before too long however, Catholic missionaries went to Europe from the East and preached the Gospel of Jesus to these cheery, superstitious heathens. Their fiery crusades against pagan idolatry are the stuff of legend: they inspired their converts to chop down the sacred groves, to smash their idols, and to turn instead to the worship of the one true God, Who created heaven and earth. But these missionaries had another quality as well, an attribute that’s often glossed over in hostile secular accounts. That attribute was empathy.

These early missionaries actually liked the people they were converting. They liked their folkways, and their culture. They liked their music, their dances, and even their local death festivals — or liked, at any rate, everything about them that could be liked without compromising the faith. Interestingly enough, we know from history that Pope Gregory sent his missionaries out with explicit instructions that anything in the local culture which was not actually incompatible with Christianity was to be left strictly alone. Today, we call this approach “missionary inculturation,” and most of us have realized that it isn’t really necessary for a Bantu tribesman to put on a three-piece suit before we allow him to come to church. We may feel very enlightened when we take this approach today, but the truth is that the whole evangelization of Western Europe (325-1100 AD) was accomplished under this principle.

This is the real reason why many Christian holy days correspond to older festivals from the pre-existing pagan calendar. The Europeans, for example, had many cherished family traditions surrounding their winter solstice festivals, and so the Church allowed them to incorporate many of these customs (Christmas trees, etc.) into her nativity celebrations. Likewise, Easter was already a spring holy day for the pagans, devoted to the contemplation of rebirth, new life, and resurrection. It was only natural, then, that many of these ancient customs found themselves gaining new and deeper significance under the reign of Christ, the true God of springtime and fertility.

The pagan death festivals were superceded in just this way by two Christian holy days based on a similar theme — All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). The pagans found it natural to remember their departed loved ones at this time of the year, and the Church wisely allowed them to maintain continuity with the old ways. To say, however, that the Church merely “Christianized” the existing paganism is to miss the point badly. As St. Paul dramatically points out in his Epistle to the Romans, paganism already had a good deal of inchoate truth in it already. What the Church actually did was to gather up some of these inchoate truths, sift out what was patently unusable, and then point the pagans to the final fulfillment of their ancient longings as revealed in the faith of Christ.

An Echo-Holiday

And yet Halloween isn’t quite All Saints Day, is it? Or All Souls Day. What is it then?

You might say that Halloween is an “echo-holiday.” Halloween is to All Saints & All Souls Days as Mardi Gras is to Ash Wednesday — sort of their outlaw second cousin. Halloween is that part of the ancient death festivals which couldn’t quite be comfortably domesticated. It’s the part that still wants to run wild on the autumn winds, to soap windows and overturn outhouses. And yes, like Mardi Gras, this urge is difficult decently to restrain at times; the sowing of wild oats often produces crops that have to be reaped by the whirlwind. But just because a thing is subject to abuse doesn’t mean the thing itself is evil — a principle that our Evangelical friends have sometimes forgotten when the subject was wine, and we ourselves have often needed to be reminded of when the subject was sex.

Yet it isn’t the puritanical aspect of Evangelicalism that causes me to worry about a possible descent towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s the knee-jerk response that Halloween is to be feared solely because it has “pagan origins.” The truth is that a good deal of what all of us do every day has pagan origins. The mathematics we use has pagan origins; our form of government has pagan origins; the very letters with which this sentence is written have pagan origins. In fact, most of the churches from which these anti-paganism sermons issue are, architecturally speaking, Greek revival temples in the “neo-classical style.” So “pagan origins” alone isn’t quite enough to damn Halloween all by itself. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the great glories of Christianity that it does save and redeem and baptize pagan things — ourselves included!

Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, profess to despise everything associated with our pre-Christian past. They especially despise the practices of the Catholic Church that redeem various elements of that pre-Christian past. They teach their disciples to hate and fear all holy days and holidays alike, and will have nothing to do with either Christmas or Easter for precisely the same reasons that Evangelicals are now despising Halloween.

And this is the reason I have found it worthwhile to mount, from time to time, a Christian defense of Halloween. Because one day — perhaps not too long from now — my own friends and relatives are going to feel forced, by their own careless presuppositions, to drop the other shoe on all holidays, to spend December without Christmas, and springtime without Easter, to go to a ballgame and refuse to sing the National Anthem.

If you find, as I do, that such a prospect makes your skin crawl a little, I hope you’ll join me tonight in soaping a few windows or turning over an outhouse or two. For truth’s sake.

Happy Halloween!

[djrakowski]

Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong (or judgmental) if you tried. We’re simply freed from the un-Biblical concepts of sola scriptura and private interpretation, and have chosen not to see bogeymen where they don’t exist.

By legalism, I mean the evangelical tendency to add extra-Biblical proscriptions against harmless activities.

Visit my parish just one Sunday. Nearly every Sunday, we hear sermons on living in accordance with the will of Christ, including: instruction on chastity, generosity/serving the less fortunate, the incompatibility of abortion and ESCR with Christianity, how to care for our families in the manner described in the Bible, how to focus our attention on worship every moment of every day, the importance of accepting Christ as our personal Lord and savior, how to stand up for Christian values regardless of the values pushed by secular culture, repentance and turning away from evil, humility (and you’re accusing me of the opposite, even though I’ve not exalted myself in any way in this thread), the need for prayer before action (and not as a last resort), and so on.

And you know what? I heard the same sermons for nearly a decade as an evangelical. So you’re a bit off-base in your analysis.

[djrakowski]

No problem... I knew exactly what you meant!

[Philo-Junius]

Let me clean that up a bit: "What do you mean by “strictly on our own terms.”

We have to engage the world in debate where we find it. A festival originally celebrated by pagans has been reinterpreted in the context of Christianity, and is now being transformed into a deracinated fancy-dress party with occult overtones. Christians need to confront this head-on, which means remembering from where the occult overtones came, which was a perfectly understandable and pro-Christian association of fall with the death of nature into winter, prefiguring Christ's death and rebirth in the Spring.

This is the first problem with "Harvest festival" substitutes some evangelicals offer--the point of the holiday is not to congratulate ourselves on our good farming, it's to note that growth is ending, which in the past meant, for instance, the slaughter of all the yearlings not considered to be good breedstock.

Fall is shot through with intimations of death, and the Christian needs to speak directly to that. Trying to change the subject is a dodge. Hallowe'en is associated with death, and with our fears about those things which bring death.

It is a common folkway for tribes to act out their fears, which in northern Europe involve either surrogate demons or counter-demons, dressed to frighten away the evil spirits. Now, most Christians are prepared to concede the real existence of evil spirits, so, perhaps some might object under the principle of "speak of the devil and he will appear," but this isn't strictly scriptural is it?

Once we understand why the costumes exist--to protect the village from those things represented by the costumes, we have to be much more sympathetic to the folk drama being acted out. Trick-or-treating is not really understood then as a sacrifice to evil spirits, but rather a gift made to those who dare to confront the evil spirits.

Hallowe'en is too important to be left to children and materialists who want to sell them candy and costumes.

[demshateGod]

No, I’m a Baptist, which was the name given us by the Pope because we believed in scriptural Baptism of believers by immersion. We were persecuted by the Pope and the Protestants for that belief.

[netmilsmom]

>>If Catholics are Christians why do you make such a big deal about your Catholicism? As thankful as you are for being “led by the Spirit there” and all...

Take for example my identity is in Christ, my Baptism is in Christ, Ive died in Christ, etc. The Catholic church cant do any of those things for you...whats your hang up with Christianity?<<

We got a live one here!!!!

[djrakowski]

If you’re a Baptist (and I was a Baptist), then you’re a Protestant. There’s no way for you to avoid that appellation.

I hope you’re not getting your view of Christian history from “The Trail of Blood.” It would explain a lot about your posts, though.

[Philo-Junius]

Actually, Baptists were first called “anabaptists” because they wouldn’t baptise children. Baptists changed it to “Baptist,” to emphasise that they did indeed want to baptise people, but only after they had come to a satisfactory understanding why.

The Pope had nothing to do with either name, which were both handed to him post-facto from northern Europe.

[djrakowski]

Based on your “ping,” it looks like we’re thinking the same thing ;)

God bless ya, my FRiend. My 6-year old is dressed as a bumblebee for Halloween and I need to go home and take some pictures before she heads out.

[Petronski]

If Catholics are Christians why do you make such a big deal about your Catholicism?

Setting aside the ignorance of the "If?" question, Christ founded the Catholic Church. That is why it is a big deal: it's His Church.

whats your hang up with Christianity?

O good grief.

When did you stop beating your wife?

[netmilsmom]

The hubby wore a leather jacket and “stick on” eyebrow piercing to work! I’ve got one black haired goth and a Wizard with a third eye.

My friend says, we go out for Halloween to show the Devil that he is not going to break our fun filled traditions, in fear of him!!

We shake our fists and go to church the next day!

[demshateGod]

Actually, no I’m not a protestant. I’ve read Trail of Blood and think it’s probably generally true, but more than that I’ve read the Bible. Jesus said he’d preserve His church. If there were no churches paralleling the Catholic domination than that makes Jesus a liar.

[demshateGod]

“Christ founded the Catholic Church.”

Christ did not establish a catholic church much less the Catholic Church.

[Zionist Conspirator]

We celebrate some Jewish Holidays. In fact, back home we had a family that would come to our Christmas celebration and would send us Latkas for Hanukkah.

The first time the youngest daughter walked into my sister's house for Christmas, she said, “It's just like the Soap Operas!”

Those were the days......

All well and good, but missing my point.

Historically the Catholic Church abolished Jewish holidays (since they had been "fulfilled" and were no longer necessary) but pursued the opposite tactic, inculturation, with regard to pagan holidays.

I don't want to get in a big argument but please try to think of it this way: the Catholic Church made lupercalia (valentine's day), pomonalia/samhain (halloween), and s*t*rnalia/sol invictus (chr*stmas) into into chr*stian holidays. It did not do this with Ro'sh HaShanah, the anniversary of the day Adam and Eve were created.

I'm asking a very simple question: why were pagan and Jewish holidays treated so differently by the ancient church? Why were pagan holidays chr*stianized while Jewish ones were considered obsolete and often proscribed as "judaizing?"

I am afraid this whole question ties in with an issue that Catholics don't seem to be able to understand. Anyone who can defend pagan holidays can defend Jewish ones. Anyone who can say "faith without works is dead" can acknowledge the validity of Torah observance.

Catholics/Orthodox/etc. simply do not seem to understand the simple Biblical sentimentalism of radical Protestants--that if there are valid rituals or holidays they should be Biblical Jewish ones, not extra-Biblical pagan ones; and if the Jewish rituals and holidays of the Bible are of no more use, then neither is any other kind of ritual or holiday.

In defending Catholic rituals and holidays Catholics must resort to using the same apologetics Judaism uses with regard to chr*stianity as a whole. In attacking Jewish rituals and holidays as obsolete they engage in an early (and inconsistent) form of Protestant antinomianism.

Does no one here at least understand the point I'm trying to make?

[Philo-Junius]

I understand your point, especially for Jewish Christians, from the point of view of cultural continuity, but it was decided at the Council of Jerusalem that gentiles would not be bound by the Torah in any way.

That being the case, mandating the observance of any of the Torah festivals would be wrong.

That said, I think it’s always a mistake to miss the opportunity for a good party. Again, Purim should be much more widely celebrated.

[Philo-Junius]

Hamantaschen for everybody!

[Philo-Junius]

"Jesus said he’d preserve His church. If there were no churches paralleling the Catholic domination than that makes Jesus a liar."

You REALLY need to sit down and examine the implications of that statement, given the possibility of your own error in interpreting scripture, coupled with the absolute absence of historical evidence of a continuous "parallel church" tradition.

[dilvish]

There’s also warning on gas pumps not to use your cellphone while your pumping or you’ll start a fire even though it’s been proven that it’s the getting in and out of your car that crates the static buildup that makes the spark that makes the fire, not your phone. There’s good money keeping people scared, for one thing it helps make sure people buy pre-packaged high profit margin candy rather than cheaper stuff like fruit. It also helps keep distrust high, media and government both like it when neighbors don’t trust each other, keeps them from talking and finding out they don’t need the media or government.

[netmilsmom]

Honestly, my FRiend, I'm not defending a pagan holiday as we have never celebrated it this way. To us, it's all Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints Day. It comes down to intent.

But more than that, it's an American tradition. Trick or Treating and carving pumpkins. That's American. And that's why we do it.

And I like Jewish Holidays! Get me back to Fairlawn to Lou and Hy's for the end of Rosh Hashana and a nice knish. I'll be one happy woman.

[TheGunny]

While I do appreciate C.S Lewis, what about the scriptures? As far as I know and read in them, Christ's death and blood made me clean. Purgatory is a fictional place used by the “Church” to keep them in bondage. Im sorry about you and the Episcopalians...and you can keep the whole universal church thing.

[familyop]

"So my original understanding is confirmed: Catholicism/chr*stianity replaces Biblical Jewish holidays and adapts non-Biblical pagan ones."

Yes. I find life with fewer metaphors to be very relieving. My family does not miss the holidays of our former religion at all and really does feel better without them.

Isaiah 43:11

Not so long ago, there was some Protestant resistance in America against this holiday's festivities/observances. My path of study and prayer was much like that of the early Puritans, but I went that step further.