Halloween Isn’t Adiafra to the Christian
Halloween is a holiday my family and I dread. It comes at one of my favorite times of the year too, which makes it that much worse. I absolutely love the fall: the crisp, cool mornings, the cozy sweaters and change from shorts to pants (which truth be told I only like because it’s a change, but I quickly get sick of once it’s genuinely cold outside!), the fall leaves, the cute decorations, the cloudy skies, new menus and flavors out on display in coffee shops and restaurants…. All of these things—the beauty and changes—I always have found good for the soul. It is good to enjoy the change in seasons and to mark that change in various celebratory ways. But these days Halloween has swallowed that beauty entirely by becoming conjoined to the fall like a set of twins might be conjoined at the hip. Halloween used to be celebrated within fall. It wasn’t the entirety of fall. It was just a day within the fall. But now it IS the fall. The dried corn, leaf garlands and scarecrows go on display simultaneously with and directly next to the decapitated heads, murder weapons, and violent decor celebrating demons, murder, pain, fear, and witchcraft (oh, and sexual dresses get for little girls and women)[1]….
Bloody corpuses and gruesome images go up everywhere. It’s all over: in grocery stores, doctor’s offices, restaurants, the hardware store… I walked into Lowes in August (it wasn’t even officially fall yet!) with my five young children and there were already massive figurines hanging inside the entrance with blood trickling down their fronts and ghoulish sounds emanating from their inflated insides. Those disgusting, Satanic demon-creatures hoovered the kids as we passed by. We just wanted to find some light bulbs. We didn’t want to see that. Every year, Halloween seems to become something people focus on earlier and earlier, which isn’t terribly surprise in our marketing and spending obsessed culture. But it’s more than a marketing and spending problem. It’s an obsession and an actual love of death. Our culture loves death, pain, fear, and the demonic. It celebrates it, laughs at it, seeks it, lauds it.
Where did Halloween even come from? The precursor event that led to Halloween was a Celtic festival called Samhain (or Samain) which was first written about in the 9th century. It was held between sunset on Oct 31 and sunset on Nov. 1[2] and was a day in which the pagan people believed the gods would be made visible to them and play tricks on them. Sacrifices to the gods would take place during the festival, and communication with the dead was (and is) a large part of this sacred time. People back then would wear costumes of demons and scary evil spirits to try to confuse the demons who they (correctly) believed were running around rampant at the time. It was a time of “danger, charged with fear, and full of supernatural episodes.”[3]
It is clear that the history of Halloween has been, and continues to be, very clearly, openly and boldly centered around the demonic. There’s absolutely no denying it.
How should Christians react to Halloween then? Are Christians given permission to participate in any cultural ritual, no matter the focus or point? Is that actually what Christian freedom is all about? I think of Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego. They did not just go along with their culture even when all they had to do was bend a leg with everyone else. The cultural belief then was it wasn’t a big deal to just bend the knee to the idol that the king had set up. Maybe some there thought it was a joke, maybe some there were taking it seriously and worshiping th eidol, and there were probably others there who didn’t care one way or another about it but bent the knee anyway to keep from being killed.
Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego could have said “WE know this is just a gold statue! WE don’t believe in this, so we’ll just bow our knee and believe in our hearts that this is false, and that’ll spare our lives!” That would have solved all their problems and been all too easy. They would have blended right in with the thousands around them. After all it was just a knee bend. Nothing sinful about THAT right? …But they didn’t do it. They refused to go along with the culture because they knew the behavior was wrong. Bending the knee, even if their hearts didn’t worship that statue, was WRONG. Behaviors matter! What you do MATTERS, even if your heart believes something else about the signifance of what you’re doing.
There is a wide array of Christians in America who truly believe that Christian freedom means freedom to do what you want. They’ve cheapened grace and made it into a “get out of jail free” card, telling others that they’re free to engage in sin and free to act like a pagan. The caveat, if there was one (which is never stated so this is theoretical) would be that you just personally shouldn’t worship Satan while doing it. So with Halloween for example, you can participate in it, but just don’t believe in what you’re participating in. Tell yourself this isn’t what it’s about for YOU. Basically, stick your head in the sand and pretend the reality around you isn’t reality. You see it, but just act like you don’t. “Manifesting” is the modern term for this. It’s the belief that reality isn’t objective, but rather your thoughts make things real. So just think strong thoughts to the contrary, then have at it! Just believe that the gruesome images, satanic and demonic decorations and movies, rituals, and outfits are all just a big joke, and suddenly it’ll just be an inconsequential nothing. No culpability on your part at all because you can change reality by your mind.
Christianity becomes just a VIP pass into the world with people like this. You’re in the fast lane to behave as you wish, participate in what you want, and enjoy the world to the full extent of everything it offers you—good or evil, beneficial or harmful. After all, you’re saved by grace! That’s the line they’ll repeat to try to address their behaviors and choices. They abuse and misuse scripture as an excuse to unfetter their desires and to prevent themselves from having to curb their sin.
Participating in the demonic is not now, nor has it ever been, adiaphora. Adiaphora literally means “indifferent things” and it refers to things not condemned in Scripture. Things you can choose to do if you wish because they are neither good nor bad. An example of adiaphora is what kind of coffee you choose to get at the coffee shop, or what color paint you use to paint your house.
Scripture and our Lord Jesus Christ did not take a light view of sin or the demonic. Not in the least. I believe modern American Protestants, who love to water down scripture, are primarily to blame for the views to the contrary here. One of their favorite pastimes has been to pick and choose out the comforting verses that require nothing of them, and to leave out all the apostles’ commands and exhortations (which is a good 85% or more of the epistles). They play like Thomas Jefferson with the Bible, who took scissors and cut out all the miracles from Scripture because those things made him uncomfortable. Modern American Protestants cut out all the commands by St. Paul and the other apostles to live lives wholly separated from the life they once lived, and to practice virtues in all things. They want a “get out of jail free” card from the Bible, not the actual truth about reality of living in a world where “the prince of power of the air”[4] is Satan and where we are told to be on our guard against him, to walk carefully in the way we should go, and “to keep oneself unspotted by the world”[5]. These people don’t want to hear what their lives should look like. They don’t want to be freed from their sins and lusts. They think of Christian freedom only in the American sense of the word “freedom”, which yells, “No one can tell ME what to do!” That’s why I keep emphasizing the American part of this. I think this idea of autonomy and personal freedom to do whatever you wish is a uniquely American diseased viewpoint. The greatest freedom to this type of person isn’t freedom to follow Christ, but rather a warped, man-made excuse to be turned entirely inward on themselves and to follow their inclinations and desires so long as it brings them pleasure, which is the highest good to these frauds. Freedom in Christ though, is actually the freedom to do good. It is the freedom to live for Christ, and not according to your sinful nature. Freedom in the Biblical sense of the word is freedom from sin.
But far too many American pastors (many of them from Protestant backgrounds) have been spreading a different message from the Biblical one for several generations now. The message is “sin boldly”. Go forward and don’t worry about what you do, it doesn’t even matter how you live. And it has helped to shape the American Christian viewpoints on many things. Halloween is just one very small example of how these teachings get put into practice.
This is why though, that the world does not hate these types of Christians. The world has no reason to hate someone who participates in their evil with them, and lives exactly as they do. The world doesn’t care if these guys say “I believe Jesus died for me!” OK, so what? They don’t act on it, they don’t follow Jesus in anything they do. Therefore, those people are not a threat. There’s a reason John the Baptist’s head was cut off by Herod. It wasn’t because John believed in Jesus. It was because John denounced sin directly to Herod. John didn’t live and speak like everyone around him. He lived differently and he spoke differently. He condemned evil and sinful behavior and didn’t participate in it. As John wrote “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”[6]
American Christianity doesn’t hate sinful behaviors; instead it hates those who would call out those sinful behaviors. It’s people like this who lead many people astray and have helped create this society of Christians who don’t follow Christ. More than that, they don’t’ even think you need to follow Christ! These people do not teach Scripture to others. They teach their own version of scripture and leave out an enormous part of it in order to do so, crushing and castrating Grace in the process. They twist Christianity into a comfy, cushy, smarmy version of their fake religion.
As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters:
“I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably classify as “Puritanism”—and may I remark in passing that the value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and the sobriety of life.”
We need to go back to Scripture, and stop listening to the world and wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing and instead listen to the Words of Christ Himself. They’re right there for us all to read!
[1] I googled “girl Halloween dresses” and a vast majority of the outfits for little girls has something to do with death, blood, demons, or were sexual. Again, this is just for girls. Try googling outfits for women! A vast majority of them are extremely sexual and perverse.
[2]https://www.bpl.org/blogs/post/the-origins-and-practices-of-holidays-samhain-dia-de-los-muertos-and-all-saints-day/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20rituals%20associated,pumpkins%2C%20or%20other%20fall%20crops. And https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samhain
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samhain
[4] Ephesians 2:2
[5] James 1:27
[6] John 15:19