It's October 31st. That means three things. (1) It's my birthday; I'm old. (2) It's All Saints Day -- my second favorite day of the Church Year. (3) It's Halloween.
Halloween is always an interesting day for Christians. We're never quite sure whether to celebrate it or not. I usually field a few questions every year. So in an effort to take my response to that questions public, I want to say here that I'm a Christian and I support Halloween.
I support Halloween for two reasons. Spiritually and psychologically, I think Halloween accomplishes two things on a particular day that our culture otherwise glosses over.
Firstly, I support Halloween because it brings us face-to-face with human frailty and mortality. Halloween allows us to collectively process our eventual death and mortality. The graveyards, corpses, blood, skeletons, and coffins of Halloween allow us, on a yearly basis, to confront our physicality and work through our largely repressed fear of death. In this, Halloween serves an important existential function.
Secondly, Halloween brings us face-to-face with what I call "the uncanny". The things that go bump in the night are Halloween's evening and monster motifs, the bats, owls, ghosts and goblins. The world is a scary place at times, a strange and mysterious place, and we tend to fill its dark corners with "monsters". Halloween, particularly for children, allows us to roam a night filled with ghosts and ghouls to find only friends and neighbors (and candy!).
Death and the uncanny -- the two things we confront on Halloween that address human anxieties and deal with very real theological issues. In this I believe Halloween is empowering to children, giving them a sense of control in a spooky and scary world. (I should also mention the third great theme of Halloween: Harvest. But I'll leave that alone for now.)
What I think has happened in some Christian communities is that the Halloween motifs of death and the uncanny get linked to the occult and from the occult to demonic/Satanic influences. I think this link is a bit of a stretch (largely made by linking that symbol of the uncanny -- witches -- to spells and black magic and from there to occult and demonic forces). Death is not demonic. We should not associate the graveyards, blood, and skeletons of Halloween with Satan. Graveyards are about our bodies and their frailty, and most of Halloween is as well. (This is why I think Halloween demands to be paired with All Saints and All Souls Days.). Further, the uncanny is the unknown and the mysterious. The night isn't demonic, it's just mysterious and, as a consequence, spooky. And it is good at times to confront the spookiness to see that there really isn't a monster in your closet.
So I defend Halloween. I think it serves some fairly important Christian ends. Life has some scary things -- death and the uncanny -- that we shouldn't ignore.
Halloween: Trick or Treat? from 10ofthose.com on Vimeo.