For years now, when someone asks me if our family celebrates Halloween, my reply has been the same:
“No, we don’t celebrate anything on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neighbors for candy.”
My reply brings to the surface two related concepts—one explicit, one implied.
The first concept is celebration. Celebration is “the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion.” Celebration, therefore, involves knowledge, intent and endorsement. What would it mean to celebrate Halloween?
Halloween: A History
Halloween finds its roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated on the final day of October, when it was believed that the barrier between the living and the dead was lifted. Druids built bonfires to offer food and animal sacrifices to Celtic deities as they wore costumes made from animal heads and skins and attempted to tell fortunes.
Throughout multiple centuries of Roman rule, beginning in the first half of the first century, two Roman festivals were blended into the celebration of Samhain: Feralia, a day when Romans commemorated the dead, and a day that honored Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees.
In the year 1000, the Catholic Church declared November 2nd All Souls’ Day, a day on which the dead were honored and those in purgatory prayed for. All Souls’ Day was celebrated with Samhain-like bonfires and the donning of “theological costumes” (e.g., saints, angels, demons).
One day prior to All Souls’ Day (November 1st) was declared All Saints’ Day, where the saints of the church were celebrated. “The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-Hallows or All-Hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse, meaning All Saints’ Day), and the night before it (October 31st)—the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion—began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.”
Celebrating Halloween?
You could be forgiven for not knowing many of the details surrounding Halloween’s origin and development—I just learned half of them on History.com and summarized them for your great benefit.
But our collective ignorance is instructive, because if celebration requires knowledge, intent and endorsement, it isn’t possible to celebrate something about which we are ignorant, unintentional and therefore incapable of approving. Thus, talk of “celebrating” Halloween outside of a liturgical context is often misguided from the start.
Participation vs. Celebration
But my Halloween retort also implies a second concept: participation. While celebration requires participation, participation does not require celebration—playing in a football game and celebrating the sport are two different things. Further, a defensive back might participate in a play resulting in a touchdown, but they won’t be celebrating in the end zone.
Thinking about participation is important, because participating in and facilitating sin is itself sinful (Rom. 1:32; 2 Jn. 10–11). As such, someone could suggest that participation in Halloween frivolity is wrong even in the absence of celebration—particularly if someone has knowledge of its background.
But the primary challenge for this suggestion (generally expressed in good faith) is the storied history of Halloween itself, which robs it of any objective significance. To see this, we might ask: “What is a door-knocking candy collector dressed up as Spider-Man participating in, exactly?”
A celebration of druid deities? Honoring a Roman goddess? Honoring the lives and legacies of departed Christians a day early? In all likelihood, the answer is none of the above.
In most cases, people are participating in a cultural phenomenon removed as far from its origin story and significance as someone stretching in a yoga class. Halloween has, in other words, been so successively redefined by empire, church, and culture that we only have its latest iteration with which to define and evaluate participation.
This is not to say that the current iteration is immune from problematic forms of participation any more than enjoying Thanksgiving is immune from indulgence and gluttony.
Halloween in 21st-century America is often an evening of very heavy alcohol consumption among adults and is used as a lame excuse by some women for dressing like harlots. Furthermore, certain costumes, symbols and decorations should be avoided by Christians—particularly the demonic and violent.
Finally, there are fringe groups who do, in fact, seek to commune with the dead and summon evil spirits on Halloween. But none of these things define “participating in Halloween” in its current expression; rather, they simply indicate what certain people choose to do on October 31st.
The Issue of Conscience
None of this means that you should have anything to do with Halloween. Perhaps you’ve read what I’ve said and yet there remains a nagging sense that trick-or-treating, costumes, or carving pumpkins is wrong, and you’d just prefer to celebrate the Protestant Reformation on October 31st.
Maybe you are Hispanic and associate Halloween with the Nov. 1st–2nd observance of Día de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead”) and some of its theologically problematic elements. Or perhaps you come out of an occult background where Halloween was indeed a day of incantations and evil, such that to even acknowledge it in any sense seems wicked.
In any case, you should probably abstain from typical Halloween festivities for the sake of a clear conscience before God (Rom. 14:23).
Those of us who are convinced in our own minds (Rom. 14:5) that some Halloween fun isn’t problematic—or even see it as an opportunity for evangelism—should not look down on those with differing convictions. We likely shouldn’t try to persuade them, either, unless they come to us asking genuine questions, keeping in mind that they have a responsibility to refrain from judging us, too (Rom. 14:2-4).
Further, we shouldn’t create environments where people may be tempted to compromise their convictions—like the one time I accidentally forgot to announce that our Halloween party would involve trick-or-treating and put an abstaining family in a very awkward position that immediately resulted in them “re-evaluating” their perspective on Halloween under intense circumstantial pressure.
Regardless, one thing is clear: outside of preparing for All Saints’ Day on the Catholic liturgical calendar, Christians don’t “celebrate” Halloween for the simple reason that there is nothing coherent to celebrate. Nor is there any socially or culturally delineated purpose that objectively gives significance to participating in what Halloween has become.
Those enjoying Halloween fun on October 31st should ask: What am I communicating to whom by my participation in this cultural phenomenon, and do I have a clear conscience about it?
We don’t need another thing to divide over—especially in the church. Halloween should not provide an annual occasion to do just that.
Hi, saw this article linked from TGC.
While I see how you got this from the source you were using, I think most knowledgeable historians consider that Druid-Samhein connection to be incorrect. While there were a people known as the Druids, most of what we think about them - including Samhein details linked to Halloween - was invented by pagans during the Neo-Druid movement of the 18th-19th Centuries. While much of what you said holds up well, I think this article takes a much better direction on Halloween given the actual history - https://theopolisinstitute.com/concerning-halloween/