Coming up this Sunday, two distinct foci. 

At church, All Saint’s – a religious holiday designated to celebrate those faithful who have gone on to glory. 

In the ‘hood, Halloween – a secular holiday designated to celebrate candy, costumes, and elaborate scariness-for-its-own-sake.

All Saint’s and Halloween used to be the one and the same, a blending of pagan superstitions about the dead with Christian teachings about eternal life. Called All Hallow’s Eve, this hybrid observance offered a strange compromise: Celtic “cautionary measures” (like carved, illuminated gourds) integrated with collective, congregational honoring of departed saints. 

But that was before Madison Avenue got involved and monetized the pagan superstition part to the tune of 10,000,0000,000 dollars for this year alone. 

Ten billion bucks. Really. 

As we all know, Halloween circa 2021 principally means three things:

1. Toddlers in Pet Patrol costumes colliding with teenaged Freddie Kruegers over bowls of tootsie rolls;
2. Friendly competition between suburbanites as to whose front-lawn turned faux-graveyard spooks best; and
3. Mom getting to go through the sugary loot first so’s to confiscate all the chocolate for personal consumption. 

This present reality, at first glance, decisively separates trick-or-treating from honoring the memory of beloved church-members.

But at second glance, the bifurcated holidays still converge in their central preoccupations: death, and the afterlife. 

What Halloween says about death and the afterlife is remarkably similar to what the pagan Celts said thousands of years ago: Be afraid. 

In the Halloween / borrowed-pagan narrative, fear reigns because corpses become ghosts become haunts/ghouls/demons (all of which are intent on making more corpses through various gruesome means). 

Yes, pint-sized Pet Patrollers and other cuteness will participate, but ultimately Halloween revolves around flashy ways to die, and even flashier ways to manifest as the murder-minded post-dead / un-dead.

Conversely, what All Saints says about death and the afterlife is the same thing Christians have been saying since the first Easter: Be NOT afraid. 

Jesus has conquered sin, death, and the devil! “To live is Christ; to die is gain!” (Paul in Philippians 1:21) 

In the Christian narrative, hope, comfort, and celebration reign because of the resurrected Jesus.

These contradictory messages are in direct competition this Sunday. And for the record, the trick-or-treating-terrorized look set to win by a landslide. Estimates are that seventy-six percent of Americans will observe Halloween, while less than a quarter of the population will attend church.

It’s no secret that Christianity, once central to Western culture, is increasingly shrugged off as irrelevant. But it’s startling to contemplate what is filling the void left in Christianity’s wake. Halloween offers a colorful catalog of some of these “post-Christian” alternatives. 

Consider the following:

Death is the Big Problem for Post-Christian Moderns. The plastic headstones crowding suburban lawns, the skeletons dangling from landscape trees, the mummies and zombies vying for space on front porches – such expensive, excessive displays are ironically accurate barometers of our collective recoil from death. Halloween is a real-world version of the horror-movie imperative: face your worst nightmare, giggle, and survive! 

The logic is solid. Without the hope of Heaven or the fear of Hell, earthly survival is the only good outcome possible, the only virtue, the sole consolation. (Dystopian novels from Brave New World to The Hunger Games capitalize on this logic, too… They twist the Christian virtue of being willing to die for others into a mandate to do whatever it takes – including killing others – to LIVE.) 

Without the hope of Heaven or the fear of Hell, nobody knows quite what to do with the inevitability of the end of life – so we endlessly rehearse worst-case-scenarios with laugh tracks.

Consumption is the Cult of Now. One word: candy. We all know we shouldn’t eat it. It rots our teeth. It makes us fat. The ingredient lists on the neon-hued packaging read like a science experiment. But on Halloween, all those rational everyday restraints are set aside as we purchase 600,000,000 pounds (yes, 600 MILLION pounds) of sweets. One source lists the average American’s candy consumption for 10/31 at 3.5 pounds. That’s more than three cups of sugar for one person, along with the science-experiment other stuff. 

What is up with this?!? Is it the fear of death chronicled above that provokes us to try hypoglycemic amnesia? Is it peer pressure run amok? Or could it just be one more illustration of the ascendant religion of Consumerism? 

The worship of Lots of Stuff – attested to by our storage units, cars parked on the street because garage is full, gadget trade-ins every 6 months, etc. – finds unique expression on Halloween, but is not unique to Halloween. Whatever “it” is, we want / need MORE! 

Again, there is logic to this kind of idolatry. Without acknowledging the existence of the God who made everything and owns everything, the need to accumulate as much as possible makes perfect sense. Focusing on more – more candy, more money, more things – assists us in believing that we are our own deities (the true owners of both our selves and our stuff), and distracts us from the inherently temporary nature of this kind of satisfaction. 

In the absence of the One who remains the same “yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), the allure of the Novel, the New, and the Next Mouthful can be overwhelming.

In 2021, Being Someone Else is Always More Fun. I’m not so much speaking to the normal childhood delight in costumes and make-believe here, which reaches a charming public pinnacle on Halloween. Rather, I’m puzzling over the growing contingent of adults obsessing over becoming “other” in radical, un-charming ways. On Halloween, this can look like a large-scale version of the kiddos’ fun. Other times, it’s scarier – plastic surgery, “injectables”, alternative “expressions” of gender, etc. Why are so many grown-ups claiming the prerogative to re-decide what / who they want to be when they grow up? Are we back to the fear of death here – a pursuit of endless childhood? Has “self” become one more consumer good to be leveraged to the hilt and endlessly upgraded? Does this adult restlessness reflect the inherent instability of being our own gods? 

Without God anchoring us, is this instability the new normal?

In my mind, the answer to the malaises which Halloween so amply illustrates is the healing which All Saints offers. Without the covering of Christ, even trick-or-treating ultimately points to the terror of death – and the trauma of living without hope or direction in the meantime. But with the covering of Christ, costumes and candy can be – costumes and candy. Good gifts from our good God, to be enjoyed as such. 

All Saints reminds us that the celebration of lives well-lived can only really be celebratory if there is faith that death is not the end. But All Saints also empowers us to celebrate our own lives while they are still unfolding – to see each day (even 10/31) as a unique opportunity and privilege to steward – and to trust the unanswerable questions to the One with whom we will live forever when we die. 

So… Happy Halloween, everyone – truly! 

Because Jesus LIVES!