This weekend, adults will invest extraordinary amounts of time, money, and ingenuity into two often competing agendas:

1. Terrify childish imaginations. 

2. Stoke childish appetites. 

And no, I’m not talking about the election. 

I’m talking about Halloween.

In my neighborhood, otherwise rational-seeming people have constructed faux graveyards, hung ghosts in trees, and rigged strobe lights to create kaleidoscopic effects of flying witches on their garage doors.

One enterprising household has a gallows adjacent to their mailbox, with latex corpses hung in all the appropriate places – including one whose lower half has been sawed off. (What’s trick-or-treating without a little trauma, right?)

But the fear factor of these Halloween displays is less scary than the other drama being played out on our front lawns of late: political signs – stolen. Or left in situ, but defaced with graffiti. 

And yes, I am talking about the election now.

Specifically, I’m talking about how the freak-show of Halloween makes the freak-show of present politics crystal clear…

Distasteful, gory displays on private property in honor of Halloween are tolerated to the point of a dismembered human torso – but differing political perspectives now require trespassing, larceny, and / or vandalism.

We can be entertained by depictions of mutilated humanity, but we are offended by differing opinions to the point of breaking the law.

Paul’s razor-sharp words in Romans apply here:

“Professing ourselves to be wise, we have become fools…”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Twin terrors have stalked us all year, have they not?

Terror #1: the virus – fear of getting sick, of loved ones getting sick, of facing death prematurely and alone.

Terror #2:  anarchy – fear of the fabric of our society being so irreversibly shredded that there won’t be anything left to patch up when the fighting ends.

We’ve been scared so long that maybe Halloween has to be amped up in ghoulishness even to get our attention.

Appropriately, the deepest roots of Halloween are in terror. Pagan beliefs about demonic activity on one night of the year, when the veil between the living and dead was lifted – those are the beginning points for our sugar-powered parades in costume.

Panic and paranoia prompted the original jack o lanterns, which served not as decoration, but rather as first line defenses against a hostile darkness.

We look back in condescension at the superstitions that birthed Halloween, even as our contemporary terrors resemble them… A virus is surely as invisible and unpredictable as a malevolent spirit loosed from Hell, and the penultimate victory of either one – death – is the same as it has ever been.

Granted, there is a factual distinction between a pandemic of deadly disease and a night’s worth of abstract terror based on imaginary ghosts and ghouls. 

Also granted, the consequences of gruesome Halloween décor is minimal, while the outcomes of a national election have material impact on millions of people.

But the fog of fear that too often obscures these distinctions is the biggest threat – the biggest actual threat – present in this moment, because the irrational outworkings of fear push people further from reality, deeper into destructive behaviors. (Google “recent looting” if you don’t believe me.)

At this point, the narrative should shift abruptly for Christians. 

Why?

Because Christians live under the covering of a God whose “perfect love casts out all fear.” 

Because Christian commandments include the injunction to “let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

And because Christians understand death not as that to be feared above all else, but as that which will bring the ultimate victory:

“To live is Christ; to die is gain.”

When Jesus identified himself as the “Good Shepherd”, he appropriated all the associations included in David’s Psalm to God as the shepherd of his soul, including this: 

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

This presence of God – Jesus, Emmanuel – makes fear supremely illogical. A “fearful Christian” is a literal contradiction in terms. 

So, yes. It’s Halloween. And then… it’s Election Night. 

This year, the exaggerated theatricality of the former will doubtless infect the latter. 

And the twin terrors of the virus and anarchy will dominate the mood of both nights more than any participant in either one.

The choice, for Christians, is whether to buy the lie of a helpless, cowering world beset by an army of supernatural / micro-biological / political foes – or to claim the covering (and the calm) of Christ’s assurance:

“I am with you, even to the end of the age.”

Come what may on Halloween or election night, the unmasked truth of our faith is that fear is a fraud – a faker – a pretense as unreal as any front-yard graveyard. 

Conversely, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life… yesterday, today, and forever.

This evening, I plan to avert my eyes from the gore, enjoy my candy corn, and have some laughs with my family on Halloween. 

I plan to spend election night in much the same way (with fervent prayer for God’s sovereignty overlaid). 

The reality is that my plans depend on my recalling the truth of who I am in Christ, and on my owning the facts of what my faith provide me in the way of protection: 

Protection from harm – because “nothing can separate me from the love of Christ” – but also protection from fear itself.

“God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self-control.”

 Friends, may we remember that – and may our light shine fearlessly in this dark world, pointing others to the glory and eternal security of Jesus, every night (and day) until we are home with Him!