Halloween Fears

iMonk posted one of his annual Halloween rants last week. He talks about how when he was growing up in a Southern Baptist community, the church was into Halloween.

From the late sixties into the early seventies, the churches I attended and worked for–all fundamentalist Baptists–were all over Halloween like ants on jam. It was a major social activity time in every youth group I was part of from elementary school through high school graduation in 1974.

We had haunted houses. Haunted hikes. Scary movies. (All the old Vincent Price duds.) As a youth minister in the mid to late seventies and early eighties, I created some haunted houses in church education buildings that would win stagecraft awards.

He then says that things changed. I remember that time. I remember the movement that arose in more conservative Christian circles to fight against Halloween as a devil-based holiday that good Christians should avoid. Halloween was Satan's way of sneaking in the back door. It wasn't far from Halloween to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. For some reason parents forgot their childhoods, or felt guilty about them, and decided to make amends through their children.

Evangelical parents decided that their own harmless and fun Halloween experiences were a fluke, and if their kid dressed up as a vampire, he’d probably try to become one. If there was a pumpkin on the porch, you were inviting demons into your home, just like it says in Hezekiah.

This is not to say that there isn't evil in the world. However you want to look at "satan" or "the devil" I tend to think that the paranoid fundamentalist leadership found a way to keep the flock in tow. It made sense, in a paranoid kind of way. But does it really?

iMonk continued:

It bothers me that any lie, exaggeration or fiction will find thousands of eager believers to pass it along.

That may be the money quote that underlies the issue. How easy it is to grab people's attention. Get them afraid. Work their fears. Stoke the fires of uncertainty under them. What is really scary is not the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties but the power that can so quickly take away our ability to think.