Where to Find the Devil on Halloween
Celebrating the spooky apart from the culture wars
I’ll never forget the joy I felt when my wife and I won a Halloween costume contest. We dressed up as characters from Quentin Taranto’s campy thriller Kill Bill, she donning the iconic yellow track suit of the film’s heroine, while I was costumed as one of the many masked mafiosos she defeats. We had spent weeks in bargain stores and secondhand shops looking for just the right parts to the costume, and the effort paid off. Every October, the trophy we won returns to our dining room table as a holiday centerpiece.
People either love it or hate it when the local pastor dresses up for Halloween. Over the past few decades, the holiday preceding All Saints has become a front for the American culture war. In the secular world, the costumes have become more commercial, more violent, and more explicitly sexual. In the religious world, the wagons are circled up, and the holiday is limited to dressing up as saints, insular alternative fall harvest parties, and trunk-or-treat events (or the holiday is just ignored altogether).
Oddly, the religious right and the irreligious left both have their own Halloween taboos. Christians avoid costumes of the devil, demons, and witches. Such matters are spiritual and must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Anything remotely sexualized is not only avoided, but a sign of our culture’s degeneracy. On the left, the three cardinal Halloween sins are shaming someone else’s (revealing and sexualized) costume, wearing a costume that is insensitive to another culture, and not having multiple types of candy on hand for kids with allergies. One must not make fun of marginalized peoples or genders, or ascribe any negativity to someone’s body.
The culture war around Halloween is a shame, and I make this declaration as both a man of the cloth and a man of the costume. It’s one of the few times a year that a neighborhood comes alive and gets to know one another. Kids are overworked and overstressed and “overscreened,” but you can’t trick-or-treat with a smartphone or tablet on hand. Fears about traffic accidents, poisoned candy, or razor blades in apples are overblown, mostly urban legends left over from the 70’s and 80’s. The lonely and elderly get a chance to enjoy the company of the young and spry. Spiritual matters of death, the demonic, and the dark are acknowledged and feared for what they truly are. Cards on the table: I like Halloween more than Christmas, but that’s probably because Christmas always falls on a work day for me.
A friend of mine tells the story of attending seminary as a jaded young person with modern sensibilities. The professor was lecturing about the devil, and my friend raised his hand. “Professor - c’mon now. Do you actually believe in the devil? Isn’t that all just made up superstition?” The professor paused, looked my friend directly in the eye, and said with sober seriousness. “Yes. I believe in the devil. In fact, I have met him, and seen him at work. And if you do any sort of good gospel ministry, you’ll meet him too.”
This professor is right: I have seen the devil at work in my ministry. I’ve seen the devil at the opioid overdose funeral I officiated for a young woman in her early 30’s who was found purple faced on the couch by her husband. I’ve seen the devil at work in abusive parents, who break plates over the heads of their children and lock them in closets for misbehaving and callously call it love. I’ve seen the devil at work in the suicides of high schoolers, abusive spouses, and greedy business owners who trick their partners out of their rightfully earned profits.
And yes, I did once see the devil on Halloween. It was in the nightclub district of a college town, where drunken coeds in revealing costumes stumbled into oncoming traffic while sober men leered with lust. The devil is real, and Halloween can indeed be the playground for the forces of darkness.
But funnily enough, I’ve never seen the devil out in my neighborhood trick-or-treating on Halloween, no matter where I’ve lived. I’ve seen ninja turtles and pokemon, ghosts and mummies, and the occasional unicorn or wizard, but I have not seen the devil. I imagine the grace and neighborly love of welcoming extortionist little monsters and joyfully giving them candy is just too godly for the dark forces of hell to handle.