It’s Almost Halloween: Are You Spiritually Ready?

In recent years Halloween has become increasingly bloody and violent, filled with pagan tradition.

Halloween is upon us. At best, a night set aside for dressing up as fairies, princesses, superheroes and collecting candy. Yet, increasingly, Halloween’s a season given over to the dark and demonic.

Step into nearly any store, turn on any TV, and we find ourselves in the middle of a frightening marketing push that assaults our senses with increasingly evil merchandise and imagery. That is both troubling and troublesome.

Christian Today’s James Cary described a recent trip to the store with his children amid bloody Halloween t-shirts and gory, violent products as an exercise in avoiding “running the gauntlet of the avenue of death and despair.” Cary said his children didn’t want to “return to this zombie apocalypse masquerading as a food store until November.” He didn’t blame them. And the onslaught goes beyond costumes and decorations.

Pastor Ben Godwin of the Goodsprings Full Gospel Church in Parrish, Alabama in an article titled “Dabbling with the Dark Side,” said, “At this time of year there is a tsunami of horror movies flooding the airwaves featuring vampires, witches, zombies, monsters, cannibals, and savage serial killers. Hollywood and viewers, it seems, have an obscene obsession with and an insatiable appetite for gory violence. You can’t avoid being bombarded by the commercials even if you just watch news or sports. These shows glamorize evil and open the door to demonic influences.” He added that “The point is there are some doors you really don’t want to open.”

Spiritual forces — both good and evil — are real and we trivialize them at our peril — James Cary

It wasn’t always this way, said Cary. “[B]ack in my day, in the 1980s, Hallowe’en was meant to be just a bit spooky. People put on bedsheets and ran around saying ‘Wooooooo!’ … There was no question of bloody violence.” Things have changed, and not for good. “Nowadays, children seem entirely conversant in the language of horror, and all things related like vampires, wraiths and lycanthropes. This is completely normal,” he adds.

While the Bible has witches and the Angel of Death, demon possession and people rising from their graves, Cary said we cannot hide behind our Christian faith in that regard. “Spiritual forces — both good and evil — are real and we trivialize them at our peril.”

Godwin added that while some aspects of Halloween are harmless, there is a very real spiritual darkness and pagan side to the day as well. He quoted 1 Thessalonians 5:22: “Abstain from all appearance of evil,” and said, “It’s an odd contradiction for Christians to dress their kids up as creepy characters they try to teach them not to emulate.”

“Halloween is a showcase for witchcraft which the Bible clearly condemns,” said Godwin. “Christians have no business dabbling in any form of witchcraft: horoscopes, crystal balls, séances, Ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, pentagrams, tarot cards, palm reading, spells, fortune telling, mediums, channeling, divination, sorcery, black magic, etc. There are only two sources of supernatural power — God and Satan. If something is not of God, where does it originate?”

LifeWay Research released a study last year about Halloween and its pagan elements. A full 59 percent of Americans felt that Halloween was “all in good fun,” 21 percent tried to avoid Halloween completely, 14 percent tried to avoid the pagan elements, and 6 percent just weren’t sure.

As expected, there was a difference between nonreligious Americans and religious Americans in their beliefs about Halloween; however, it wasn’t as large as one might expect. Research showed that 75 percent of nonreligious Americans said Halloween was “all in good fun,” while 54 percent of Christians agreed that Halloween was “all in good fun.”

Of Christians, 18 percent tried to avoid the pagan elements and 23 percent avoided Halloween altogether. Interestingly, 71 percent of Catholics said Halloween was “all in good fun,” as compared to 49 percent of Protestants. As might be expected, Southerners were most likely to avoid Halloween (27 percent) while Northeasterners were least likely to avoid Halloween (12 percent).

Godwin acknowledges that it’s difficult to live in the culture and not be fully immersed in it. “It’s a tricky balance for Christians to be in the world without conforming to it,” he said. “Jesus prayed, ‘I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one’ (John 17:15). If we imitate the world, we lose our distinction; if we isolate from the world, we lose our influence. Christians need to engage the culture if we expect to make an impact. It’s perfectly fine for a boat to be in the water, but if too much water gets in the boat, now that’s a problem.”