Another Problem with Halloween: Thinking Christian and Consumerism

I want to take just a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you will find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. You're listening to Thinking Christian on Life Audio, and I've got Dr. James Spencer with me, who's your host. And we're going to talk a little bit about Halloween today. James wrote an op-ed piece. He wrote this for The Christian Post last year. James, some dangers, some things that we need to watch out for. How do we think Christian on Halloween? You know, my experience with Halloween has generally been that people focus on, and I think rightly so, on the pagan origins of Halloween. And so there isn't a whole lot of consensus about how Halloween really started. There's not a clear historical track of when it, where it came from, how it all works. You know, as it sort of bridged out of the Celtic context and came over to the United States and other European nations, it just isn't a hundred percent clear how all that worked. But most people, when they think about Halloween, they're thinking about demonic influences that can enter as kids, you know, participate in activities that have an association with the occult. Now, you know, obviously dressing up in costumes isn't exactly participation in the occult, so you have to dig maybe a little bit deeper. We could get into things like witches and we could think about things like Ouija boards, which often are associated with Halloween. And it is a time where there is a sense in which people tend to focus in on this heightened spirituality in a non-Christian realm, let's say. And so that's usually the way people think about Halloween. Now, you know, from my perspective, those are obviously dangers. There are things that we want to look out for. We never want to give a foothold to any sort of story that denies God. We don't want to give any foothold to that in our lives. That's just not a wise thing for Christians to do. And there's no real reason for us to dig into, you know, demon possession and the influence of evil spirits and those kinds of things. Those are great topics to get into. But when we think about Halloween, I think one of the things that we just really need to highlight is Halloween becomes a very American holiday today. Halloween is, you know, dominated by purchases. And, you know, I have four kids now, and we opted out of Halloween this year, not because we have some sort of moral disdain for it, simply because we didn't have the time to go out and buy the costumes and all that kind of stuff. I envision us getting trick-or-treaters. We live in a subdivision, so I envision us getting trick-or-treaters. But we're not really planning on spending a lot of time, money, and effort getting everybody dressed up, doing the whole Halloween thing, you know, traipsing around the neighborhood, you know, getting candy from everyone. We're just not into it this year. And so I think that, like many other holidays, the spiritual aspect of Halloween remains. You know, there is something to it that's sort of dark and spooky and unfortunate in its origins, right? Halloween is not a Christian holiday. But I think, like other holidays, which are Christian holidays, something like Christmas or Easter, right, the spiritual message, the actual substance, we could say, of the holiday has tended to be masked by all of the consumerism that goes around these holidays. Yes. And that is sort of the substance of my op-ed, is I'm arguing that, you know, we tend to be, the title is Tricked by Treats. We tend to be tricked by treats. We are no longer using these holidays, by and large, as times for us to really take a step back, focus on Jesus, focus on being together as a family and actually enjoying it as a break, as a time where we can, you know, as a nation, honestly, and, you know, we take these holidays off, we have the time. We could be spending it really productively by, again, focusing on Jesus, you know, being with our families, doing good things. And instead, we tend to crowd some of those things out simply because we get involved in, like at Halloween, it's buying costumes and getting candy ready and, you know, maybe decorating the front yard. And, you know, hey, those people who enjoy those things, more power to you, right? It's not a condemnation of it. But the point is, these things can have a tendency to go too far. Right. And we just need to, as Christians, take a step back and ask ourselves, what am I really celebrating here? What am I really doing here? And is there a way for me to do Halloween in a different way that would maybe be more honoring to Christ, would point to him and magnify him in ways that I'm not right now? I think what you talk about a little bit with the commercialization of everything and also the merchandising of everything, too. I mean, certainly this is the candy holiday, right? I mean, people are spending a lot of money. There are people going broke buying candy for Halloween for one day. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. We're going to talk a little bit about the original All Saints Day and that that came around with church history more so than theological things. Although Martin Luther is around this time as far as the thesis goes, right? And churches do these alternative types of events. It is concentrating on actually where these things came from. And of course, the thing that we always make a holiday into now more on the merchandising and the economic impact of, you know, Thanksgiving is now surrounding Black Friday. Let's talk a little bit about that. Let's talk about some of the churches that are doing these and a lot of churches are doing alternative events. What do you have to say about that? Well, you know, obviously, there's nothing wrong with doing an alternative event, some sort of harvest festival or something like that, where the kids can still come. They can still dress up. They can still have all the fun with none of the potentially demonic activities. And so if the goal is to create an event where kids can enjoy themselves like they might at Halloween, but without all of the sort of demonic, spiritual overtones, I think that harvest festivals do a great job of that. Where I think we should be thinking a little bit more deeply about this. When you look back at the origin of a lot of these different festivals, Halloween, All Saints Day, you know, even the Celtic rituals from which all of this seems to have emerged, they're actually geared toward changes in seasons. So, you know, you're actually, you know, you're looking at the onset of winter, let's say, which in an agrarian society was a significant event. I mean, for us, you know, we look out our windows and we say, oh, we have snow. That means I'm going to be shoveling my driveway and scraping my car off before I actually get to drive it. Right. But honestly, you know, with auto start and auto defrost and all those kind of fun things, like how much do you really have to do? It's just far less impactful for us. Now, you know, knowing my wife's father used to farm, I know, you know, some farmers that are, you know, more concerned with the weather than I am. They're far more concerned with the changing of the seasons. And so those seasons were these natural windows, right, the natural times in the life of a community that was centered around an agrarian economy where the people came around to celebrate the end of one thing and the beginning of another. And they also got together to say, OK, let's let's entreat our gods, right? Let's ask our gods for safety as we enter into these times.

Leanness, really. Winter was not a time when things were going to grow. And so you have this sort of cadence of life that's established by the nature of the seasons. What I see happening with us now is that we've largely lost those patterns, right? It doesn't matter a hill of beans to me that it's winter, really. I mean, you know, I'm sure some people it does, but the reality is that we're not—when I say that, here's what I mean. Yes, it's going to get cold out. It's going to snow. But as a community, right, we have other mechanisms that are fairly transparent to us. Like, we don't really see how they work, but we end up with food in the grocery store. We end up with cleared streets. We end up with, you know, all these different things where we can just go and do life, generally the same way that we do the rest of the year. And so these shifts in time really don't mean much to us. Now, that creates two problems in my mind. One secular and one church-based. Okay? The secular is this problem. The secular says, well, this is odd because how do I entice people to do more of a certain thing? In our case, usually it's purchasing stuff. How do I now create a cadence of economic expenditures without these natural seasons? Will you do it by creating new natural seasons? Or what we might say are artificial seasons. Right? And so we then get the Halloween season, which is quickly followed. I mean, we kind of skip over Thanksgiving because everybody's going to buy their turkey anyway, I guess. And we quickly move into Christmas. Right? Like you said, Black Friday is an event. Black Monday, an event, or Virtual Monday, or whatever it's called now. Right? Like these events are created so that we go and shop. Right. Just kind of how it works. And so we have, you know, multiple of those. In the church, the problem really is, I think, that we now lose our sense of time. You know, I grew up as in a Lutheran church, a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, probably about an hour and 20 minutes from where I live right now. And the Lutheran Church would always change the color of their different, you know, sort of adornments in the sanctuary depending on what time in the church calendar it was. We would celebrate things like Advent and we had, you know, Lent and, you know, all these different, you know, sort of times across the church calendar. Right. But I know many churches don't do that. And so, you know, when you ask the question about harvest festivals, do I have a problem with harvest festivals? Not at all. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. I think what I have a problem with is the church has lost any real sense or ability to help believers think about time. There isn't a churchly cadence that we go through anymore, or at least it's severely diminished, that truly would combat what we're seeing in the secular realm. The secular realm is a barrage of, hey, it's Black Friday, buy stuff. It's Cyber Monday, go buy stuff. It's Christmas season, you need to get all these gifts. Right? Even Easter, right? Easter candy, Easter egg hunts, all of these different things are sort of the expected ways that we're going to spend our time, and they're advertised to us as such. And so that sort of tends to mark our time. Right. And that's not a Christian way to mark time. Oh, you know, and I think about this, too, is that have we eroded the liturgical year? And even when you look at that, and you look at the merchandising of the liturgical year, Advent calendars are always, now seem to be some merchandise that go along with the calendar, including chocolates or whatever go into an Advent calendar. And, you know, so it becomes an expensive type of thing. And really doesn't deal with those four or five candles that are surrounding kind of in between the Testaments, those seasons. That's right. I think, you know, as a general rule, we've seen this with globalization, right? We've seen a sort of a flattening out of local character. And so anywhere you go, I mean, I was just over in Germany and you could hit a McDonald's, a Burger King. We even found a Subway. And, you know, KFC was over there. And I'm like, man, I'm over in Germany. I don't want to eat any of this. Right. I wanted to stick to more of the local kind of flavor. Right. But it's available. It's all over the place. And I think that, you know, we've recognized that from a globalization standpoint, is that, you know, almost any big city you go to has essentially the same stuff. Right. Right. There isn't a, you know, local character is getting harder and harder to find. And so I think we've noticed it from that perspective. But where I don't think we've noticed is that as things have gotten more efficient and as most of us don't have jobs that are dependent on naturally changing seasons. Right. That we've also lost, really lost a sense of time. Yeah. And as we've lost that, the church hasn't necessarily been as strong at preserving it through the liturgical calendar, through the, you know, what have you. You know, even just sort of the marks of, let's say, you could even say like Sunday school. Right. You know, it used to be when I grew up, you'd have Sunday school. Now there were ups and downs of Sunday school. I'm not saying, oh, Sunday school was the only thing ever. But you'd go to Sunday school, then you'd go to church. And Sunday was sort of marked off as this time where you were expected to go to church. Well, now you don't have that anymore. Now you sort of fit small group in wherever you'd like. Right. It becomes something that you go when it's convenient and everybody needs to find a convenient schedule to go. You don't usually go to a church sanctuary. You're just sort of piled into someone else's house, which, again, no big deal. You know, it's not like it's a horrible thing, but we haven't always recognized what it does to us when it becomes just another activity that we're fitting into our weeks. That creates problems. And so I think this whole topic of, look, what's the challenge of Halloween? Right. Obviously, the challenge of Halloween has to do with its origins in the Celtic divinatory rituals. Right. Where they're calling on their gods to help them survive the upcoming winter. Right. That's obviously a problem. It's not a good thing for us to be mimicking that or imitating it or giving it a foothold or anything else like that. But what I would just say is that is decades, if not a century ago, that Halloween was actually practiced in that way. Well, we'll be back after these messages. We're going to take a break right now. But when we do come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about seasons, the liturgical year and also wrap up this conversation about Halloween. I'm Richard Beattie. You're listening to Life Audio. And this is Thinking Christian. Scripture and brain science agree. Meditating on God's word transforms us and reduces stress in our lives. I'm Jodi Nisnick, host of So Much More Creating Space for God, a scripture meditation podcast. And each week I give you space to hear God's word, listen to the spirit and pray about what's on your heart. And then we have a thoughtful conversation with guests to help us go deeper. Listen and subscribe at lifeaudio.com.