Why Christians should stop boycotting Halloween

When I was a kid, my family exercised a number of different options each time Halloween had the audacity to roll around once again.

For several years, we tried trick-or-treating with friends and innocent costumes, each year to the increasing detriment of my mother's conscience.  After that, we tried going to Chuck-E-Cheese's with other families from our church, but the place was always filled with as many greedy, be-costumed trick-or-treaters as were the streets, which defeated the original purpose.  Every few years, there would be a harvest party or some similar gathering, and then there were the dreaded 31sts when we made no plans and simply sat in the darkness while muffled voices passed by, dangerously close to our front door.

If you grew up in a Christian home, your experience with Halloween probably falls somewhere into those brackets.  It's understandably awkward for parents who are sensitive to worldly influences upon their children, who can appreciate the innocence of going to neighbors' houses for candy, but who also know the morbid realities that surround the holiday.  Christian witch-hunts (pun intended) have made the 31st of October into a celebration of the dead, citing instances of child sacrifice and demon worship as the main reason Christians should not participate in trick-or-treating.  I'm not about to get into a discussion of the sullied history of Halloween, because you can do that research for yourself.  For this post, it's negligible.  The reality is that while such horrific things might be true, they are not the norm.  Halloween might be the night of the year where terrible horror movies make a resurgence on Netflix and stores sell out of masks and fake blood, but the general temperature of the communities in which we live is that it is a fun evening to dress up as a family and go around the neighborhood in the cold, filling old sacks with candy.

This year on October 31st, instead of finding a safe place to hide, my wife and I and several of our friends camped out on their front lawn with hot chocolate and apple cider for adults and a bowl of candy for the kids.  We didn't hand out tracts.  We didn't announce (unless asked, or the opportunity arose organically) that we were even from a church.  What we did was purely about reaching out to families in the neighborhood with kindness.  We weren't recruiting, and we weren't moving stacks of literature -- both things people hate about the church.  What we were doing was simply turning on the porch light to say, "We are also people in your community."

Some of the biggest complaints about the church is that Christians are out of touch with reality, that we are snobbish, judgmental, and detached.  Passing out tracts communicates the fact that I don't have the time or the desire to discuss what I believe with you on as an individual, or I don't fully understand my own faith.  Recruiting members tells people that all the church cares about is attendance, padding pews with bodies as well as new velvet -- thanks to the increase in monthly tithing.  While that mountain isn't one we can demolish with such a simple gesture, taking the opportunity to reach out in the midst of a holiday which Christians are particularly known to reject says something to a skeptical community.  What we did was small, insignificant on its own, but if it becomes one of many different and repeated gestures, all of a sudden that reputation which applies to the church as a whole no longer applies to us, and people begin to question whether or not their notions of God and His people are fully accurate.

I understand the sensitivity surrounding Halloween.  It's not a bad thing.  We are told to take no part in darkness, because children of light cannot have fellowship with those who are in the darkness (2 Cor 6.14).  We are told to be holy as God is holy, and to keep ourselves unsullied by affiliation with the world.  But what we communicate when we turn off the porch light and pretend not to be home on October 31st is not preserving our holiness, but imposing distance and implying superiority.  We read James 1.27 and think that somehow by participating in a worldly holiday that we are somehow staining our righteousness.  But Jesus said that the ones who need doctors aren't the healthy, and doctors are required to get their hands dirty.  Besides, "participation" in Halloween doesn't mean donning a mask and fake blood.  Participation isn't about making ourselves blend in so that we can perform some type of covert operation.  Participation looks like reaching out boldly into the community in which you live.  That's why the porch light should remain on: because we have a responsibility.

What I'm getting at is the greatest commandment (Mark 12.30).  Christ told us it was to love God first and then others -- vertical love and then horizontal love.  One naturally follows the other.  True horizontal love doesn't just apply to your family and maybe the elderly couple who sits in the same pew as you on Sunday mornings.  Horizontal love necessarily includes the community, the people on your block and the next one over.  Horizontal love means taking the initiative to love, in word and in deed, anyone who might cross our paths -- even if they're dressed like zombies, geeks, or escaped convicts.