It's In the Code Ep. 71: Christians and Halloween - A Brief History
Dan gives a brief history of halloween and the ways it has morphed through pre-Christian and Christian history. He then asks: What does it mean when religious people appeal to “God’s will”? What kind of work does this do? Does it always provide the guidance and comfort for life it seems to promise? And what are the dangers of understanding God in terms of “will” in the first place? Dan dives into these and other issues in this episode.
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Axis Mundi Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be with you.
As always, love to hear from you, especially for this series, which is driven by so many of your ideas and your comments and your feedback.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj.com.
And as always, thank you to all of you who not only reach out in that way, but support us in so many other ways.
Those of you who listen to us, the patrons who are kind enough to support us, those of you who support the other shows that we're putting together, and just on and on and on.
Thank you all so much.
Want to dive in here?
One of the things that I've been talking about the last few episodes, right, is that we're coming up on this sort of slew of fall or early winter holidays, soliciting some ideas.
And as I sit here recording this, Halloween is next week, and I've had a few people reach out about a couple things.
But one of the things that stood out Stood out to me from my memory, it stood out to me as I drive around and I see certain church signs and billboards that talk about this.
Folks have reached out to me about this through the podcast email.
I've talked with clients, the clients that I work with in the religion trauma coaching work.
And it's the idea of harvest festivals, or sometimes they're called fall festivals, but the church harvest festival.
And I decided this would be a good one to talk about because they always happen around Halloween for reasons that we'll see here in a minute.
But maybe you're familiar with the idea of this sort of the church harvest festival, right?
Maybe you have driven around and this is exactly the time of year when you drive around, you'll see some church signs somewhere with, you know, maybe some hay bales around it and a couple corn stalks.
That kind of stereotypical fall stuff, especially if you, like, I live in New England, which is sort of as stereotypical a fall-looking kind of place as you can get.
And you see the sign that says, you know, Harvest Festival October, like, you know, I don't know, 28th or October 30th or even the 31st or whatever, kind of depending on the days of the week.
Maybe you grew up in a church that has a Harvest Festival.
Maybe you attend a church that does.
Maybe you've had conversations with family members who have churches that have a Harvest Festival coming up.
Whatever the background is, and as I say, I've had lots of conversations with folks who remember that, or who are part of that, or wonder why their churches did that, or whatever.
You probably have some idea what these are, right?
And if you've experienced these attached to a church, right, you also know that these harvest festivals or fall festivals, they always happen to coincide with Halloween.
And so why is that, right?
And I've had that question From folks, as well as just sort of frustration about that and so on.
And the issue, of course, is Halloween itself, right?
For many within a certain kind of Christianity, and again, I always have to press this, a certain kind, not all Christians, but I do think, and in this case, not even all necessarily just Christians.
I think there can be other kinds of religiously minded Americans who might share this view, but I think I think that's it has wound its way into other traditions through a kind of cultural Christian background.
But so for people within a certain kind of Christianity, Halloween is a spiritually dangerous holiday at best and it's possibly even satanic at worst, right?
It's a big deal.
So church harvest festivals, right, as they're called, largely arose as a kind of Christian alternative to Halloween activities.
And as I say, this is a certain kind of Christian practice, right?
If you're in a church that is more sort of open to broader secular culture that doesn't understand, or, you know, maybe in, you know, a liberal Protestant tradition or something that kind of doesn't really believe in Satan or demons all that much, doesn't sort of take those as literal entities or something like that, then maybe this isn't a feature.
But it is a feature that's prominent in certain parts of popular American religious life and specifically Christianity, right?
And it's because of this opposition to Halloween, and that's what we're going to think about here.
But before I do that, I also want to note that there are lots of reasons why people might have harvest or fall festivals.
I'm not here to denigrate the practice of harvest or fall festivals, right?
I'm here to kind of look at some cultural background to some of that within a very particular subset or subtext.
But for some people, right, having a fall festival, it might just be a more general and sometimes sort of grown up way to have a kind of celebration this time of year that doesn't devolve into like crazy kids on a sugar high and asking for candy and ridiculous sexy costumes or whatever, right?
I've, I've known grownups for like, Hey, we're going to have like a, you know, a fall party or, you know, something like that.
They don't want to tie it to Halloween necessarily.
Just something they want to do.
Cool.
Right.
Um, But additionally, as probably most listeners know, right, what emerges over time as Halloween almost certainly had its roots in earlier Celtic practices, right?
And when I say earlier, we're talking like, you know, a millennia and more ago, right?
Most probably the Fall Festival of Samhain.
If you've ever seen this spelled, it looks like Samhain, S-A-M-H-A-I-N, Samhain.
And these celebrations and the Celtic life and Druidic practices tied in with them are sort of clouded in myth and mystery, and I am certainly not an expert on this.
But it was likely a celebration that marked the end of summer.
I put summer in quotes here, right, and nowadays most of us don't think of summer running until the end of October, but the end of the the light time of year, right, the time of year when it starts getting darker, a time period that was often envisioned as sort of breaking the world, or not the world, the year into two halves, kind of a light half and a dark half.
The time of harvest, the end of the growing season, and so forth, right?
So, it was almost certainly a harvest festival and a time of celebration, right?
And all of that background, that, as I say, millennia and more background is relevant for lots of reasons, but one is that another reason you might see fall festivals or harvest festivals is that for many neo-pagans, right, or other non-Christians,
The celebration of this time of year and calling it a harvest celebration or a fall celebration is sort of a way of recovering or rehabilitating a kind of pre-Christian consciousness, a kind of pre-Christian practice.
It's a way of opening up other forms of religious or spiritual practice that kind of counter what for them is a hegemonic Christian Focus, as well as a sort of commercially hegemonic holiday season.
So, all of which is to say that if you see the language of Fall Festival, Harvest Festival, etc., that can mean different things, right?
And I'm not here to denigrate all of those, nor am I here to pretend that I can talk about all of those.
Certainly in one episode, I can't.
Okay?
So, Fall Festivals can be a lot of things, but what I'm interested in I'm interested in the one you see on that church billboard.
I'm interested in why a certain kind of American Christianity has these fall festivals and advertises these fall festivals, why they do that and where that comes from, right?
And within that context, within that limited context, they're typically devised as an alternative to Halloween observances and celebrations.
And sometimes this is very explicit.
Sometimes this is more kind of suggested or implicit.
Sometimes it's just assumed.
The folks I talk to, they're like, I grew up in a church that always had like a fall harvest festival and they'll say, you know, nobody ever said you can't go trick-or-treating.
Nobody ever came out and said that you're bad if you put on a costume and go knock door to door.
Nobody ever said you like, I don't know, it was satanic to wear a witch's hat or whatever.
But it was there.
It was kind of assumed.
We just knew it, right?
And others will talk about, you know, preaching against this.
I remember sitting in churches, and my church that I grew up in, for the most part, was not super heavily into this fall festival thing.
But I remember some sermons targeting Halloween.
I remember some sermons talking about, you know, that we were prime for demonic influence at this time of year, and we'll get into that in a minute as well.
I remember that language, and that was part of what I grew up with, right?
So where does all that come from?
Well, here's the thing, all right?
So I'm going to give a little history today.
Not a lot of history.
It is not exhaustive.
Again, I'm not an expert.
Invite people to, you know, fill in gaps for me.
If you've got information that I don't have, go take a look for yourself.
As always, but Christians have a long history of encountering Samhain practices, right?
So to make a really long story short, when a Christian Rome, right?
A Rome that by this point in time has adopted Christianity as its religion, right?
When it took control of the Celtic regions that observed Samhain, The Christian holiday, All Saints Day, sort of takes shape, right?
What emerges as the Christian practice or observance of All Saints Day, it predates this, right?
Way back, even further back, before Christian Rome encounters these Celtic traditions and so forth, when Christians were still persecuted by Romans, The martyrs, that is those who had been executed for their faith, right, who had died for their faith, they were celebrated as heroes of the faith.
These were the quote-unquote saints.
So it starts out as a holiday really kind of aimed at Rome, right?
When Christians are the enemies of Rome, or Rome is perceived to be the enemy of Christians at any rate.
Eventually Christianity becomes the favored tradition of the Roman Empire, and then later becomes the official tradition of the Roman Empire.
And so when it takes on that status, All Saints Day develops, and there it becomes remembrance not just of the martyrs, but of the exemplars of the faith, right?
That's more what the word saints comes to mean, because once you're the official Roman, you know, the official Christian empire, you're not going to be martyring people anymore.
Nor do you want to explicitly remember the times when you did, and so the concept of the saint kind of changes and develops into something more like what it still is within the Catholic tradition, this kind of exemplars of the faith.
So, All Saints Day develops as this time of remembering these sort of heroes of the Christian faith.
So, you have this Christian tradition of All Saints Day that develops, okay?
So, in the meantime, Way out on the periphery of the Roman Empire, you have these Celtic regions that are now under Roman rule and Roman occupation.
Rome is not a Christian empire yet, but they are there.
They are encountering these traditions and people groups and all of these kinds of things.
They are attempting to sort of control those.
Often the Samhain practices and others are undertaken sort of in opposition to Roman rule and Roman occupation.
So, the Romans are opposed to them.
Eventually, they suppress them.
Over time, the Romans become Christians, right?
As I say, Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
And so, in those contexts, those same Celtic contexts, you now have Roman Christians who basically are trying to displace or replace these pre-existing Celtic practices.
And they basically swap Samhain for All Saints Day, right?
In other words, they make Sawan, sort of the time of the remembrance of All Saints Day, some evidence that All Saints Day was already sort of celebrated in the fall and so forth.
And Samhain already incorporated certain elements of remembering the dead, right?
And the idea that the veil between the living and the dead is particularly thin, and so it sort of lends itself to this.
And then Christian missionaries, then as now, they recognized that it was easier to modify existing religious practices and holidays that still had a life in the population That they are supervising, right?
They are still part of the actual lived experience of the peoples over which they rule, despite the fact that over time Rome becomes a Christian empire and so forth.
And so they recognize that it's easier to modify these practices than just to sort of ban them outright, okay?
So, November 1st becomes All Saints Day, right?
And it eventually develops into one of the Catholic Church's six days of obligation when the faithful are required to attend Mass, and All Saints Day is still a part of the, you know, the Catholic tradition, right?
So, the evening before All Saints Day becomes All Hallows' Eve or Halloween, right?
And I think a lot of us probably know some of that history.
I'm just going to throw out here that All this stuff about Halloween having pre-Christian origins, Christians sort of modifying it or incorporating it into their own practices, this is very much what happened with Christmas.
And I talked about this in an episode last year, kind of in the lead up to Christmas.
May revisit that some this year.
Again, I invite your thoughts about sort of episodes related to holidays, including Christmas.
But this was a pretty typical pattern of Christians sort of accommodating or appropriating pagan quote-unquote cultural practices and incorporating them into their faith, right?
So basically Halloween emerges as a kind of Christianized holiday, right?
All Hallows Eve for Halloween followed by All Saints Day on November 1st.
So Great, cool.
If you're listening to this and you don't know this history, or maybe this is new to you, say, that sounds fine, but like, so why are these churches that we're talking about now so opposed to Halloween and Halloween practices if Halloween in sort of the European West takes shape as a Christian holiday?
Okay?
The big reason is, the kind of historical reason, is that during the Protestant Reformation, Protestants rejected a number of Catholic observances, including the observance of All Saints Day, right?
They argued that it wasn't in the Bible, that these practices were unnecessary, that they were kind of add-ons to the authentic Christian tradition, that they were superstitious, that they involved the practice or the acceptance of pre-Christian pagan practices and so forth, right?
And so the Protestants come along, and in Protestant areas, they do away with this, okay?
So that's one strand.
That's a historical strand.
It goes back like hundreds of years, right?
And your typical church, with a sign up about a harvest festival, is not thinking of the Protestant Reformation doing away with All Saints Day, okay?
The other strand of this that they're thinking about is the way that that Halloween becomes kind of secularized culturally and it becomes the sort of cultural phenomenon that it is that we're all familiar with now, right?
Yeah, the fun and games stuff of like, I don't know, Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin and going trick-or-treating and apple bobbing and all that sort of stuff, but also all the mythology around it of, you know, Witches and goblins and, you know, again, the kind of veil between the living and the dead and being thin and ghosts and all of that sort of stuff, right?
And in the 20th century, as you have Christians that had been fundamentalists, that had sort of rejected American popular culture and so forth and withdrawn.
After World War II, they begin to kind of reemerge as what were known as the neo-evangelicals.
That develops into what we consider contemporary evangelicalism.
Topics that we've talked about on the show before, I invite you to go back and check out.
Those episodes, but they're kind of alarmed by this, right?
As they engage popular culture, they are alarmed by the celebration of horror and ghoulishness and the undead.
Halloween, because of this and the openness to this, it comes to be associated with things like Satanism and demonic influence and witchcraft and all of that, right?
The idea of this kind of permeable spiritual boundary, this idea that goes all the way back to the Celts, I think it is still transformed into the idea that is operative in this kind of popular Christianity.
The Halloween is a time where people are particularly susceptible and open to negative spiritual influence, to the activities of demons and activities of Satan and so forth.
And if some of that sounds weird to you, and you're like, do people really believe that?
Yes, people absolutely believe that.
Yes, there's a kind of church in American Christianity that believes that.
This is why I say the rejection of Halloween and the setting up of harvest festivals is something that appeals to a specific kind of popular Christianity, because this is all wrapped up within it, okay?
So this is why so many of us who are familiar with these kind of popular Christian practices, we remember pastors railing against Halloween.
We might remember pastors telling people not to read Harry Potter because it celebrated witchcraft.
Or if you're older, like me, you might remember churches preaching against Dungeons and Dragons, which has kind of been revived through shows like Uh, Stranger Things and so forth, right?
Uh, Sermons Against Violent Video Games, tying them to to Halloween and like just a general worry about sort of demonic or satanic influence or cultural decline and Halloween is like This time when it all becomes hyper-concentrated, right?
I think it becomes, for a certain kind of Christianity, this nexus of cultural and spiritual anxiety where there's a particular day when all of this is sort of hyper-concentrated and has to be countered, right?
And that's why there's the opposition to Halloween, okay?
But here's where we come full circle.
Here's where we get to the part that I find interesting about this, right?
Is that this form of popular Christianity didn't just stop with rejecting Halloween, right?
Protestant Reformers just didn't observe All Saints Day, right, on the shores of North America when the Christians come here.
And again, I'm in New England, so I think about this stuff.
The Puritans, they didn't put some alternative to pagan practices.
They just didn't have them.
Again, I talked about this with Christmas last year.
The Puritans just banned That's not what we find in this form of popular Christianity, right?
That's not what we find in this form of popular Christianity, right?
It's not just rejecting Halloween.
Despite their Protestant legacy, right, of critiquing Catholicism for, you know, practicing incorporating a practice of accommodation, right, of accommodating non-Christian culture into their spiritual forms, despite the rhetoric of countering so-called secular despite the rhetoric of countering so-called secular culture, this form of popular Christianity reenacts the same practices of cultural accommodation,
Or sort of follows the same pattern that those Roman Christians did in the Celtic Isles 2,000 years ago, right?
Rather than simply opposing or denouncing Halloween and everything that comes with it, they attempt to develop alternatives to it.
They don't simply reject popular culture and popular cultural practices.
They attempt to create a kind of Christian parallel popular culture.
And we've talked about this a lot in the show.
I've talked about it in this series.
This is one of the defining features of American evangelicalism, is this creation of a kind of parallel Christian culture that moves alongside of, or beneath, or sometimes even within, so-called secular popular culture.
This is what they develop, right?
Just as the Roman Christian missionaries discovered that it was difficult to simply do away with quote-unquote pagan practices, contemporary Christians opposed to Halloween know that they have to provide an alternative.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the capitalist society we live in, where religion is viewed as kind of one market among others, right, where people are in the market for religion, right, where we have to compete for consumers or for adherence with other belief systems and other traditions, We have to have something to offer.
It's not enough to just say, Halloween is bad, don't go out and do it.
We have to give an alternative.
And this is all the more so in a tradition where evangelicals no longer hold the kind of cultural sway to tell a town that they shouldn't have trick-or-treating or they shouldn't have Halloween events.
They now have to sort of compete with those.
And so you get this articulation of the Harvest Festival, right?
So next time you're out driving around and you see that church with the sign advertising a fall or harvest festival or when a pastor rails against Halloween or you get one of those, I don't know, maybe passive-aggressive emails from a family member like asking why you posted pictures of your kid as a witch on Facebook or whatever, this is the background for it.
And again, what I'm really interested in is not just the opposition to Halloween and all of that, although that's interesting to talk about.
Maybe we should say more about that.
Let me know what you think.
But what I'm really interested in, as you know, I try to observe culture, I try to make sense of it, I try to sort of decode it, right?
That's the purpose of this series.
As I look at it, what interests me is the way that this opposition is enacted in a way that simply parallels Arguably parrots the very culture of which it is so critical.
And this for me is a really defining feature of a lot of the things we look at, but this notion of harvest festivals, right?
So that's what I've got.
This is this thought on Halloween.
As I say, next week it is Halloween.
We could talk about other things.
Maybe we should.
Like I say, you let me know.
But I was driving around, I saw the signs for Harvest Festivals, I hear from you, I talk to clients, and these are the thoughts that sort of, I don't know, strike me.
Running out of time, we need to wind this down, so let me again say thank you to all of you.
Thank you for supporting us.
Thank you for listening to us.
It is always humbling to hear from so many of you.
I am working to close that email gap, as always.
It is my task of Sisyphus, right?
He rolled the rock up the hill over and over.
Mine is trying to close up the gap on emails.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S-W-A-J, would love to hear from you, as always.
Keep the ideas coming.
And until we talk again, please be well, and if you are observing Halloween, or Samhain, or Harvest Festivals, or whatever you are doing, be safe, have fun, and I'll talk to you soon.
