Hell Houses & Halloween
I was around eleven years old when I was taken to my first and only hell house. Prior to this, I had been exposed to a fair amount of rapture movies and stories that left me completely scarred and praying the sinner’s prayer each time that I thought I was going to die. At this hell house, there were different rooms that we entered that had scenes set up—like a teen fighting with their parents about not going to church or an angered husband who was an alcoholic. By the end, we learned that these characters all died in tragic ways and we were going to find out if they ended up in heaven or hell.
We slowly entered into the dark, scary hell room with lights flickering. For me, it was like entering a haunted house. We peered in through a window to three people chained to a black and red wall, one of them was the teen who didn’t want to go to church. Each person was crying out and screamed for relief. The lighting in the room went dark and all we heard were screams that came from the three imprisoned bodies.
I’ll probably never forget that experience…it messed with my faith in damaging and painful ways. It twisted my image of God, my image of goodness, my image of eternity. That Hell House did more damage than Halloween ever could.
Halloween Worship
For some, Halloween is a time of imagination and excitement—a chance to play and create. Pumpkins and spiders adorn kitchen hand towels, whimsical costumes line the aisles at Target, and little creatures that make you jump and cry “BOO!” provide a chance to laugh and squeal while walking around your neighborhood. And among those who celebrate and aim for a certain kind of “fun”, there are some who scare and torture in unkind and traumatizing ways.
For others, this holiday only marks a dark beginning of destruction, ghost-summoning, and devil worship. Perhaps you’ve seen this quote used to convince Christians that celebration of this day is Satanic worship, “I’m glad Christians let their kids worship the Devil at least one night out of the year.” (This quote is attributed to Aton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, but I was unable to find a source noting that this is a real quote from the founder.) And while I see the concern of a child participating in actual Devil worship, I wonder if the idea behind this quote takes a step that even we might not make—those same Christians probably wouldn’t say that any child participating in a Christmas or Easter event is automatically participating in Jesus-worship.
Wherever you find yourself during the celebrating or avoidance of this holiday, I am wondering if there are some things that we might observe and notice together.
Damned if you don’t, damned to hell if you do
Some Christians have decided that instead of Halloween, they will celebrate Reformation Day or Harvest Festival. This day is usually on the same day as or around the time of Halloween and the themes (pumpkins, costumes, and hay bales) are typically the same as other Halloween events and parties—minus the witch and ghost costumes of course. In their best efforts, some have tried to redeem Halloween by removing the parts that seem especially evil or scary and have made their own version of the day—this can be such a beautiful thing! In this, they are seeking to care for those who like myself, might be easily frightened or overwhelmed by the scary parts of the holiday. We may consider that this is a good step toward goodness and truth—and along the way, we may also find that the total absence of things like death, darkness, and evil to not be the full story of life on this earth, even life with Jesus.
Perhaps the felt darkness of Halloween invites us into a reality that we long to understand, one that we feel exists, but that we don’t often want to enter into.
Maybe out of fear of glimpsing into a world that feels too dark for our eyes, or maybe because we feel the pain of death and darkness too much already, we choose to not only bar ourselves from things like trick-or-treating, but we say that for someone, especially a Christian to participate, is devil worship. We say that it is evil to celebrate with pumpkins and ghosts while scaring fragile ones with the flames of hell.
Perhaps the church that put on that hell house was trying to redeem Halloween. Perhaps they thought they knew what would (or should) truly scare people—a vivid, terrible picture of life after death for those who didn’t go to church or didn’t control their substance abuse—and it worked for someone like me, I was scared to do anything wrong again.
But I don’t think that this is the heart of Jesus—to scare and traumatize children with shackles and torture, threatening their eternal life if they decide not to go to youth group.
Even in our best efforts to redeem a holiday like Halloween, we might still be faced with real fears, real scares, and real deaths.
The origins of historic Halloween are vast—and Christians, from the beginning, have been active in seeking to make this a day to care for neighbor and community, to celebrate and feast, and even to simply have fun.
Perhaps we too can seek to celebrate this holiday in holy and honest ways—by celebrating the goodness of opening our doors and sharing food, delighting in the whimsy and creativity of costumes and masks, and maybe even looking at death and darkness in honest ways together—remembering that while we experience death and darkness in this world, there is One who enters as light and life into that darkness, One who doesn’t compel us to come by fear and torture, but by love and kindness.
