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Some churches rebel against the dark side of Halloween

Sunday, October 27, 2002

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Nine years ago, Kelli Maravalli sat down with her 7-year old daughter and told her she was free to have candy on the night of Oct. 31.

	The Grim Reaper is the tour guide for "Hellstop," an anti-drunk-driving presentation by Word and Worship Fellowship in North Braddock. (Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette)

But not from trick-or-treating. Maravalli, the children's pastor at Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Church, had pretty much had it with Halloween.

"I was personally amazed at the way little kids were dressing up -- as Freddy Krueger, or the grim reaper," said Maravalli, 43, who began organizing a "harvest" party instead, one that has become a successful substitute at her church for Halloween.

"It was just a combination of seeing how my own children were experiencing Halloween and not feeling that it was consistent with the other values we were instilling in our kids."

Maravalli isn't alone. Many conservative Christians have stopped celebrating what today is the second -biggest commercial holiday, after Christmas, in America with an expected $6.9 billion in sales of candy, decorations and costumes this year.

"I have a problem with the association of Halloween with darker things, everything from the extremes of the demonic to things that tend to scare or be destructive or evil," said the Rev. Karen Stevenson, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Washington, Pa., which plans to host a coffeehouse featuring music and singing as an alternative to Halloween night. "Plus, there are safety issues which have arisen in recent years, and that's been a really unfortunate piece added to the mix."

The anti-Halloween movement has ebbed and flowed in this country, flaring up most recently, experts say, around 20 years ago when reports of razor blades in apples and poisoned candies became more common, not to mention widespread vandalism in cities such as Detroit on "Devil's Night," the night before Halloween.

"Evilness aside, I'm a parent of four kids, and I would like to keep them safe," said the Rev. Keith Applegarth, children's pastor at Monroeville Assembly of God, which sponsors a big carnival-style harvest party on Oct. 30 and 31, including a skit dubbed "The Fearless Factor," in which children's fears are soothed with references to Jesus Christ's caring and love.

"I don't have a major philosophical view against Halloween," he added. "What I try to stay away from is the whole fear thing. There is a lot of stuff that goes on that night, ritualistic stuff, with black cats disappearing and all that. I don't understand how we can have decorations featuring dead people hanging from trees. If I did that in April, I'd be arrested."

Word and Worship Fellowship, an independent charismatic church in North Braddock, puts on a Christianized haunted house called Hellstop that's aimed at teenagers. It depicts the dangers of drinking and driving. A gruesome car accident is re-enacted, complete with fake blood, and a grim reaper leads participants through hell before encouraging them to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

Hundreds of other evangelical denominations have gone further by purchasing Judgment House kits, where abortion and homosexuality are described as a straight route to hell. One of the companies that offers the kits -- New Creation Evangelism, a Clearwater, Fla., not-for-profit business -- has trained 220 churches in 27 states on how to host a Judgment House.

"Halloween just isn't the best thing for our kids," said Gavin Hassell, 40, of Murrysville, a member of Word and Worship and the father of three children, two of whom participated in Hellstop. "People are becoming so desensitized to things, and we want to expose our children to godly things, upright things, moral things."

But keeping up the anti-Halloween spirit can be taxing for some churches. DaySpring Christian Center in Tarentum, which has run a Hellhouse for the past few years, won't be doing it this year, citing the amount of staff and money in putting together such an event, which can run into the thousands of dollars.

"Since we had already decided to do a dinner theater play in November, it would have been too much," said a woman answering the phone at the church, which plans to sponsor a "Hallelujah!" evening on Halloween, featuring games and food. "One year the kids got to throw pies at the pastors. It's a lot of fun."

While many churches try different ways to spend Halloween, there's no evidence that it is actively condemned throughout the Christian community.

In 2001, a poll by Christianity Today, an evangelical Christian magazine, found that 56 percent of respondents said their churches offered alternatives to children for Halloween, while 34 percent said they took a hands-off policy, allowing members to do what they want. Another 4 percent said their churches actively opposed Halloween.

Questionable history

Besides objecting to the holiday's secular, overtly commercial character and increasing emphasis on violence and evil, some Christians are uncomfortable with what they perceive as Halloween's pagan origins. The holiday takes place on what was, many centuries ago, a Celtic Holy Day, the feast of "Samhain" (pronounced sow-en), which marked in a rather dark and sinister fashion the passing of the old year and beginning of the new. On this night, the dead were believed to rise from their graves to take over the bodies of the living. To scare off those spirits, people would dress in costumes and storm about in the dark.

While the Internet is rife with Web sites reporting on these pagan roots, some scholars say the connection is overstated. Many of the rituals of the holiday -- trick-or- treating and the carving of jack-o'-lanterns -- stem from medieval Christian traditions which replaced earlier pagan ones, said Hans Broedel, a professor of medieval history at Hamilton College.

"There was a concerted effort in the 19th century by scholars interested in paganism to connect Halloween with ancient Celtic traditions, but most Halloween traditions are Christian. In fact, efforts to connect it with paganism may have been a form of stealth Catholic bashing," Broedel said.

As Christianity spread through Northern Europe in the Middle Ages, the Celtic New Year was transformed by the Catholic Church into All Saints Day, or All Hallows Day -- hence "All Hallows Eve," or Halloween -- on Nov. 1, he said. And the Celtic Day of the Dead also was turned into All Soul's Day, on Nov. 2.

"The medieval church believed that on All Soul's Day, the souls of the departed in purgatory were allowed to come back to the living world for intercessory prayers" that would help send them to heaven, Broedel said.

In a practice called "soul caking," children would walk from door to door "offering to pray for the dead" in exchange for treats. Indeed, children not only went trick or treating in the 16th and 17th centuries in England and Ireland, but they also carved jack-o'-lanterns from turnips, strung them from the end of a forked stick and carried them around at night.

There may be other reasons Halloween was anathema to some religious groups, said Anderson Rearick, an assistant professor of English at Mount Vernon Nazarene College.

"Christians have always had a problem with fiction," Rearick said. "Quakers were once very uncomfortable with the idea that you could make up stories, because they were lies. Novels were frowned upon for the same reason, because they didn't tell the truth." Rearick, a self-described evangelical Christian, doesn't see the anti-Halloween movement as building momentum.

"The anti- feelings about Halloween are a fad. What is terribly important and serious to one generation becomes null and void to another generation," said Rearick, who is, by the way, pro-Halloween.

"If we give up All Hallows Eve, we lose the delight of God's gift of imagination, and we condemn the rest of society to a darker Halloween because our laughter will not be there to make the devil run. If we follow the traditional formula of having a good time at his expense, Satan flees," he said.

"Whatever," sniffed Ralph Deffenbaugh of Mt. Lebanon when he was told of Rearick's view.

When his children were young, Deffenbaugh enjoyed the excitement of Halloween.

"It was fun getting dressed up, and watching them. There are parts of it that certainly appeal to our humanity. Children are cute. They're beautiful, innocent."

But after he became a Christian, "I started wondering, 'How will this glorify Christ?' " He couldn't find any way it did, so he told his children that they would no longer participate in Halloween.

Did they object?

"Oh, yeah," he laughed. "They were viewing it from a child's perspective. What's in it for me? They're OK with it now. It's an opportunity for us to go to church and focus on the Lord that night."

"It certainly doesn't bring glory to Christ, that's pretty obvious."