Understanding the origins of Halloween — and how Christians can shine hope and light in the face of fear and darkness.
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21) And Americans are spending a lot of money on Halloween. The National Retail Federation (NRF) projected Halloween spending would reach $13.1 billion in 2025, surpassing the previous record of $12.2 billion set in 2023. Halloween is the second grossing consumer holiday in America.
That means that Americans spend more money on Halloween decorations, costumes, parties, paraphernalia, entertainment, and travel than on any other day except for Christmas. Only Christmas still outpaces Halloween. Halloween is a bigger deal than Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, and yes, Easter.
Spiritually speaking, that’s an indictment of the American heart. But many people will say that’s much ado about nothing and that Christians who protest Halloween, protest too much.
The origins of Halloween are Celtic and have to do with observing the end of summer sacrifices to gods in Druidic tradition. Those summer sacrifices included both animal and human sacrifice. The Celtic people in what we now call Britain and France, believed the waning days of summer, its light and life pushed out by the encroaching darkness, were due to Samhain (pronounced Sow-wane), the lord of death. It was believed Sow-wane sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. Most of our Halloween practices can be traced back to these pagan rites and superstitions. So, it’s definitely a pagan celebration of evil—making it specifically forbidden for God-fearing Christian believers. Which is why the church sought to adapt it.
In the fourth century, Christians attempted to co-opt the holiday by celebrating the lives of faithful Christian saints. All Saints day, November 1, was flanked by All Souls day (Nov 2) and All Hallows Eve, October 31. While most Americans will not be in church celebrating All Saints Day or All Souls Day, almost every American will be out in some observance of Halloween.
So what is our response and responsibility? As each of us must work out our own convictions before God through His Word and His Spirit, I have a proposition for you to consider. Let’s shine as lights in the darkness and enter incarnationally into the world as agents of God’s redemptive grace.
Yes, Halloween has pagan roots and is a genuinely grotesque glorification of evil and death. But Halloween is also the one day of the year where strangers cross the threshold of our personal kingdoms, step over the curb and knock on our door— hoping to receive a blessing.
This is the day the world actually comes to us seeking favor. Do we open the door? Do we bless? Do they find in us a glimpse of joy and grace?
Are we the one neighbor they remember for greeting them, knowing them by name, recognizing them even through the get up of the world? Do they remember us as the house where they were known and loved; where the giving was extravagant and really really good?
Think about how that differs from the way we ordinarily approach strangers who come knocking on our door. So, what if Christians were to see Halloween as an opportunity— not for extraction, but for incarnational living?
Lots of churches now gather their own people in their own buildings or on their own campuses isolated from the celebrations taking place in the neighborhoods where God has actually deployed His people to incarnate the Gospel. They are what Dan Steigerwald calls “extractional” events. They extract the people of God from the relationships and community events where God intends the reverse. They pull us out exactly when we most need to be showing up and leaning in.
So, ask yourself, where would Jesus have us be on Halloween? Would Jesus have us turning out our lights and hiding from our neighbors— or would Jesus have us leaning in, turning on the lights and inviting people in? Could you demonstrate the beauty and truth of the goodness of God by preparing to joyfully receive those who come knocking at your door, blessing them with more than they expect?
Harvest parties at churches are great— if the harvest we’re celebrating is the harvest of new believers whom God has gathered unto Himself in Jesus Christ through the deployment of His people into the world He so loves. And that kind of harvest happens when the people of God are faithful to represent God as His ambassadors IN the world. So, while there are times to draw away by ourselves, I do not believe Halloween needs to be one of those nights.
Instead, we take our posts in the culture as living demonstrations of goodness in the face of evil, light in the darkness, dolling out the sweet savor of God that others might taste and see that the Lord is not only good, He is right there, IN the neighborhood where they live.
Our homes are the lighthouses, the places of safety and refuge, where welcoming Kingdom ambassadors stand with open doors to bless all who seek and knock and ask.
I feel I’d be remiss in not making a few additional points about Halloween as 508th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
And while it might be tempting to think The Reformation only affected “the Church,” consider that The Reformation established our sense of the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom to challenge the authority of our day. Luther’s act established the right of an individual person to stand up and say, “I don’t agree. I think there’s another way. I think the institution is wrong.” And in nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, he was not only inaugurating a great schism in the hierarchical church, but establishing the cleft that made possible the recognition of inalienable rights we take for granted today.
It is not an overstatement to say The Reformation also gave us democracy. Yes, really. The idea that God intended a priesthood of all believers, that God intended for every person to read and understand His Word, and pray to Him without the priest as mediator, was democratizing not only the faith— but extended to the entire culture and society.
As we consider The Reformation and the radical changes that took place in the world as an outflow of one man’s act of moral courage, let us consider how we might restore the Word of God to its rightful place in our lives and the life of the churches where we worship. Let us consider the abuses of power we see and how best to call them out in ways that would result in fresh reformations. And let us consider how we might rightly and righteously exercise the freedoms of religion, speech, assembly and redress in our day and time as Luther did in his.
If you are a Protestant Christian, this is your day. Let us reclaim the spirit of The Reformation and commit ourselves anew to its Solas: Scripture alone; Faith alone; Grace Alone; Christ alone; to the Glory of God alone.
