Bah Humbug to Fear

I’m basically the Ebenezer Scrooge of Halloween, which is to say I hate most Halloween decorations, and it would be perfectly fine with me if we just skipped right over the holiday and went straight to Thanksgiving.

I’m not legalistic about it. I know some Christians have a strict “no Halloween” policy, and I can certainly understand it, but that’s not where my conscience lands me. I have no problem with costumes, candy, or fun. If you’re going to denounce Halloween on account of its pagan origins, then you have no business putting up a Christmas tree either. I generally believe that even things that were originally rooted in darkness can be reclaimed for good. The passage from Corinthians about food sacrificed to idols comes immediately to mind, and I think Christian people should create prayerful space for other believers to work these issues out according to the dictates of their own consciences. My personal rule of thumb for my kids is that they don’t get to dress up in anything that glorifies evil or death. I understand that some will disagree, and that’s fine.

Still, I think Halloween is as good a time as any to address the very real nature of spiritual warfare. I’m increasingly noticing that so much of the holiday celebration does seem to be rife with demonic elements that people are tempted to write off as benign when they’re not, and there’s a whole world of important conversation to be had in this space. We’re no longer seeing friendly little ghosts with googly eyes as decorations; we’re seeing decapitated babies and severed bodies with intestines spilling out the sides. What does this communicate about our collective spiritual condition?

Let me just say that I hate being scared. I hate blood and guts and gratuitous gore. It pisses me off when people put demonic zombie babies or shrieking ghouls with glowing eyes on their front lawns. These things scare the living daylights out of kids with overactive imaginations. I was once one of them. Heck, even the old school cartoon Maleficent from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” gave me nightmares.( “Touch the spindle! Touch it I say!” I can’t be the only 80s kid who was traumatized by that crap.)

I’ll gladly distribute candy to the neighborhood rug rats, but you’re not gonna find a blowup Frankenstein on my lawn. I may never understand why people pay good money to flood their minds with fear. Hell will freeze over before I pay someone to wear a bloody clown costume and jump out at me wielding a chainsaw. How the heck is this fun? What is wrong with people? I mean, I understand the basic concept of enjoying an adrenaline rush, but why not just ride a roller coaster or go ziplining or take a cold shower? You lose me when blood, guts, and evil get baked into the experience. I don’t think that’s emotionally or spiritually healthy at all.

Again, I’m not trying to be judgmental here, but I do think a word of caution is in order when it comes to curating your thrill-seeking content. I know a woman whose teen daughter suffers from debilitating anxiety to the degree that she’s been institutionalized for it, so when I hear that this woman is actively taking her daughter to watch horror films in the theater, all I can do is scratch my head and pray that the good Lord gets a hold of hers. Our brains are like the rest of our body; what we feed them actually matters: Garbage in, garbage out.

As a Christian, I avoid anything related to the occult: tarot cards, ouija boards, astrology, magic crystals, psychics, etc.—not for me. It’s my personal opinion that when you dabble in that stuff, you might as well roll out a welcome mat for the devil to take up residence in your life. And I think, if we’re not careful, some Halloween activities can inadvertently do just that. I think an active, willful choice to feed fear is a dangerous one.

The spiritual realm is real, and there’s a literal war between good and evil over our souls. There are angels, and there are demons. Demons traffic in fear. Why help them?

As a child, I experienced the demonic with startling frequency and intensity. As I grow in my faith and understanding, I realize this is a typical experience for abuse survivors. Even those who don’t believe in God often have personal, visual experience with the demonic realm. We have fancified, clinical language to describe and explain these experiences in a way that feels less mystical and more logical, but these explanations never really get to the root of the problem.

For me, this experience was so pervasive and so intense that I slept with the light on well into my 20s. When I was pregnant with my son and fighting some of the most extreme spiritual warfare of my life, I actually needed my mentor to sleep in the bed with me because the terror was so intense. I could see demons in my room at night. I could feel them. I could hear them.

It’s fascinating to me that even people who don’t believe in God per se have often had personal experiences with the demonic that are hard to explain away:

• Things like sleep paralysis are often (not always) spiritually driven.

• If you’ve ever been in a relationship with a narcissist when his eyes go completely black and his jaw tightens and he begins to shake, and he doesn’t seem to remember a thing you’re talking about afterward, there’s usually spiritual funk involved.

• If you’ve ever heard other worldly voices or shrieking coming out of someone you know and love, it’s a safe guess that there’s spiritual warfare in play.

• If you’ve experienced weird events in your home and secretly wondered if it’s paranormal activity, it could very easily be spiritual warfare.

• If you have an irrational, uncontrollable aversion and rage toward even the mere mention of God, you might be dealing with some spiritual crap.

No one wants to talk about any of this, of course, because it makes you look and sound like a wackadoodle, but I don’t care how you judge me; I know what I’ve seen, and I know that Halloween, in particular, has a tendency to stir some of this up, so I figured I could at least invite the discussion.

Why am I talking about all this crazy stuff on my blog? Because I think people out there with similar experiences need to know that it’s real, they need to know what to call it, and they need to know there is hope for freedom from it.

While there is so much I deeply appreciate about my Reformed theological roots, this is one area where I think Reformed believers (generally cessationists) get things really wrong in a way that severely limits our impact in the world around us. For me, there was no language to describe my experiences, which were quickly written off as mental illness rather than demonic oppression. And the shame that came with this diagnosis made me seek to hide, isolate, and retreat further into the oppression rather than expose, rebuke, and conquer it.

It was only after I started going to a charismatic church that I realized that everything I had been taught about spiritual gifts and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit was flat out wrong. I wasn’t mentally ill. I was experiencing the demonic, and I had to come to embrace my authority over that crap in order to thrive as an adult.

Reformed believers, I say this in love, but if you’re tempted to quench the Spirit, stop. We are expressly forbidden from doing that in Scripture, so we forfeit our right to claim orthodoxy it we are actively embracing errant teaching. Speaking in tongues? It’s real. Casting out demons? Real. I’ve done it. I’ve seen it. You will never convince me otherwise. And the tangible gifts of the Spirit are available to all believers. The Bible even encourages us to “eagerly desire” them. Cessationism is not orthodoxy.

I guess what I’m needing to express to anyone reading this who might be floundering in ambiguity about what to think about any of it is that you’re not crazy if you’ve had these experiences. And there are people who can pray with you to help you learn how to navigate them.

The Bible says in Ephesians that “We fight not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It’s true in a literal, active sense, not some figurative, impotent, passé one. Do I think you have to speak in tongues or operate in the prophetic to be a genuine believer? Absolutely not. Do I think your effectiveness as a Christian and intimacy with Christ will increase tenfold if you open yourself up to receive and believe audacious things the Bible invites us to believe are possible? Yes.

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.” John 14:12

If you’re out there reading this and thinking, “Gosh, I’m familiar with some of this,” just know you’re not alone, and you’re not crazy. And what you choose to feed matters. Are you feeding faith, or are you mindlessly participating in things that feed darkness and fear? How do your Halloween activities factor into any of this?

The good news is that as real and as horrifying as the darkness is, the light is infinitely greater, and His name is Jesus. My old pastor used to say, “There’s only one thing that moves faster than the light, and it’s the darkness; it has to get out of the way.”

Join me in saying, “Bah humbug!” to fear. It’s got to go. May your Octobers find you flooded with love and light.

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