Halloween in the Wake of the Hamas Attack

Will people ever learn?

You might think the recent attack by Hamas on the people of Israel would temper the annual dance with the devil called Halloween. It hasn’t. The mock graveyards and ghoulish figures are out in my neighborhood once again. Seems about the same amount as in past years. I cannot understand why someone wants to make up their front yard like a place of death.  

I continue to see articles written by liberal journalists openly admitting what occurred in Israel on October 7 was outright evil. Such admissions are not common among elite journalists and the upper strata of society. It is to admit there is the opposites spiritual quality of good as described in the Bible. Neither is talked about in some of those circles.  

Journalist Lance Morrow wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal about evil. 

The torments that Hamas “militants” inflicted on Oct. 7—mass slaughter, rape, the beheading and incineration of babies—amounted to behavior that the high court of any uncorrupted intelligence in the world would describe as evil... Many people believe evil doesn’t exist. That view is especially common among the rational and enlightened, who insist that events always have a scientific, clinical or political explanation. They are mistaken. Evil is real, with a spooky, inscrutable life of its own. (Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real; Wall Street Journal; October 24, 2023)  

Writing in today’s edition of the same paper, Barton Swaim takes aim at the Halloween custom in unmistakable terms. 

I’ve never been a fan of Halloween. In recent years, as celebrations have become darker and more gruesome, I’ve started to dread its onset. 

Part of my aversion arises from my own hidebound premodern Calvinist outlook, in which death is no laughing matter and necromancy is forbidden by God (see Deuteronomy 18:9-13). Forgive my Puritan sensibility, but I find the whole spectacle ugly and offensive and vaguely sinister. What sort of “holiday” deliberately terrifies children with images of murder and ruin and treats torture and death as a joke? I look forward to the day when this ironic nonholiday goes the way of Flag Day or Michaelmas. 

Swaim further targets our secularized culture. 

Halloween, in its present iteration, is the perfect holiday for secularized and affluent sophisticates: The supernatural isn’t real. Evil isn’t a lurking spiritual force but the consequence of bad societal arrangements or an underfunded education system. Most of the people one knows have little chance of being killed at the hands of another. But wouldn’t it be thrilling if we could pretend, in a jolly sort of way, that something or someone was out to kill us? This is the same impulse, I assume, that drives the teenagers of wealthy families to watch horror films. (Down With Halloween’s Ironic Death Cult; Wall Street Journal Digital; October 26, 2023) 

The Hamas attack should be enough horror and gruesome for anyone. To celebrate it in the desensitized manner of current culture shows the truth of what Paul writes. 

Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron,; (1 Timothy 4:1-2 NKJV) 

Some are waking up. More need to follow.