The hippies have a famous saying, “what if there was a war and no one showed up?”
Then Gary Larson, in The Far Side had a Military General ask, “what if we had a war and everybody showed up?”
I’ve got a new question, what of we had a war and everybody showed up but only half of them knew it?
Every year around Halloween (which you might hear me refer to as the “pagan death festival) a debate starts up around my house/family/church… well around me. Truth be told Halloween is not the real problem, it’s just the spark, because it kicks off the season including Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas and New Years.
How much should we participate in “holidays”?
The argument from my wife and folks at church is that we should use Halloween as a day of outreach. People are coming to your door, share Christ, or at least a tract, with them. Of course there’s the argument that it’s just kids having fun at dress up and its not hurting anything.
If Halloween happened in a vacuum I might agree with that line of thinking. I mean, really, what’s wrong wrong with dressing up like Spiderman?
But it’s not happening in a vacuum. The world is having a Twilight meltdown. Our teenagers are going to school dressed like guest of honor at a funeral. The rate of all the bad things we don’t want, teen pregnancy, drug use, etc… and the rate of our kids leaving the church when they leave home are all skyrocketing.
I have the dubious honor of living in the shadow of Athens GA. (Here’s a tip: never name your city after a pagan goddess.) It is common for me to see bumper stickers reading “the old ways are alive” referring to the Druidic customs, “goddess bless America” or just proclaiming the owner a practitioner of Wicca.
We are in a culture war. It’s easy to see when they shoot rockets out of Gaza or fly planes into buildings or march on the capital to have homosexual marriage. Its not as easy to see when it’s you neighbor’s kid making a subtle shift, slowly picking up little clues from the adults around him to move farther from what we consider acceptable.
Somewhere, we have got to draw the line and say “this far and no farther.” At some point we have to say, “here I stand I can do no other.” As for me, I simply cannot in good conscious participate in the Druid tax collection (Halloween) any more than I can participate in Ramadan or a bunch of people dressed in black sitting around a pentagram.
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I agree, now what?
My wife accuses me of being a hermit and hiding, which might be true when my lights are all off on 31 Oct. But for two weeks before and after my opinion of Halloween strikes up dozens of conversations where I explain why I don’t like and don’t feel it’s appropriate to participate in the day. Strangely enough even people planning on going whole-hog in dressing up are receptive to what I have to say.
In our family we don’t do Santa Claus. We give gifts, as a reminder of the ultimate gift we were given. We just don’t use the mythical elf and his possessed reindeer. It seems like every Christmas I find another family making the same choice.
this is the ultimate goal, that Christians would one by one reclaim our Holy days and stand against the unholy days until the entire societal treatment of these days is shifted.
That’s a tall order and a *LONG* term goal. But hey, think big right?