A Holiday of Darkness
Every autumn, as October draws to a close, much of the Western world dresses itself in the symbols of death. Skeletons hang from porches, gravestones appear on front lawns, witches and demons stare from shop windows, and children go door to door dressed as ghouls, vampires, and the walking dead. Americans alone are expected to spend some $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation, with nearly three in four people planning to take part. For most, it is simply a night of costumes and candy, harmless fun for the children.
But is it harmless? Where did this festival come from? What do its customs mean? And what does the Word of God say about a Christian’s part in it? In this message we will look at the dark history of Halloween, how it came to be accepted in America and around the world, why it is not Christian but rooted in paganism and the occult, and why believers should not be partakers of it.
Its Roots: The Pagan Festival of Samhain
Halloween did not begin in the church. It began among the pagan Celts of Ireland, Scotland, and the surrounding lands, who celebrated the festival of Samhain (pronounced “SOW-in”) at the end of October and the beginning of November. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year, and for the Celts it was the start of a new year.
At Samhain, the Celts believed, the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead grew thin. The spirits of the dead, along with fairies and other supernatural beings, were thought to roam the earth. Fires were lit, offerings of food were set out to appease the spirits, and people disguised themselves so that wandering spirits would not recognize them. The druids, the pagan priests of the Celts, presided over the rites and practiced divination, seeking to foretell the future on that night above all others. Here, in the darkness of Celtic paganism, are the roots of the costumes, the treats left for visitors, the bonfires, and the fascination with ghosts and the dead that still mark Halloween today.
Rome Baptizes a Pagan Festival
How did a pagan festival of the dead come to carry a Christian-sounding name? The answer lies with the Church of Rome, which for centuries followed a policy of absorbing pagan customs rather than rooting them out. In AD 601 Pope Gregory I wrote to the missionary Mellitus, who was bound for England, advising that the pagans’ temples should not be destroyed but converted to Christian use, and that their festivals should be given a Christian meaning so that the people might be won more easily.
In the eighth century Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in St Peter’s in Rome to all the saints on November 1, and in 835 Pope Gregory IV extended the feast of All Saints, or All Hallows, to the whole church. Around the end of the tenth century, the monks of Cluny began to observe All Souls’ Day on November 2, a day of prayers for the dead in purgatory. The evening before All Hallows’ Day became “All Hallows’ Even,” shortened in time to “Hallowe’en.”
So the festival of the dead did not die; it was simply moved into the church calendar and given a Roman Catholic coat of paint. Prayers to and for the dead replaced offerings to the spirits, and the pagan night remained much as it had always been. This is the same method by which Rome absorbed the pagan midwinter festival into Christmas and the spring festival of the goddess into Easter. But a pagan custom does not become Christian because a pope renames it. “Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jeremiah 10:2).
The Customs and What They Meant
Trick-or-treating. In medieval Britain and Ireland, the poor went from house to house on All Souls’ Day “souling,” begging for “soul cakes” in return for praying for the souls of the household’s dead in purgatory. In Scotland and Ireland, young people went “guising,” going door to door in disguise. Behind both lay the old Samhain practice of disguising oneself from spirits and setting out food to appease them. The phrase “trick or treat” itself carries a threat: give, or mischief will follow.
The jack-o’-lantern. Irish folklore told of “Stingy Jack,” a man who tricked the devil and was condemned to wander the earth with only a coal to light his way. People carved frightening faces into turnips and set lights inside them to ward off Jack and other evil spirits. In America, the pumpkin took the turnip’s place.
Costumes, ghosts, and witches. The disguises once worn to hide from the dead have become costumes that celebrate the dead and the demonic. Witches, the practitioners of the very sorcery God condemns, are portrayed as friendly figures. Divination games, fortune-telling, and seances have long been part of Halloween parties. The whole festival glorifies death, fear, and the powers of darkness.
How Halloween Came to America
The Puritans and Protestants of colonial New England would have nothing to do with Halloween; they rightly regarded it as both pagan and popish. The holiday came to America chiefly with the great wave of Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine in the 1840s, and with Scottish immigrants, who brought their customs of guising, turnip lanterns, and Halloween games with them.
In the early twentieth century, as the holiday spread, it became known for vandalism and pranks, and communities began to promote parties and parades to tame it, turning it into a children’s celebration. The phrase “trick or treat” first appeared in print in 1927. After the Second World War, as sugar rationing ended and the suburbs grew, trick-or-treating became a national custom, encouraged by candy makers, retailers, television, and Hollywood. What had been a pagan rite and then a Romish feast became, in America, a commercial holiday worth billions of dollars, and the church largely made its peace with it.
From America to the World
In recent decades America has exported Halloween around the globe through films, television, and commerce. In Britain and Ireland it has grown into a major commercial season. Across Europe, from Germany to France, it was promoted heavily by retailers from the 1990s onward. In Japan, enormous crowds in costume now fill the streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district, so much so that local authorities have restricted drinking in the streets and urged visitors to stay away. In South Korea, Halloween crowds in Seoul’s Itaewon district ended in tragedy in October 2022, when a crowd crush killed 159 people, most of them young. Halloween is now marked in some form in much of the world, often by people who know nothing of its history.
Its spread is a picture of how paganism, given an attractive wrapping, can conquer a culture without a fight. Few ask where the customs came from. Fewer still ask what God thinks of them.
Not Christian, but Occult
Halloween has never belonged to Christ. Its roots are in Celtic paganism, its name and dates come from the Roman Catholic cult of the dead, and its imagery celebrates witches, ghosts, devils, and death. And those who openly serve darkness know exactly what it is. For modern witches and pagans, Wiccans among them, Samhain is one of their eight great annual festivals, often regarded as the most important, and they observe it as a time to commune with the dead. Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, wrote in The Satanic Bible that after one’s own birthday, “the two major Satanic holidays are Walpurgisnacht and Halloween.”
When witches and Satanists claim a holiday as their own, Christians should take notice. The occult world does not celebrate Halloween by accident; it celebrates it because Halloween is, at its heart, a festival of darkness. Satan “is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), and nowhere does he do it more effectively than in making darkness look like fun for children.
Why Christians Should Not Take Part
1. God forbids all dealings with the occult. “There shall not be found among you any one that … useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD” (Deuteronomy 18:10–12). “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them” (Leviticus 19:31). A festival built around witches, spirits of the dead, and divination is built on the very things God calls abomination.
2. Light has no fellowship with darkness. “For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? … Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you” (2 Corinthians 6:14–17). “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). How can the children of light celebrate a night devoted to darkness?
3. We are not to worship God after the manner of the heathen. God warned Israel not to ask how the pagan nations served their gods, saying, “even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 12:30–31). “Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jeremiah 10:2). Taking a pagan festival and giving it a Christian label, as Rome did, is exactly what God forbade.
4. We cannot share the table of the Lord and the table of devils. “But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:20–21).
5. We are to abstain from all appearance of evil. “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:22). “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely … think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). Gravestones, gore, demons, and witches are not lovely or pure.
6. The dead do not wander the earth. The whole idea of spirits of the dead returning on Halloween is a lie. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Between the rich man and Lazarus there was “a great gulf fixed” (Luke 16:26). The believer at death is “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); the unbeliever is in torment awaiting judgment. Whatever spirits men contact in the occult are not the departed dead, but demons. “Should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony” (Isaiah 8:19–20).
7. We must train our children in the way they should go. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). Teaching children that witches are fun and ghosts are friends trains them to make light of the powers that seek to destroy souls. When the believers at Ephesus were converted, those who had used “curious arts” brought their books together and burned them publicly (Acts 19:19). They did not keep a little of the occult for fun.
Answering the Objections
“It’s just harmless fun for the kids.” Something is not harmless because it is popular or because children enjoy it. The question for the Christian is not whether something is fun, but whether it pleases God. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
“It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Witches and Satanists certainly think it does. And even if many celebrate in ignorance, the Christian is not ignorant. We know where it comes from, and we know what God has said.
“Our church holds a harvest festival or trunk-or-treat instead.” Many churches hold alternative events on October 31, often with costumes and candy. But an event held on the same night, with the same customs, under a different name, is only Halloween with a church sign on it. That is exactly what Rome did with Samhain.
“Isn’t this a matter of Christian liberty?” Christian liberty covers things God has not forbidden. It does not cover witchcraft, divination, or the celebration of darkness, which God has plainly condemned. And even in lawful things, “all things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient” (1 Corinthians 10:23).
What Then Should Christians Do?
Christians should keep themselves and their children separate from the festival, kindly but firmly, and use the season as an opportunity to bear witness to the light. Some believers use the occasion to hand gospel tracts to those who come to the door, pointing them to the One who conquered death and the powers of darkness. Others remember that it was on October 31, 1517, that Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses, and that God, in His providence, used those days to bring the Scriptures and the gospel of grace back to the common people. Whatever we do, let us not be partakers of the works of darkness, but reprove them.
Above all, let us remember that we have no reason to fear death, the devil, or the spirits of darkness. The Lord Jesus Christ came “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). “Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). The believer belongs to the One who holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18).
To any who are trapped in fear, or drawn to the occult, or simply living without God: the God who is light invites you out of darkness. He has “delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13–14). That is the only true deliverance from the powers that Halloween celebrates.
Sources: National Retail Federation, 2026 Halloween survey (September 22, 2026); Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible (1969); the history of Samhain, All Saints, and All Souls from standard historical works; Shaun Willcock, “The History of Halloween.”