Halloween revelry is upon us, and I am struck by how weird our rituals have become. With the first colors of autumn, suburban neighborhoods are transformed into hellscapes. A stroll through a hardware store this time of year is likely to bring you face to face with demon clowns, towering giant skeletons, or the grim reaper himself!
Death is certainly in the air today—but not in a fearful haunting of mortality, as one might expect in a culture that has lost transcendence and hope in a life hereafter. Ours is a supposedly “secular age,” and we are not superstitious or really believe in monsters and ghouls.
Rather, the symbols of death that drape our homes and fill the airwaves are an interesting demonstration that we celebrate this holiday all in good fun. Halloween is a mischievous, transgressive time in which our culture chases vibes. For many mild-mannered neighbors, it seems, the appeal of the macabre or gruesome is in its shock value.
Christians often wrestle with whether to participate in Halloween, and rightly so given the demonic and pagan imagery that has become so mainstream. What began as a veneration of all saints who have departed this life to be with our Lord has, over the centuries, become a commercialized, transgressive, veneration of death itself.
But might we set aside the question of whether or in what way it is appropriate for Christians to join in the festivities, and consider the holiday from the perspective of a cultural liturgy? What exactly does Halloween say about our society, and the common values and intuitions the season reveals?
When we listen to our secular public rituals around Halloween, we hear a message of death and the celebratory subversion of death through mockery and transgression. But perhaps surprisingly, we also find that our Christian faith offers a similar message of subversion that can better ground and bring life through God’s own mockery of death.
A Culture of Death
Our culture is obsessed with death, but not in a straightforwardly fearful way. Other cultures are haunted by death and its domain in such a way that regular sacrifices are offered to appease the spirits or ward off fate’s deathly call. But our culture doesn’t seem to celebrate Halloween because we’re scared.
Nor do we celebrate it because it gives us the taste of something distinctly spiritual or transcendent. No one really seems to venerate monsters or the paranormal—at least at the popular level.
No, it seems our society is obsessed with Halloween because we’re thrilled by the taste of being naughty. We have an intuition that it is wrong or improper to fill our yards with tombstones and splash our walls with blood, and when we collectively give each other permission to act out, it is exhilarating and cathartic.
But also, our public rituals seem especially ironic. We love the jolt brought on by the smarmy veneration of death and its black parade through our places of life. Our society largely hides death from view, locking it away in hospitals and cemeteries. Therefore, it’s funny in a dark and twisted way when we bring it out into open and caress about with death for a few weeks each year.
All of these rituals are what Philip Rieff describes as deathworks. That is, cultural practices and aesthetics that are used subversively to destroy the former meaning and value of a society’s sacred symbols. By mocking death, our society reveals what is actually sacred: transgressive expression and vibes that help us transcend the mundane or stifling norms of life.
God’s Defeat of Death
But mocking death in this way is not actually new or even that creative. In fact, God himself reveals the greatest trick against death, and his parading of the carcass of death should cause all the proud and boisterous to suddenly stand up straight and become sober-minded at the sound of his name.
None of this is hyperbole, but rather it is the very language used of the Exodus and God’s defeat of Egypt recounted many times throughout Scripture. We get the sense that the Exodus is about much more than God freeing his captive people from slavery when we read in Isaiah:
Wasn’t it you who hacked Rahab to pieces,
who pierced the sea monster?
Wasn’t it you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep,
who made the sea-bed into a road
for the redeemed to pass over?
And the ransomed of the Lord will return
and come to Zion with singing,
crowned with unending joy. (Isa. 51:9b-11)
The name Rahab, used for Egypt, identifies the nation with primordial sea serpent (cf. Job 26:12; Isa. 30:7). Indeed, Michael Morales has argued that Egypt symbolizes not merely the cult of death, but also death itself. It is the sea of chaos, and YHWH has slain the great sea monster of death (Psa. 89:9-10; cf. 75:13-14).
Even more, Pharoh himself is cast as the watery monster of death:
Speak to him and say, ‘This is what the Lord God says:
Look, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt,
the great monster lying in the middle of his Nile,
who says, “My Nile is my own;
I made it for myself.” (Eze. 29:3).
In the opening of the book of Exodus, Pharoh has the first-born sons of Israel cast into the watery grave, showing that the house of Israel—God’s firstborn (Exo. 4:22)—were captive in the jaws of death. Even when Moses confronts Pharoh in the saga of the ten plagues, he repeatedly goes to meet Pharoh as he “is walking out to the water” (Exo. 7:15, 8:20) crocodilian-like on the banks of the Nile. Pharoh embodies the terrible hold of death.
This background renders the story all the more glorious as YHWH breaks the bonds of death by delivering his people. But how does YHWH make a mockery of death? He does so by leading his people through death in order to undo the hold of death itself, as Morales argues.
The Passover presents a vicarious death of a suitable mediator, the paschal lamb, which is put to death in place of God’s firstborn son even as Egypt’s firstborn sons are slain. Even more, Israel is led out into what they fear is a watery grave in the Red Sea. Yet like the Spirit hovering over the chaos of the deep in Genesis 1:2 before YHWH separates water from dry land (Gen. 1:9; cf. Gen. 8:1-14), God split the sea with a wind (Exo. 14:21-22). Israel passes through the waters of death, having been purchased back from the dead by the ritual Passover.
God could have freed Israel in many ways, and he even could have shown his might and glory to the Egyptians through a single act. Yet, God hardened Pharoh’s heart, causing him to have the endure the full destruction of his house and all it stood for (Exo. 7:3-5). Death is swallowed up by death, symbolized by Aaron’s staff becoming a serpent-eating serpent (Exo. 7:12). Like the world-snake Ouroboros, YHWH’s mighty arm crushes the serpent death by forcing it to swallow itself, and in so doing, become undone by its own horrible power.
This saga of the death of death in Exodus paradigmatically anticipates the final work of God’s Son who, like Israel, passes through the waters of baptism, dies like the paschal lamb in our place, and walks out of tomb untouched by death (John 19:41) to usher in the new creation.
Through Christ Jesus’s death and resurrection “death has been swallowed up in victory” (I Cor. 15:55). The greatest trick of subversive reversal, then, came literally at the hands of God himself. God has made a mockery of death, disgracing its forces in a public spectacle (Col. 2:15).
Subversive Witness
Should Christians participate in Halloween? That is for your own conscience to decide—and if you do, remember that it matters how we participate in the festivities. I’ll likely venture out with my children dressed as knights and princesses, and use the time to get to know my neighbors a bit more. But even as I do, I’ll survey the horrors of my cul-de-sac with bemused chagrin, knowing that true cultural transgression against death isn’t found in gawdy decorations, but in the humble suffering of our Creator dying in our place.
Christians are able to eat candy, make counter-cultural merriment with our friends and families, and offer a life-giving subversion to all the celebration of death around us. Because of God’s great work, we might sublimate the culture of death by reveling in death’s demise.
Dennis Greeson (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is dean of the BibleMesh Institute and program coordinator and research associate at Union Theological College, Belfast. He’s a fellow in public theology at the Land Center for Cultural Engagement. Dennis is coauthor of The Way of Christ in Culture: A Vision for All of Life (B&H Academic, 2024). He lives with his wife and three children in Youngsville, North Carolina.
