Should Christians Be Trick-or-Treating?

Gary: Now, Contending for the Faith…. Here is this week’s question: “Dear Dave and Tom, it seems that every year at this time, the same debate arises in our fellowship. The topic is ‘What Should We as a Church Do or Not Do with Our Children Concerning Halloween? Should we avoid the so-called holiday altogether or come up with an alternative function for the kids which keeps them from pining for Trick-or-Treating? By the way, do you give treats to costumed children who come to your door on Halloween?’”

Tom: Dave, this has been one of the banes of my existence. I know as a young Christian when this festival, this holiday, came around (so-called), we used to shut off all our lights and just hide in the back room, not wanting to participate in it. On the other hand, you have a church that has children, and the parents of children, they don’t know what to do, and they’d like to get them off the streets or get them on church grounds and have some kind of function. What do you think?

Dave: Well, if you want to have some special church function that evening so the kids are not out trick-or-treating, or so they are not tempted to do that, I see no problem with that.

Tom: Sometimes it becomes a Halloween or a costume function at the church.

Dave: Yeah, right.

Tom: Where do we draw the line?

Dave: Then it’s a “sanctified” Halloween. “Christianized” Halloween. I would not be in favor of that, because as you know, Halloween, again, has to do with the dead. It’s an ancient pagan festival of the dead, and some of the costumes, of course—the goblins, the witches, the ghosts, the devils, and that sort of thing—you wouldn’t want to participate at all in that. You would want to distance yourself from that sort of thing. So, the church, if it’s going to have some function, it should not be a Halloween function! Now, if someone wants to…Tom, where we happen to live right now, we don’t even face this problem, because we’ve been there for ten Halloweens and we’ve never had anybody ring the doorbell yet. But supposing…

Tom: The point is, you’re out in the country. And nobody’s going to drive, or walk up your driveway for a Butterfinger, or something like that.

Dave: But suppose a Christian wanted to…okay, here are all these children coming to my door.

Tom: Right. If you’re on a city street…

Dave: Right.

Tom: …in your neighborhood, and if you’re at home…

Dave: Right. Am I going to stand there and denounce this? I can’t convert them from Halloween. I need to bring them to Christ. When they come to Christ, then I might be able to tell them what is wrong with Halloween. So how about giving them their little piece of candy along with a gospel tract?

Tom: My sister does that.

Dave: Yeah. Now, most of them are going to maybe throw those tracts away. On the other hand, it might fall in the hands of a parent or someone. So, I think we have to do what we can in the situation where we are, and just to stand on your front porch and shout fire and brimstone at everybody…

Tom: Or hide in your back room—that’s what I used to do…

Dave: Well, okay, that’s not so bad if you’re hiding back there studying the Word of God…

Tom: Right.

Dave: It is a problem that reflects the fact that as John tells us in 1 John 5—is it 19? Somewhere around there, he says, “The whole world lies in the wicked one.” Satan is the god of this world, and he has all kinds of little tricks and treats to divert people from the truth, to get them occupied with something else, and, incidentally, as you implied earlier, to lead them into the occult. To lead them into trusting some other force, some power, other than God. And I shouldn’t have said, “other force.” By that I don’t mean God is a force. God is a person—a personal Being, who loves and who cares, and so forth. But if Satan can get them trusting in false gods, some other techniques…. You know, one of the things I can remember as a boy, I remember one particular church—they had a Halloween thing going, and part of it was they had a fortuneteller sitting there with a crystal ball and so forth. And I’ve seen churches where they have the whole works going—all of the occult!

Tom:  Well, they set up…some set up haunted houses for the kids to come through. Walk through.

Dave: I cannot understand why they would do that. Am I going to lead people into the occult in order to lead them to Christ? What is the point? I think we should turn them away from this sort of thing. But, as you say, it comes up every year.

Tom: Yeah, and, surprisingly—maybe not surprisingly—we talk about these being the Last Days, if my statistics are right, this holiday, the holiday of Halloween, is the biggest holiday in this country. Financially—every other which way!

Dave: I’m not sure about financially, because they buy so many presents at Christmastime…

Tom: Well, Dave, do you know what a costume costs?

Dave: I’ve never bought one.

Tom: You want to buy candy to feed the whole neighborhood? Well, anyway, I’m not sure either, but I know it’s definitely a growing concern financially.

Dave: But you have an awful lot of people out in the streets participating in it, and possibly it does more to lead people astray and into the occult than anything else, and it’s a tragedy that the churches would go along with it, even to any extent, and encourage this.

Tom: Well, Dave, an interesting irony here is, we’ve just been talking about the church and the Great Commission and discipleship. What kind of discipleship is it for parents, pastors, deacons, elders, to set up a situation in which they’re really condoning not just what goes on in the world but something that is heavily occultic? That’s not discipleship, and that’s really the antithesis of what Christ would have us do.

Dave: Amen!