Can We Agree that Halloween is a Religious Holiday?

Photo by Sabina Music Rich on Unsplash

OK, HEAR ME OUT. I know that this claim will generate some knee jerk reactions. Most of the people I know who are really into Halloween are also the least religious people I know. Halloween is enjoyable precisely because of its irreverence; not only is it creepy, and ghoulish, but it pushes the limits of everything appropriate. That’s what keeps it festive, and fun. So I anticipate that some of you will find the suggestion—that Halloween is a religious holiday—to be offensive. But I don’t mean to offend.

Religion has come to seem like more and more of a partisan category in America. “Religious” is a word used, with some frequency, to describe the politics of the American right. It’s the thing that’s supposed to stay out politics, but refuses to. It’s the thing you don’t talk about unless you want to offend someone. But as a scholar in the field of religious studies and theology, I think about religion differently. For me, it’s a much more flexible and messy category. 

AMONG SCHOLARS IN MY field, the term that joins us professionally—religion—is understood to be contentious and debated. Many students walk into my classroom assuming a religion is something that has to be oriented around a supernatural being of some sort: God, or some of God’s alternatives. But most scholars in the field today understand religion to simply be a social or cultural system. What’s less clear is the extent to which the term religion can (or should) be applied to traditions and practices beyond the historical complexes commonly referred to as the great religions of the world. My own take is that it can. So things can be deemed religious, even if they’re not directly affiliated with a recognizable major religion.

I’m not going to lead you into scholarly debates. But, if you’re curious,  here’s a nice overview from my colleague Kevin Schilbrack about the concept of religion, and why it risks becoming incoherent in our field. Scholars like JZ Smith have pointed to the many ways in which academics who study religion (like me) have themselves had a hand in creatively determining what gets classified as religious, and what doesn’t. That may be problematic. But, to some extent, it just is what it is.

In essence, there’s an arbitrariness that hovers in that term—religion. Most of us might have an intuitive sense of what it means, or marks out. And yet, most of those intuitions fall apart upon deeper analysis. We tend to put things like gods, spirits, sacred objects, and rituals into boxes marked “religion.” But these things also refuse to remain contained by such boxes. And it’s actually rather easy for a non-religious thing to fall into the religious box. When I say that something is religious, in other words, I recognize that it might also not be. I am humble enough to acknowledge the contingency of my claims (though arrogant enough to point out my humility). 

HALLOWEEN, FOR INSTANCE, can arguably be something perfectly non-religious. Most people I know would make this argument, I think. But I’ve always felt that the ritual American enthusiasm for Halloween, matched in intensity only by Christmas, is basically religious. So I’ve tended to let it fall into that religious box. I used to joke, when I was a little younger and more cynical, that I was too secular for Halloween. I couldn’t be bothered with any of its rituals or traditions. I was not into it. To be fair, I also said that I was too secular for graduations. I didn’t attend my PhD hooding ceremony, or even my undergraduate commencement. I’ve always felt burdened by the pomp and circumstance, and I really hate to wear costumes that someone else has forced me into. I’ve never liked the coercive dynamics of tradition. But, since having a kid, I’ve become a Halloween convert. This year, I might even willingly wear a costume. Now that I’m a convert, Halloween feels even more religious to me. 

The fact that Halloween has origins in religious holidays might seem like an incidental historical fact, for other people. This is especially true, perhaps, if they’re not connected with the Celtic traditions of Samhain or the Christian observance of All Saints Day. But, for me, this religious history has helped to make Halloween more interesting and compelling.  For one thing, I appreciate the fact that, like Christmas, Halloween is clearly a hybrid Christian/pagan practice. But I also appreciate the fact that, unlike Christmas, there hasn’t yet been a major move for Christians to “take back” Halloween. For now, it seems, they just let it be the mess that it is. Ultimately, I appreciate the fact that both of these traditions allow me to see something in Halloween that’s always felt a bit buried, to me.

Me, when I was a kid and still religiously dressed up for the holiday. Costume and makeup, courtesy of my mother (who, if you can’t tell, was wearing a bird costume).

I THINK THAT THE form of Halloween I was too secular for was actually just Halloween as a sacred holiday in that most holy of American traditions—capitalism. Since the 1950s, Halloween has been increasingly oriented around the purchase of costumes and candy, and American consumers are apparently poised to spend almost $12 billion on Halloween related purchases in 2024. I was too secular for the pious ritual purchase of a new, cheap, plasticky costume. And too secular for the ritual purchase of pounds of candy, which would allow me to ritually poison sweet and unassuming children with more sugar for their overwhelming sack of excess. None of this was sacred to me. 

I have, however, always loved this time of year. Yes, part of it is the fact that I was born in the middle of October and so this time of year probably stirs up that old longing to return to my origins. But there is also a thinning of things that happens this time of year that feels somehow sacred to me. The leaves fall off of most trees, which begin to look like great skeletal beings above us. And much of the living world begins to sleep, as it waits for the world to warm. This thinning does, also, remind me of the thinness of time, the thinness of dimensions in space, the thinness of whatever it is that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. 

AS SOMEONE WHO’S written and thought quite a bit about relationships between the living and the dead, I think there’s an essentially sacred—let’s call it religious—zone that opens up between life and death, or when the living and the dead come into some form of social contact. The violation of this zone, when it’s eroded or misappropriated somehow, is—to borrow a somewhat outdated term from religious studies scholars of the past—profanizing. It’s a violation of the lines set in place to render something sacred. 

Many of the old rituals of Halloween, like the donning of a costume, apparently date back to Samhain, which was a thin time between seasons, when spirits of the dead were said to briefly walk the earth. Wearing a costume was, perhaps, a way to hide from the most ill-intentioned of those spirits. But I can’t imagine that the understanding, for Celts, was that every spirit who surfaced in those hours had evil deeds in mind. Perhaps bonds with some of those spirits were celebrated. And while All Saints Day is observed on November 1st, the vespers for the holiday begin the night before. So, technically, the Christian tradition has long been celebrating the sacred bonds between the living and the dead on All Hallow’s Eve. 

This bond between the living and the dead is much more obvious in the ritual observance of the Días de los Muertos, in Mexico. When my American students talk about this holiday many of them—religious and non-religious—express a deep envy. “I wish we had a day like this here in the US,” they’ve told told me, “when we can take time to connect with our ancestors.” For many people with desires like this, perhaps, Halloween is about as close as it gets. 

For many people, and I would include myself here, the spookiness of Halloween isn’t simply horrific. It’s also a little beautiful. It’s the sort of spookiness that runs through you like a chill in moments of awe and wonder. And it’s an evening where something that feels true to many of us is overtly acknowledged: the line between the world of the living and the world of the dead is thin. The dead remain with us, in complicated ways. And when we forget or ignore this there are consequences of all sorts. It’s the sort of knowledge that’s important enough to feel “sacred”, if you dare to use a term like that. 

OF COURSE, IT doesn’t really matter, in the end, whether Halloween is a religious holiday, or not. It’s all just an argument over semantics. But semantics are political, they quite literally determine meaning. I’m not trying to make an argument that we should “recover” and reimpose the religious origins of Halloween, to fight back against secularization. I have no interest in rendering Halloween less sacred to all of the secular people who revere it—even for the most piously capitalist of reasons.

Maybe there’s just a part of me that wants something more from Halloween, now that I’m no longer too secular for it. Maybe I need to deem it religious, so that its meaning changes in some small way, for me. Or maybe I’d just like to be able to write a letter to the administrators at my daughter’s school and have her absence excused for the day. For a religious holiday. There’s a lot to do, when you’re actually taking the ritual observance of Halloween seriously. There are extra pumpkins to carve, and dinners to eat, and costumes to be carefully donned, and maybe even a few ancestors to revere. Who has time for the hustle of real life, on this most spooky of special nights?