Walking around Capitol Hill recently, I was struck but just how ghoulish many Halloween yard displays have become. Fake blood graphically drips from hanging skeletons, or plastic zombies with all-too-realistic rotting flesh spring from lawns – not exactly sights one wants to witness on an autumn stroll. Modern celebrations of Halloween can be almost so revolting and macabre as to make me sympathetic to certain evangelical denunciations of the holiday.
Almost sympathetic, but not quite, because the true meaning of Halloween is deeply conservative. The ghostly holiday is a reminder that we should celebrate those things that link our living generation to the dead gone before, and recognize that the veil between this visible world and the invisible hereafter is much thinner than the “enlightened” usually allow. In the face of gross-out horror or demonic excess, this is the conservative wisdom we must return to our fall revelry.
Long before vulgar plastic displays had so utterly conquered front lawns, the great conservative Russell Kirk noticed something decaying in American celebrations of Halloween. “Yesteryear’s festive bonfire in the village square, with its half jocular, half fearful notions of ghostly presences,” he wrote in one essay, “has given way to a diabolical destruction in the core of some great metropolis.” The faith that once sustained the holiday was slipping away, and it was gradually being replaced by a certain insensibility to violence and the darkness.
Among twentieth-century conservative voices, Kirk was foremost in reminding Americans that society is an eternal contract between the living, the unborn – and, yes, the dead. To Kirk, the twentieth century’s horrors stemmed less from political issues than the loss of a religious feeling of that enduring chain of being. A dauntless critic of all forms of materialism and utilitarianism, his philosophic and historical works always aimed at restoring the perception that man is not simply animal but also spirit.
To that end, Kirk also authored a number of ghost stories endowed with this transcendent meaning. In a recent book, Kirk scholar Camillo Peralta argued that he favored the tropes of Gothic fiction because they were well-suited to the “defense of the ‘permanent things,’ the enduring norms, values, and beliefs of Western civilization.” Modern man had forgotten that we live in a haunted universe, Kirk believed, and literature could do something to refurbish what Edmund Burke called “the wardrobe of the moral imagination.”
Serious writing was important to resisting the revolution, but Kirk also believed that Halloween’s true spirituality could be a cure for modern numbness. He ensured that his home in rural Michigan, Piety Hill, had a reputation among local children as one of the best trick-or-treating spots for miles around. Kirk would play mysterious chants and other spooky sounds on a gramophone, and greet merrymakers in either his ornate doctoral robes or else a black cape given to him by the Count Dracula Society. He had a flair for the dramatic he would deploy every October 31 not to horrify, but to delight.
Kirk’s commitment to an elevated celebration of Halloween, and his respect for the spiritual realm, are callbacks to the holiday’s Christian roots. Although many fundamentalists and evangelicals insist All Hallows’ Eve is somehow pagan, it is in fact one of the Church’s great feasts. This is a night to remember what the writer of Hebrews calls the “great cloud of witnesses,” the saints and martyrs who, though dead, are still mysteriously with us.
For most of history, the dying light of autumn was something mankind dreaded – but Christianity changed everything. Earlier sunsets, colder days, and falling leaves symbolized the hopelessness of a pagan world clutched by death. But the Church tells a different story; for her, October is full of resurrection light. Liturgically, September ends with the feasts of Saint Michael and All Angels, commemorations of triumph over Satan. The succeeding weeks are marked by feasts of other wonderful saints: Luke the Evangelist, James of Jerusalem, Simon and Jude, even the modern Reformers. It culminates, though, with Halloween – a day to honor all the saints of the Church Triumphant, and through them Christ’s victory over death.
As Our Lord put it, “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth labourers into His harvest.” Every autumn, then, the Church teaches the faithful to celebrate a luminous, otherworldly harvest of souls. Christians are not supposed to fear death, we are supposed to remember that we are made for eternity. Halloween is for joy, not terror.
Preaching alone cannot restore the holiday to its old glory, though. Kirk was fond of quoting a passage from the eminent Victorian Walter Bagehot:
“The essence of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome Conservatism throughout this country; give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps this as well—you may be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics); but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned — try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”
He meant that a stuffy conservatism, puritanical or pharisaical, would never succeed at winning the hearts of the people. This is the great mistake of the fundamentalists who reject Halloween. Yes, the excesses to which Americans have taken the day are disturbing. But moral superiority will never redeem the times. If one thing is certain, hectoring people for trying to have fun will never make them more religious.
There is no need to indulge the worst of modern Halloween’s secularization and commercialization and vulgarization, but conservatives should absolutely reach back to the older traditions that honor the faithful departed. Attend an All Hallows’ Eve service and pray for all immortal souls, carve a Jack-o’-lantern and light its candle against the dark of the night, or read a ghost story (perhaps one of Dr. Kirk’s) to remember “There are more things in heaven and earth… / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Only by enjoying these good things can we ever hope to preserve them.
Donning costumes for trick-or-treating or bobbing for apples may seem somewhat frivolous on the surface, but they are in fact signs of a deep truth. Americans love the customs they inherited, and their traditions’ unending popularity is proof that the people still have conservative hearts. Ultimately, Halloween teaches us that love can grow into a faith that can exorcise even the dark forces clutching our anguished society.