Why Evangelicals Are So Weird About Halloween

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Every year around this time, the ol’ ‘JesusWeen.com’ bumper sticker pops up on social media, giving us a chance to laugh at the absurdity of evangelicals. Did whoever came up with that not consider how this would make every person with an even slightly naughty mind think about Jesus’ penis? Let’s all have a mildly blasphemous chuckle about that.

As Snopes documents, the JesusWeen campaign, which called for the distribution of Bibles rather than candy to trick-or-treating children, was the project of a single pastor at a single church in Alberta—the Texas of Canada—and fizzled soon after launching in 2011. But as anyone who has lived either as them or among them can tell you, North American evangelicals truly are downright weird about Halloween. Hashtag not all, natch. But it’s a pervasive subcultural pattern shaped by harmful beliefs.

Just as JesusWeen makes the social media rounds this time each year, there’s another meme of sorts that gets passed around conservative Christians’ social media circles. That meme is the following apocryphal quote, attributed without evidence to Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan: “I am glad that Christian parents let their children worship the devil at least one night out of the year.” Now, LaVey was a hedonist, an atheist, and an Ayn Rand adoring asshole. He didn’t worship Satan, in whom he didn’t believe. He just liked the symbolism of the devil and some associated pageantry to go along with his “enlightened” selfishness. 

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