Appropriating Halloween and Creating Liminal Times

Danger! Syncretism ahoy!

(Part of the Samhain Synchroblog “A Christian response to Halloween“.) 

In the very small corner of my early Christian experience with a very small segment of the Christian pool, references to Christmas and Easter were met with disapproval. The former, Christmas, was viewed completely secularised and celebrating the latter, Easter, meant Christians were inadvertently worship Ishtar. Halloween was viewed with much superstition as a Satanic event, with roots in Druidism. It wasn’t till much later in life that I discovered the concept of syncretism and linked my mentors objection to it. They, like many others including myself, were simply seeking to distinguish between the core of our faith and what that meant and looked like apart from “man-made religion”, and syncretism was viewed as something damaging to the faith and people.

Years later I’ve moved to another small corner of the Christian faith and experience. Now I ask, “Can we celebrate Halloween as a Christian event? Is there any hope for it? Or by linking Christianity and Halloween are we creating a syncrotistic – read bad idea – event? What elements of Halloween can we take and make appropriate use of as a vehicle for engaging Christ and Spirit?”