A Seventh Reason why Halloween is far from harmless

image from here.

Last year the well known evangelist and Christian speaker J. John wrote a short article in the Daily Mirror, '6 Reasons why I think Halloween is far from Harmless'. I read it with interest. It also came out very close to my friend Glen Scrivener's powerful video about Halloween. Do watch it;

But as I was  reading through the J. John article, again, I thought about a seventh reason why I think Halloween, in its current incarnation, is far from harmless.

Sexualisation.

I think this probably first occurred to me at University, where various nightclubs were starting to realise (in line with America, and echoed since in other ways in the UK) the lucrative potential of Halloween, for making money. And yet it seemed to me that the vast majority of costumes available for my female student friends - particularly shop-bought but also that influenced the ones they made for themselves - seemed bizarrely sexual. I blogged - a long time ago, and before I'd read some important things - on the 'slutwalk' phenomenon in the states. I wonder if there are some similarities here.

I remember one particular Halloween, where a bunch of us from the CU had borrowed a car and were dishing out biscuits and water to those in the queue, and hot drinks to the bouncers, which sticks in my mind. Some of us were chatting to a couple of the bouncers/door staff, and they were remarking that they thought skirts were getting shorter each year, and that Halloween seemed to be a chance for people to particularly lose their inhibitions. That stuck with me.

A rapid google search throws up this page of results for halloween costumes you can purchase (you'll notice I didn't search 'girls' or 'sexy') which includes such 'highlights' as 'Sexy Swashbuckler Pirate' and 'Sexy Devil'. There is a clear distinction between the costumes aimed at men - which seem to resemble normal levels of clothing - and those aimed at women, which seem more like they are riffs on a theme of lingerie. Call me old fashioned, but since when were women defined by what they were, and since when was it good and healthy to celebrate people wearing less? There is something deeply disturbing about the blend of sexualisation, commercialisation and 'causal horror' which I see in how Halloween is increasingly treated

This 'sexualisation' thing goes deeper, though. I can't quite put my finger on it, so please excuse me, but I find the notion of a 'sexy devil' in particular more than a little disturbing. As my friend Glen points out so eloquently in his video, there is something real about Halloween. And I've blogged before about the reality of the spiritual world, and the reality of spiritual warfare. The BBC website has this helpful article on the history of the festival. I don't want to link 'sexualisation' and the Devil explicitly, but I do want to challenge those of my readers who call themselves Christian about how complicit they want to be in the thing that Halloween has become, particularly with the nebulous spiritual elements that linger, and this problem of sexualisation.

The reality behind Halloween is complex - it used to be called All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Day - which is why I'll be celebrating something else today. Because, on this day, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, which is widely accepted as the start of the Protestant Reformation. This theological, social and cultural revolution profoundly impacted Western (and global) culture, and was a revival of true Christianity. You can read more about Reformation day, and the ideas behind it, here. I say all this - mixing talk of sexualisation, spirituality, Martin Luther and so on - not to be a party pooper but to point people towards the ultimate party. Which would you rather celebrate? An ambiguous if not downright unhelpful distortion of a once-Christian, once-pagan festival, draped in the trappings of modern sexualised and commercialised 'culture', or the radical rediscovery of the Gospel of Grace, Christian freedom to drink beer, and the call to continually reform and re-discover the Goodness of God?

incidentally, I'll be speaking a little to that topic of continual reformation in my session at the Christian New Media Conference 2014 tomorrow - read more here.

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I've blogged before about why Christians need to remember the cause of women, about International Women's Day, and you can read a great Guest Post from a friend about how Jesus treated women. On the complex and murky topic of spirituality and spiritual warfare, I'd recommend this post about how it is a matter of fact, this longer post about the Armour of God, and my review of a great little book about the Devil.

Thank you for reading - I'd love to connect with you via Facebook or Twitter. I always welcome comments, shares, pushback and dis/agreement! I look forward to hearing from you.