Halloween struggles

It's always a bit startling to be reminded about the huge numbers of Americans who are still gripped with medieval, superstitious takes on religion. And no time is this more fun than the annual reminder that some people actually think that Halloween is Satan's birthday. Jesus' General has a story today about a town torn by whether or not to celebrate Satan's birthday on the Lord's day, which is Sunday for you heathens. (My take? The Lord is being selfish--he gets 52 Sundays a year, and Satan only gets one day.)

This story raises a lot of important questions, not the least of which is, "Are these people fucking mad?" I'm sure that many of you are stuck on that question. But to me, one of the apparent problems is with the logic on the anti-Satan townspeople. If Halloween is Satan's Day, then how is it only a problem when it falls on a Sunday? Is it okay to worship Satan the other six days of the week?

I bring this up because our Baptists and other assorted crazy Christians in my small town were absolutists. Celebrating Satan's birthday is unacceptable regardless of the day of the week. (Does Satan have a mother? Is she proud of her boy?) Our local elementary school had an annual Halloween festival that raised money for the band, and the local Satan haters decided that this scourge needed to be scrubbed out of the elementary school.

Now, this stuff is pretty funny, but it's also deadly serious. If you live in an area where the Christians are trying to ban books and Halloween, you start to feeling nervous, especially if you're an ungodly sort who reads and knows about things like the Inquistion and the Salem witch trials. Or even worse, you understand that the Bible and the Constitution are separate documents, and one of them guarantees freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. So these battles can take on a great deal of symbolic importances as the forces of evil go up against the Satan-haters and try to keep them from shoving their religious beliefs down our throats.

Most of the town, from what I could tell, was pretty much pro-Satan. We had always had Halloween at the elementary school, and much, if not most of the town turned out for dippy activities like dunking booths and kissing booths and badly done haunted houses. Everyone dressed up and a grand time was had by all. So, most people didn't see the point of banning it. But Southern Baptists will wear you out, and by the time all the Satan scaring was over, huge numbers of people in our town were certain that Satan-worshipping was the favored activity of the young. (I myself got hoodwinked into attending a lecture on the dangers of Satanism, where my friend, a preacher's daughter, was told that her peace symbol T-shirt was a Satanic symbol.)

So the Halloween festival was banned. Since it was a big fundraiser, they decided to replace it with a Fall Festival. But the Fall Festival had to be properly Christian, so rowdy activities like kissing booths and haunted houses were gone. They kept the children's costume contest so long as all the children in the contest had preapproved costumes based on characters in children's books and there were no monsters, demons, witches, fairies, or devils. Apparently, it was a bunch of princesses and animals. I wouldn't know for sure--I didn't go and I wasn't the only one. Attendance was low, especially since all the teenagers avoided it like the plague for fear that some Southern Baptist would nab them by the ears for having hormones.

Ironically, the other churches in town swooped in and filled the hole that was left for teenage Halloween entertainment. The Methodists and the Catholics notably came in and started having dances and haunted houses for the teenagers, bringing Satan's birthday into the house of the Lord, but that's the price you pay for being pure, I suppose.