One Week To All Hallow’s Eve!

Greetings one and all!

It’s only one week until my second favorite publicly recognized annual festivity – Halloween! That means just a few days left to shop for bags of candy, cute costumes for the kids, inappropriately sexy outfits for the adults, and so forth. If you haven’t already decorated the outside of your home, probably you aren’t about to do so, but if you need some extra cobwebs and spiders, I can probably hook you up.

As with any other public festivity here in America, devout Christians are hard at work trying to either reclaim it, recycle it, or trash it. In a common example of the reclamation approach, Mormons and Evangelicals have both adopted the idea of a Trunk or Treat event as a ‘safe’ alternative to traditional door-to-door beseeching. I almost understand what they are getting at here, because their approach is much easier than mine, which requires following the children around the neighborhood, telling them which houses to avoid (schizophrenia is not just for homeless people) and glaring murderously at anyone who hands out tracts instead of candy. Seriously, uptight Christians, just lock the door and dim the lights if you want to sit this holiday out. No need to sully it with unsolicited offers of salvation and damnation.

Which brings me to the most obvious and bizarre manifestation of the religious recycling process for this particular holiday: Hell House. It’s sort of like a conventional haunted house, except that there is just one Ghost, and He is most frightfully Holy. For the most part, younger children are brought into the church, wherein they are taught to fear the effects of unrighteous and unrepentant living, by a cast of characters consisting primarily of the older kids from the youth group. There was an insightful and disturbing documentary on this Bible-belt phenomenon awhile back, and I can tell you from personal experience that it wasn’t far off the mark.

There is also a mutant variation of this phenomenon known as Judgement House, which is somehow even more explicitly theological and downright Calvinistic than the original. I have more than a few years of experience with this latter variety of theological fright-fest, and I’d like to share some of that with you now.  Here are the podcast recordings we did in 2010 and 2011. Here is my detailed write-up from 2010. Share and enjoy!

p.s. If you have the chance, do go and visit one of these events. It is a rare opportunity for skeptics to speak directly with believers (who are in a sharing mood on their own turf) and tell them why we think their ideas are less than well substantiated. Godspeed!