10/28/2024
Annual reminder that despite what people with good intentions but no history degrees tell you, Halloween is actually one of the oldest and most uniquely Christian of holidays.
For the first 200 years of Christianity local churches honored feast days to remember local martyrs and saints who had gone to sleep in the grave during sporadic and localized persecutions. People visited their graves, lit candles, left flowers, talked to and prayed with/for their dead, inspired one another that they would be reunited in Christ, and used grave ashes mixed with holy water to make visible crosses on themselves and homes. The practice was meant to turn the power of death (symbolized by the skeleton and grave) into the promise of life eternal, and to remember that the Church was mysteriously universal and eternal despite the experiences and lives of local people.
But under the Emperor Decius (in 250ad) and then Emperor Valerian (from 257-260ad) Christians in the Roman Empire experienced the first truly systematic persecution. Both emperors made it a crime punishable by death for Christians to refuse to offer pagan sacrifices to the Roman gods and emperor, even requiring professing Christians to perform such sacrifices in the presence of a Roman magistrate who would issue them a signed & sealed “libellus” certificate to prove they had obeyed the law, offered a sacrifice, and renounced Christ. All Christians who refused to do so were killed, resulting in the first mass executions across the entire empire: two popes, dozens of bishops, and unknown thousands were martyred with many more physically going into hiding and the local church communities being ripped apart.
Following the end of Emperor Valerian in 260 his son, Emperor Gallienus, repealed these laws and ordered Christians to be treated peacefully again, allowing survivors to literally come out of hiding. Christians returned to abandoned churches in towns and cities, wrestled with rebuilding their local communities (and whether to forgive those who had submitted to the laws and renounced Christ), ritually buried the countless who died as martyrs, and above all REMEMBERED. For the first time the celebration of the martyrs transcended local churches and Christians all over the Empire began to celebrate acts of remembrance for ALL the martyrs to recognize the universality of what had been endured- and the victory over it.
There would be more, and even worse persecutions to come, but from this time onward the Christian Church practiced a universal unity of remembrance and hope expressed through celebration of “all saints” over particular local martyrs. Within a century that practice was fixed to a day each year set aside to remember and celebrate “all the saints” (or “hallows” in Old and Middle English, the same root as the modern words “halo,” “holy,” and “holiday”). By official decree of Pope Gregory IV and Holy Roman Emperor Louis “the Pious” in 835ad that day was fixed permanently on the calendar as November 1st. Per widespread European tradition the evening before the holy day (“holiday”) was celebrated with fires and candles, songs, games, gifts and feasts. People “made merry” the evening before so that they could focus on resting, praying, and visiting graveyards the next day. This was true on the Continent as in the British Isles; in Germany Martin Luther, for example, famously chose 31 October to nail his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 specifically to be read by church goers attending All Saints Day celebrations the next morning.
And just for clarity, in Middle English we have “All Hallow’s Eve” as the merrymaking extension of “All Hallow’s Day.” Following the Protestant Reformation many English & Scottish urban Protestants chose to use the term “saints” over “hallows” (despite being of Latin origin, from “sanctus”) to subtly separate themselves from mostly rural Catholics, who being more traditional continued using “hallows” in the countryside. During the English Civil War and the Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, however, English Puritans legally banned “merry making” festive gatherings for all holidays as sinful affairs. While this famously included banning Christmas, it also banned public celebrations on All Hallow’s Eve, which the Puritan (and xenophobicly English) propagandists accused of being derived from the Celtic pagan holiday of Samhain (despite the two being from a different calendar, different date, different culture, different religion, and different language) and a celebration of ghouls, demons, witches, lecherous drunkards, adulterers, and naughty children.
After the Puritans got sacked in England’s Great Restoration of King Charles II most of them took the boat to their fellow Puritan colonies in… “New England,” where they did their best to reboot their special brand of Christian nationalism and hostility to happiness in what would become America. When Halloween arrived here a century later coming with predominantly Celtic and Catholic immigrants the merry making of the evening before All Saints Day was condemned by the descendants of Puritans as proof the holiday was demonic and we have been saddled ever since by the peculiar American bipolar celebration or condemnation of the event.
But overshadowed, to the loss of American Christians, is the heritage of a day set aside for the Church universal, eternal and triumphant to invite us into public remembrance of all who were faithful followers of Jesus. Though they have gone to sleep in the grave, they are yet alive with us in Christ, as we are already in spirit with them at peace though in this world we experience persecution. Blessings to all, awake and asleep, this Halloween and All Saints Day. 🙏🖤
