Oct 17, 2025
I look around this time of year and feel something different in the air. Not just the crisp wind or the smell of burning leaves—but a chill that goes deeper. Halloween used to be a mischievous kind of darkness, the playful sort that pretended to be scary but never meant it. It seemed more like a mockery of demons than a participation in their deeds.
It was the night when kids ran through neighborhoods dressed as monsters, laughing at fear itself. Maybe it was naive, maybe shallow, but it was—somehow—seemingly innocent.
Today, though, that innocence is gone. The masks no longer hide fear. Instead, they reveal fascination. We’re not mocking the demonic anymore. We’re entertaining it.
It’s bizarre how quickly it happened. What was once a parody of evil has become an invitation to it. You see it in the decorations—what used to be paper skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns are now pentagrams, bloodied altars, and realistic corpses hanging from trees.
You hear it even in the language of secular culture, buzzwords like “summon,” “manifest,” “channel.” The dark spiritual has become trendy, and the demonic has become desirable. What our grandparents called witchcraft, our generation calls self-discovery.
Satan doesn’t need people to worship him outright. He only needs you to stop taking him seriously. And that’s what Halloween has done—it’s turned the ancient warning of Scripture into a costume party.
“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness,” Paul wrote, “but rather expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)
Yet the modern church, with its fog machines and candy buckets, would rather dress it up than call it what it is. We hand our children masks of demons, send them into the night, and call it harmless fun. But is it harmless to teach a generation to make peace with darkness?
I’ve heard the argument—“It’s just pretend.”
But pretend what?
Pretend there’s no such thing as evil?
Pretend demons are jokes?
Pretend the same spiritual realm that Scripture warns about is just a game?
Evil thrives in make-believe because make-believe dulls the edge of discernment. We laugh at the devil until we forget to fear him. And then, when the culture begins to celebrate what God condemns, we act surprised that the laughter has stopped sounding funny.
This isn’t about costumes or candy, it’s about our own comfort. We’ve become comfortable with the symbols of rebellion against God. Comfortable with ghosts, with graves, with the celebration of death. Comfortable with the very things Christ came to conquer. There was a time when Christians mocked the darkness by shining light into it. Now we light candles to it, and call it ambiance.
You can feel the whole paradigm changing. Halloween isn’t merely darker in imagery, it’s darker in spirit. The boundary between parody and participation has eroded. People hold “seances” as party games. Children chant over Ouija boards. Adults burn sage and post “witchtok” tutorials.
Demonic rituals, once hidden in the shadows, are now live-streamed on TikTok “just for fun.”
Even the Satanic Temple lists Halloween as sacred, hosting festivals of defiance while the Church laughs along, unsure whether it’s supposed to be serious. It’s as if the ancient feast of Samhain has been resurrected under neon lights, and we’re too desensitized to notice.
Every year the symbols grow bolder and darker. Skulls, blood, black candles, inverted crosses—once fringe, now mainstream decor. You can walk into Lowe’s and purchase almost anything dark and demonic, and no one flinches.
The world tells itself it’s aesthetic, artistic, ironic. But hell has always known how to disguise seriousness in irony. The serpent’s first lie was that sin was just curiosity. “You will not surely die.” The same whisper curls through this generation—“It’s just fun.”
Even the animals know something is wrong. In New York, roosters and doves were found decapitated and drained of blood—ritual sacrifices in plastic bags, the kind you can only describe as demonic.
In Spain, authorities banned the adoption of black cats this month, afraid they’d be used in ceremonies. These are not superstitions from the past—they’re news headlines. And they testify to something real, that the spiritual world is not imaginary, and it is not amused.
When Christ walked among tombs, the demons screamed and fled. They recognized Him instantly. Yet today, His people can’t even recognize them. We mistake darkness for decor and call our participation liberty. “All things are lawful,” we quote—but forget the rest: “but not all things are beneficial.”
Freedom without discernment is surrender.
And still, the tension remains. I’m not here to bind the conscience. You’ll decide for yourself what your family does on October 31. But I will say this. A follower of Christ should never feel at home in a celebration of death. If the night is built on fear, blood, and mockery of holiness, what fellowship can light have with it?
When a culture spends one night glorifying evil, the believer’s refusal to join becomes its own quiet act of rebellion—a better kind.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Christians stopped trying to sanitize Halloween and started grieving it instead. What if we looked at the cost—the normalization of darkness, the erosion of reverence—and simply said, “No.” Not with arrogance, not with legalism, but with sorrow. The same kind of sorrow that looks at a fallen world and remembers that once, God Himself entered it to crush the serpent underfoot.
Evil doesn’t care whether you believe in it. It only needs your apathy. And that’s what frightens me most about this season—it’s not the costumes or even the rituals. It’s the ease with which people laugh at what should make them tremble.
The night grows darker every year, but the light still burns. The question is whether we’ll keep our lamps lit—or learn to enjoy the dark
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