On Religion: How Halloween Is Different In The Bible Belt
(ANALYSIS) In the first act of the Judgement House drama, actors gathered for a raucous teen party with lots of booze.
In the second scene at the born-again haunted house, the young Matt Mitchell and other kids saw a DUI car crash, with dead teens surrounded by ambulance lights, police and loud sirens. The third room was Hell: A dark, cramped, basement room with the heat set on stun.
This morality tale was rather blunt. But, for Mitchell, the scariest moment took place in Heaven — the church gym decorated with fluffy white curtains, the bright light of eternity and Jesus descending on a scissor lift from a construction site.
The man dressed as Jesus got off the lift, and he “went around the room and whispered into everyone's ear, individually,” recalled Mitchell, in "Southern Halloween is ... Different,” a video on his YouTube channel, the latter dedicated to deep-fried culture, food and humor.
“When he got to me, he said, ‘I'll see you one day.’ I thought he said, ‘I'll see you MONDAY.’ Yeah, not a fun weekend. Even less fun of a Monday. ... So, Happy Halloween, y’all. Watch out for Jesus on a scissor lift.”
Obviously, there's Halloween, and then there's Bible Belt Halloween.
Modern Halloween is complicated. Old-fashioned Halloween still exists, with costumed children going door-to-door seeking candy. But on some suburban streets, many homes are now buried in intense lights, spiderwebs and armies of devils, demons and skeletons, like a spooky competitor with the December holidays.
Mitchell, a seventh-generation Alabamian, grew up Baptist and remains active in a Baptist congregation. Today, he said, it appears that the "hell" house era — with its off-Broadway-meets-Bible-camp vibe — has run its course. What started as evangelism “kind of went wild and turned into theatrics and less about the Gospel. ... The wheels came off.”
However, lots of Southern believers still consider Halloween a “celebration of all things evil" and thus strive to avoid the holiday — sort of, noted Mitchell, reached by Zoom. The complicating factor is that Baptists in the South are easily the heaviest flock in the world, so "they're not going to pass up all that candy.”
Thus, many congregations have developed safer celebrations — often called “Holy-ween, “fall festivals” or similar terms — which almost always offer “trunk 'r treat” options, with families parked in church lots and children going car to car collecting candy. Some churches in older traditions celebrate All Hallows’ Eve on the night before All Saints Day. Some Protestants observe Reformation Day.
A Baptist Press feature on Halloween debates noted that church-centered events tend to offer “a trick or treat alternative for young children, a fall decor for the church, costume parties for both children and teens, fall-themed games and amusements, seasonal foods and refreshments, bonfires and other related seasonal activities. Generally, these churches discourage costumes with occult, pagan or 'gory' themes and they refrain from calling these events Halloween parties. ... These churches also offer prayer and devotion before their festivities and also pass out evangelistic tracts to visiting community members.”
The key is finding a way to keep building ties inside families and communities, said Mitchell.
That’s very Southern, along with other regional touches, like children sweating in their costumes since summer never seems to end, biting into orange-wrapper peanut butter chews "that could be used for doing drywall work,” and peeling humidity-soaked paper off Pixie Sticks after the sweet-sour powder in the straws has turned solid.
Growing up in rural Alabama, he said, meant loading children into cars and pick-up trucks to go knock on the doors of neighbors, a quarter of a mile away, and nearby loved ones. “You'd go get some candy from Mee-maw and then head home. That's Halloween.”
Religion is part of the Halloween mix, he added, because religion is a normal part of life.
“To me, the Bible Belt and the culture of the Deep South and how intertwined religion is with everything is just Southern culture,” he said. “It’s really hard to separate the two — they go hand in hand. Even if you didn't grow up in church, your life is still affected by religion down here. It's in the politics, it's in the schools, it’s everywhere. It's unavoidable.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.