[Repurposed from an October 2024 “AskMeAnything” Message.]

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The question we’ve received more than any other question over the past month has been this: Is Halloween secretly pagan?

We’ve been getting this question since the very beginning of our Ask Me Anything series, but this question really started flooding in over the past few weeks.

We’ve got a few versions of it:

• “Is Halloween secretly occult?”
• Is Halloween a pagan ritual?
• Should Christian celebrate Halloween?
• Does Halloween worship pagan gods?

And so forth.

This is a question that seems to have been on everybody’s mind, which doesn’t surprise me at all, because every year around September or so, suddenly social media gets flooded by Christian TikTokers saying things exactly like that, right?

Your Facebook reels get absolutely bombarded with Christian influencers saying things exactly like that.

When we were promoting our trunk or treat event that happened last week, we were flooded with both Facebook comments and messages to the church’s account yelling at us for participating in Halloween activities.

You might have seen some of those.

One woman messaged me and told me I was a servant of Satan because I was letting my church perform secret pagan rituals.

She didn’t even send it to the church account. She somehow found my personal Facebook account, and sent me a message request to tell me that I was a false teacher for having a trunk or treat.

That’s how my week went.

And it’s easy to laugh at people like that, but that’s a really common view among a lot of Christians, including a lot of really smart Christians.

And as a result, you may have grown up hearing that Halloween was off limits to Christians.

That Halloween is in some way opposed or antithetical to the Christian faith.

That worshiping Jesus and celebrating Halloween are somehow contradictory to each other.

That’s a claim you hear not just about Halloween, but about a lot of popular holidays.

People often claim that holidays like Easter and Christmas – but especially Halloween – are secretly pagan and that Christians should not celebrate them.

A lot of pastors and preachers and teachers claim that Easter was originally a pagan fertility festival.

Have you ever heard that one?

They say that Easter was originally a pagan festival in honor of a goddess named Ishtar, and that Christians just kind of haphazardly turned it into a holiday celebrating the resurrection.

And as a result, there are some hardcore fundamentalist churches that refuse to celebrate Easter.

In the same way, there are some pastors and preachers and teachers who claim that Christmas was originally the pagan festival of Saturnalia, and as a result, they refuse to celebrate Christmas.

But there is no holiday that stirs up more wrath and paranoia than Halloween.

If you’ve never heard any of this before – then good for you – but I’m gonna lay it all out as clearly and simply as I can.

Many pastors and preachers and teachers claim that Halloween was originally a Celtic Druid pagan festival called Samhain (pronounced sow-ehn).

That’s how you pronounce that. Sow-ehn.

They claim that during Samhain, Celtic priests could predict the future.

They claim that during Samhain, fairies and spirits would break into our world and wreak mischief.

They claim that during Samhain sacrifices were performed to appease the Celtic deities, typically human sacrifices.

They claim that during Samhain, the Celts would wear animal skin costumes to scare away the spirits, and that they would place jack o lanterns in front of their homes to keep the spirits from entering.

And they claim that when we celebrate Halloween, we are accidentally worshiping pagan gods and opening a door for pagan spirits to enter our lives.

For many of us, there’s a good chance that is what you grew up hearing when you heard about Halloween, and as a result, you’re left wondering today, “Should we be celebrating this holiday at all?”

So we want to spend this answering that question: “Is Halloween secretly pagan?”

And I’m gonna give you the long answer in just a moment, but before we get there, I want to give you the short answer so you know where we’re going with all this.

“No.”

No, Halloween is not secretly a pagan ritual.

It’s not secretly a pagan festival.

It’s not secretly a pagan practice.

And you have not been accidentally worshiping pagan gods.

1. The So-Called “Pagan Roots” of Halloween Were Invented by a Con Man From the 1800s

The pagan roots of Halloween were invented by a con man from the 1800s.

All of these claims about the so called pagan roots of Halloween come from exactly one book.

They don’t come from a bunch of historians. They don’t come from a bunch of professionals who’ve spent years researching.

They come from a book written by one dude in the 1800s.

The source for all these claims about Halloween’s supposed pagan origins come from a book written in 1890 by a Scottish author named James George Frazer.

The book is called The Golden Bough.

Now, just to give you an idea of how historically reliable The Golden Bough is, in that book James Fraser claims that Jesus is a fictional character invented by Christians.

And that everything about the life of Jesus was ripped off from earlier stories about pagan deities like the Egyptian gods Horus and Ra, as well as the Persian god Mithras, and the Zoroastrian religion.

James Frazer says that the entire story that the Bible tells is a myth ripped off from other pagan religions, and that the earliest Christians were a death cult who drank human blood.

So just to be clear: This is the guy who wrote the book that invented the claim that Halloween was pagan.

Now, at the time his book The Golden Bough was extremely influential. It inspired a whole bunch of other copycat books and 1000s of authors who came after him took the claims he made in the Golden Bough and repeated them without ever actually confirming or researching them.

And so to this day, in fields like anthropology and comparative religion, there are still claims floating around that were literally made up out of whole cloth by this con man named James Frazer.

But something really funny has happened over the past 140 years since he wrote it.

What’s happened is that nearly every word of his book has been debunked.

His book has been thoroughly myth-busted.

It’s actually kind of funny looking back.

The British anthropologist Robert Ackerman called the Golden Bough “An embarrassment.”

Another expert named Godfrey Lienhardt wrote that Frazer’s claims “seem to have originated almost entirely in his imagination.”

The expert Edmund Leach wrote that “whenever the evidence did not fit Fraser’s story, he simply altered the evidence.”

The celebrated anthropologist Rene Girard called the Golden Bough “a grave injustice to the field of Ethnology.”

In other words, we can’t trust the book or the man that all of these claims about the pagan origins of Halloween came from.

That is the first thing we have to understand: The pagan roots of Halloween were invented by a con man from the 1800s.

2. We Have Almost No Reliable Information About Ancient Celtic Paganism

It makes no sense to say that Halloween is rooted in Celtic paganism because we have almost no reliable information about ancient Celtic paganism.

So many horror movies and TV shows and stuff like that involve evil druid priests doing evil pagan sorcery and stuff like that.

Some of my favorite movies are about people who get attacked by evil Celtic or Gaelic or Druid Pagans.

Ever seen the movie The Wicker Man?

That’s about druidic pagans.

Ever seen the later Halloween movies when they started to get all weird?

That’s about Celtic and Druidic pagans.

The list goes on.

And they make great horror movie villains, but they basically didn’t exist – at least as far as we know.

Because we know practically nothing about Celtic pagan culture.

We know practically nothing about the ancient Druids.

Almost none of the things that you’ve seen in horror movies and tiktoks and conspiracy theory websites about Celtic druids and so forth are actually true.

Almost all of it is made up.

Because before the coming of Christianity, the Celtic peoples didn’t write anything down to preserve their culture or history.

We have absolutely no written record that tells us anything at all about those scattered Celtic peoples who existed before the coming of Christianity.

And as a result, we don’t actually know anything about them except for where they lived.

And so I love the way that the scholar Carolyn Emerick puts it. She says:

“[When we claim that Halloween is rooted in ancient paganism, we] arrive at this conclusion not by hard evidence like a written record because the inhabitants of Britain did not record things in writing during the pre-Christian era. We simply assume the pagan origins of folk customs like the jack-o’-lantern.” – Scholar Carolyn Emerick

That’s number two: It makes absolutely no sense to say that Halloween is rooted in Celtic paganism, because we don’t know anything at all about Celtic paganism.

3. We Don’t Even Know What Samhain Actually Was

It makes no sense to say that Halloween is rooted in some pagan ritual called Samhain, because we don’t even know what Samhain actually was.

As far as we know, everything James Frazer wrote about Samhain in the Golden Bough was completely made up, because he didn’t have access to any historical records to go by.

We have exactly one reference to Samhain in all of ancient history, and it’s literally just from a calendar from the first century BC.

It’s literally just a notch on this bronze calendar, and on the notch, it says Samhain.

It doesn’t say what Samhain is. It doesn’t say what happens during Samhain. It doesn’t say what Samhain is for.

The only thing we know about Samhain from this calendar is that it represented the transition between summer and winter – because the word Samos meant summer.

We have absolutely no reliable evidence that it had anything to do with ghosts or witches or Jack O’ Lanterns or religious ceremonies of any kind.

As far as we actually know, it was just a standard ancient festival celebrating the beginning of winter.

That’s number three: It makes no sense to say that Halloween is rooted in some pagan festival called Samhain, because we know practically nothing about what Samhain even was.

And what all of this means is that there is absolutely no real evidence linking Halloween with ancient Paganism.

What Is Halloween Then?

If it’s not secretly a pagan holiday, what is it?

I’m going to give you the long answer, but first I’m going to give you the short answer.

It’s an old church festival.

You may have a hard time wrapping your head around this, but the actual origin of Halloween is that it’s an old church Festival, and it always has been.

Christians didn’t steal Halloween from the pagans, pagans stole Halloween from the Christians.

The Earliest Version of Halloween Was a Set of Fourth Century Festivals Called Martyrs Day and All Saints Day

The earliest version of Halloween was a set of fourth century church festivals called Martyrs Day and All Saints Day.

What was Martyrs Day?

Martyrs Day was a festival created by the early church where they would take a day to remember the Christians who were martyred by the Roman government.

It was very similar to what we’re doing nowadays when we have Memorial Day. We take a day to consciously remember those who have fallen in battle.

And in the same way, the early church would take a day called Martyrs Day to remember their brothers and sisters in the faith who had been martyred by the Roman government that was persecuting them.

Now, churches in some regions would celebrate martyrs day near the end of April, but others would celebrate martyrs day during late October or early November – as fall started to come on in full force.

Now, around that same time, there was another church festival that they started to celebrate.

They created a very similar tradition called All Saints Day.

What was All Saints Day?

It was a church festival where they would remember not only Christians who were martyred, but all of their Christian ancestors who had passed away.

They would take a day where they consciously remembered and honored their deceased loved ones in the faith.

And once again, some churches celebrated All Saints Day in the middle of the spring, typically in May. Other churches celebrated All Saints Day at other parts of the year.

During the early centuries of the church, it wasn’t fully united and organized, and so it took a while before they all got on the same page.

But what happened was that these two festivals were eventually combined into one festival called All Hallows.

The two festivals were eventually combined into one festival called All Hallows or All Hallows Day.

Essentially what happened was that, as the early church became more organized, they decided that they needed to pick one date that all the churches could celebrate Martyrs and All Saints Day on together.

And they ultimately decided that they would formally put all of those celebrations on this one day in late fall.

They would celebrate it as fall began to turn into winter at the end of October or the beginning of November.

Now, why did they choose that fall date?

Because fall reminds us of death.

That’s why.

They chose this late fall date – October 31 and November 1 – because, as the trees start to die and the greenery starts to die and the animals prepare to hibernate and the crops go dormant, that date fit perfectly with the theme of remembering and honoring our dead loved ones and martyrs.

And so the origin of Halloween is this church festival called All Hallows.

Halloween is literally just a juxtaposition of “All Hallows Eve” in the dialect of those British Christians.

Celebrating Christ’s Victory Over Death and Hell With Costumes and Dancing

Now, what does a festival that honors martyrs and deceased Christians have to do with Halloween as we practice it today?

The answer is everything.

Here’s why: Because during All Hallows Eve, they celebrated Christ’s victory over death and hell with costumes and dancing.

Where do Halloween costumes come from?

They come from the Christians who invented All Hallows Eve.

What happened is that they invented this very strange tradition called the danse macabre.

What happened was that on All Hallows Eve, they would stitch together costumes that were made to look like skeletons and other scary things.

The costumes were supposed to remind them of death.

And then they would put on these scary costumes and they would dance.

Why would they dance?

Because dancing was a reminder that even though death is inevitable, Christ has defeated death.

They put on scary costumes and danced to remind themselves that death has lost its sting and the forces of darkness have been defeated.

They called that the danse macabre.

It was a way to remember that death is coming, but there is hope beyond death.

And so every year, just as fall was transitioning into winter and everything was dying, they would celebrate All Hallows Eve by putting on scary costumes and dancing to remind themselves of Christ’s victory over death as they honored the martyrs and their deceased Christian loved ones.

Where Did Trick or Treating Come From?

But we are still not done, because at exactly the same time, they had another tradition.

Because during that All Hallows Eve celebration, the children would go out throughout the village – there were no helicopter parents back then, so the kids could wander around the village at will – and they would knock on doors and sing songs in exchange for home baked sweets.

Processed candy didn’t exist back then, so you would bake some sweets in your house, and you’d give it to the kids who knocked on your door.

They called that guising.

The kids would put on their scary All Hallows Eve costumes and go beg for sweets at your doorstep.

Does that sound familiar?

We have a new name for it now.

Where did trick or treating come from?

It came from the Christians who invented Halloween.

And so just to be clear: Halloween originated as a church festival where they would remember and honor the dead, put on scary costumes and dance, and send the kids out to go knock on people’s doors begging for sweets.

That is the story of Halloween.

So to answer the question, “Is Halloween secretly pagan?” the answer is, “No, it’s actually exactly the opposite.”

Rather Than Banning Halloween, We Should Be Reclaiming Halloween

And so the takeaway from all of this should be that you don’t have to ban Halloween in your household.

You can.

It’s fine.

You don’t have to celebrate anything you don’t want.

But you shouldn’t ban it on false pretenses.

Halloween is not a pagan holiday that’s been copied by Christians.

It’s a Christian holiday that was invented by Christians as a way of celebrating some of the most glorious truths of our Christian faith.

And so if anything, the takeaway should be that rather than banning or avoiding Halloween, we should be reclaiming Halloween.

Because Halloween is not just about going and getting candy.

It’s not just about watching scary movies.

It’s not just about putting on costumes and carving up a pumpkin – even though all of those things are great.

Halloween is about celebrating the gloriously good news that Christ has defeated death and hell.

Christ has overcome the forces of darkness.

Christ has curb stomped the devil.

He has crushed the demons.

He has defeated the pagan gods who used to wreak havoc on this world.

And so we have a glorious hope beyond death.

And we are going to see our deceased loved ones in the Lord again.

And even as we mourn the loss of so many of the people we care about, we have a profound joy in the knowledge that they are going to be returned to us when we are reunited with the Lord one day.

And I think that is a holiday worth celebrating.