Why are Christians still celebrating Halloween?

Let's pretend your mom's name is Annie. Let's also pretend that in the small community where you grew up, back a few years, a handful of people decided they didn't like your mom. Didn't want her around. Even though she was probably the most loved, trusted, reliable, truthful woman in your community, certain people viewed this as a threat.

So they started a "Non-Annie Day." It was a day when parties were organized – but your sweet mom was not invited. Gatherings of neighbors included food, fun, laughter – but never your mom. She was shunned, by design.

After a few years, it became an annual observance. Like a pointless cancer, it grew, and with it grew rumors. You couldn't help but hear them.

"Annie's hateful," was one report. "She's no fun," went another tale. "She's part of a conspiracy to impose her repressive values on all of us!" one thread of hysteria maintained.

Through it all, your mom held her head high, but you knew that she hid ever-deepening hurt beneath a brave exterior. These were people whose children she had hugged, whose birthdays she had remembered, whose ailments she had tended. She had always been there, and this was what she got in return? Why?

Oh, there were a few of your mom's close, staunch friends who refused to go along, appalled by the whole event. But they were increasingly marginalized. "What are they trying to prove?" went the sentiment. "It's not that big a deal. Just a harmless good time." Many celebrants didn't even know the origins of "Non-Annie Day."

Let's say you also noticed as the years unfolded, the celebration begin to extend and spread, as the town's little children were lured into the observance. Decorations for "Non-Annie Day" became increasingly more elaborate, and each year, appeared earlier and earlier. Costumes became a central focus, every year more colorful and inventive. Candy was the reward for each child's clever disguise and how widely it was paraded through the streets.

And as the years go by, you – your mom's own child – become the object of increasingly intense pressure. "Come with us," your neighbors coax and whine, "Don't be a stick-in-the-mud. You're really over-reacting. It's just a party."

But you love your mom more than parties and peer pressure – don't you? Because you ache for how she must feel, you become more outraged over time. "Mom, why don't you move away? Retire to Florida? Go visit your sister in San Jose? You don't have to take this!"

She always shakes her head. "They don't know what they are doing," she says. "Besides, there are still a few who love me."

Will your mom survive, even prevail? Sure – but that still doesn't excuse the heartless, mindless disloyalty.

Halloween strikes me like this. Certainly not every child who goes trick-or-treating understands that it's the highest "holy" day of celebration for those immersed in the occult. But unless their parents are living under a rock, they can't have missed the wild popularity of "Harry Potter" and its many off-shoots. Only the brain-dead can fail to perceive that supernatural themes have eclipsed almost every other genre in youth media. The gatekeepers are not watching, don't get it, or don't care. It's almost as if Satan had some real power! The results portend spiritual trouble for this generation of biblically-illiterate kids. And so, we send them out in today's climate of supernatural evil's immense popularity, to celebrate it?

Parents who claim to be Christian, who claim to love God and be followers of Jesus Christ, must not read their Bibles either. Don't they remember the clear admonitions against sorcery, witchcraft, all the forces of darkness? (Deuteronomy 18:10-12; 1 Samuel 15:23; Acts 19:19; Galatians 5:19-20) Or do they think this stuff is a joke?

Have they bought the Christian-lite version of the supernatural, that Satan doesn't really exist, and spiritual deception is not real? That Satan wouldn't actually use our cultural dismissal of him, our tendency for cynicism, to minimize our allegiance to our Creator while he's sneaking in the back door? And that God wouldn't allow us to make such foolish choices if we wish?

Perhaps we deceive ourselves that Halloween will be winked at by the Almighty, that when we see Him, His response will certainly be, "Yes, you were right. It would have been wrong to deprive your children of candy at Halloween. That's the really important priority." As if children in America are typically deprived of parties, candy, or much of anything, and couldn't use a few lessons about self-denial.

Halloween marks and highlights the forces of darkness. It's a showcase for mediums, fortune-telling, occult beliefs, to become more and more mysteriously appealing to uninformed children, all whilst they are surrounded in today's America by the lure of "magick." We're not in Kansas anymore. It's 21st-century America, where Christian parents lovingly hand their kids novels where the child hero is tutored in witchcraft. Hello?

And those who say that, if we sacrifice Halloween, we'd have to stop celebrating Christmas and Easter, haven't thought this through. Yes, there were originally pagan holidays near Christmas and Easter, but Christ's birth and resurrection have really re-claimed both of these, despite the commercialization. Worldwide, people know what both these holidays are about.

God has left Halloween untouched. There is no significant Christian spiritual or historical event that occurs near Oct. 31. I think that might be deliberate by the Almighty, as a test. There is no "gospel" message in Halloween. It's a vacuum, and into vacuums rush all the demons of deception.

Like a garden, children need two things: nourishment, and protection from destruction. To teach our children that their Creator and Savior deserves love, respect and sometimes, self-sacrifice, we should as parents be shutting our doors, boycotting the candy shelves and clearly showing our children that we are saying "No" to Halloween – because we say a constant and continuous "Yes" to God.

It's the least we can do to honor our Parent.

Linda Harvey is president of Mission America, a pro-family organization which monitors homosexual activism, the occult and New Age influences on American youth.