*spark-online.com >> version 25.0, OCTOBER.2001 >>JONATHAN C. SCHILDBACH

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welcome to hell

by jonathan c. schildbach

Halloween is the second biggest holiday in the U.S., right behind Christmas, in terms of the amount of money spent per capita on holiday-related decorations, costumes, and gifts. It's big business for a pagan celebration. And just as a huge number of Americans fail to celebrate the Christian aspect of Christmas, few give any thought to the origins of Halloween. These days, Halloween is an excuse to throw a party, put on a costume, get candy and get drunk. For many Americans it's not that much different from Christmas.

And while some Christians may be upset at the commercialization and secularization of Christmas, they don't go to great pains to try to ruin Christmas for people who aren't celebrating it the way they feel they should. But that is exactly what some Christians have tried to do to Halloween: make it less of a celebration than a depressing, painful event.

Some members of the Christian right have taken up the decidedly anti-Christian ideology of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." They have determined that rather than staying out of the business of Halloween, it is better to give Halloween a real "Christian" meaning: scare the hell out of kids and teens. Since Halloween is most enjoyed by the young'uns, let's make it the worst experience of their lives. Let's disturb 'em so bad they never want to have fun again.

So, following in the vein of Halloween-season haunted houses featuring gore and shock for some cheap thrills, "hell houses" now feature gruesome scenes not for fun, but to save souls. There are car wrecks presided over by demons encouraging teens to drink and drive; demons pushing drugs and laughing at the overdosers; demons urging teens to have sex; demons pushing teens to have gay sex; abortion clinics run by, you guessed it, demons.

What's the point? Apparently, it's that if teens can be scared badly enough to prevent them from ever doing anything immoral, if they can be convinced that they may die at any moment, and from anything that is morally questionable, they can be convinced to give their souls to Jesus.

Or can they? What exactly are the recidivism rates for scary salvation or fright conversions? Why try to scare people, especially young, impressionable people, into believing something? There's an element of the Patty Hearst experience in all of this. Maybe there's too much difficulty in explaining what is positive about what you're offering, while the (extreme) negatives of the other side are easier to illustrate, particularly if you can be trapped in an unpleasant setting.

At any rate, the hell houses are prevalent and effective enough that both Christian and mainstream media outlets run stories on them, showing sobbing teens signing pledges that they don't want to go to hell, and are going to give their lives to God. One wonders how much footage of jaded, sarcastic teens emerging from the hell houses snickering, unchanged and convinced that Christians are a goofy lot is edited away.

Of course, the real problem with hell houses is that they are completely counter to reason and the principles that they are trying to convey. For example, the people who are running hell houses are the same people who want sex education out of schools. Rather than teaching teens the consequences of sex in a realistic manner that might actually lead them to make informed choices, is it better to teach them that the dangers of sex include getting an abortion from a freak in a latex mask covered in fake blood? Should homosexuality really be avoided because a person might end up in eternal torment involving latex masks and fake blood? Teenagers are generally aware that they shouldn't drink and drive, or even drive recklessly while sober. Yet the feelings of invincibility that come with youth, and which can be enhanced by drugs, often override reason.

Sure, if some corny display can save some lives, I guess I gotta endorse that. But if the real purpose of hell houses is to produce converts who will live a meaningful life in Christ, I'm not sure how great a job they're doing. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that it's easy to convert the hungry with a Bible in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other, but that they are probably thinking of their hunger more than their eternal souls. A teen that has been, for the moment, traumatized by a haunted house probably has not reached any meaningful spiritual understanding that will last a lifetime. I'm guessing that all those people who saw "Psycho" and were temporarily afraid to take a shower eventually started showering again.

Jesus didn't devote much time to scaring people in the hopes of getting followers. His mission was more about presenting the possibility of greater positives.

Jesus did not say "make the children suffer so that they might come to me."

Happy Halloween.

Jonathan Schildbach is trying to arrange a Halloween pay-per-view event wherein the forces of good and evil battle over his soul. So far, there have been no takers.