In the spirit of the season, today’s challenge is to pick a Halloween costume that is specifically designed to be as frightening to fundamentalists as possible. Extra points will be awarded if you actually provide a photo, drawing, or MS Paint sketch of the costume in question.
(I’m personally coming as an in-context exegesis of I Thessalonians 5:22. Still haven’t exactly worked out the details of the costume design, though.)
We’re having a party at SFL today! Today’s challenge is to tell us what who you’re coming as and what your costume will be.
Feel free to pick either a real famous fundy or fundamentalist archetype such as pastor, preacher boy, or soulwinner.
Games will include a shouting contest and bobbing for prayer cards. A covered dish supper will follow.
Witches and Warlocks and Satanists, oh my!
The approaching day of Halloween is the perfect time for fundamentalist pastors to dig out one of their favorite topics: How Practitioners of the Occult are planning to take over America’s youth via television shows and storybooks. That fact that these dabblers in magic have allegedly been working tirelessly since the 60’s with very little to show for it does not bother fundamentalists in the least. The more you don’t see them the more you know they’re there.
It’s easy enough to gather fodder for these types of claims since any reference at all in a book or video game to magic, magical creatures, spells, black pots, goats, wizards, spirits, or even unicorns can be construed to be the subtle hand of the New Age Movement subtly instilling a love of Satan in people’s hearts. And here you thought you were just watching Sesame Street. You fool.
Do you practice Yoga? Read your horoscope? Believe predictions from the Weather Channel? You might as well be sacrificing a virgin and branding Satan’s mark on your forehead. But never fear, if you’re an evangelist who can claim to be a former believer in the occult it’s worth its weight in spell books.
Never mind that the total number of Wiccans, Pagans, and other such folks is less than 0.1% of the population. Never mind that folk tales about the fantastic and supernatural have been around for as long as time. The world’s of imagination and make-believe evidently have no part in the fundy’s worldview unless the writer’s name happens to be Lewis or perhaps Tolkien.
Since we’re in the season, this weeks’ FWOTW was selected for having one of the most over-the-top anti-Halloween pages that I could find.
Not content to merely call this Satan’s holiday, this author makes the case that Halloween actually hails back to Baal Worship, cannibalism, incest, and (worst of all!) Roman Catholics.
Be sure to check out the rest of the site as well.
Although there are exceptions, fundamentalists generally believe that celebrating Halloween is tantamount to worshiping the Devil himself. So to avoid celebrating this wicked holiday by dressing up in costumes and going door-to-door looking for candy, some of them instead dress up in costumes (no witches, ghouls, or Obama costumes, please) and go to the church gymnasium looking for candy.
Who says that fundamentalists don’t appreciate nuance?