Halloween is a Conservative Holiday
Walking around Capitol Hill recently, I was struck but just how ghoulish many Halloween yard displays have become. Fake blood graphically drips from hanging skeletons, or plastic zombies with all-too-realistic rotting flesh spring from lawns – not exactly sights one wants to witness on an autumn stroll. Modern celebrations of Halloween can be almost so revolting and macabre as to make me sympathetic to certain evangelical denunciations of the holiday.
Almost sympathetic, but not quite, because the true meaning of Halloween is deeply conservative. The ghostly holiday is a reminder that we should celebrate those things that link our living generation to the dead gone before, and recognize that the veil between this visible world and the invisible hereafter is much thinner than the “enlightened” usually allow. In the face of gross-out horror or demonic excess, this is the conservative wisdom we must return to our fall revelry.
Long before vulgar plastic displays had so utterly conquered front lawns, the great conservative Russell Kirk noticed something decaying in American celebrations of Halloween. “Yesteryear’s festive bonfire in the village square, with its half jocular, half fearful notions of ghostly presences,” he wrote in one essay, “has given way to a diabolical destruction in the core of some great metropolis.” The faith that once sustained the holiday was slipping away, and it was gradually being replaced by a certain insensibility to violence and the darkness.
Among twentieth-century conservative voices, Kirk was foremost in reminding Americans that society is an eternal contract between the living, the unborn – and, yes, the dead. To Kirk, the twentieth century’s horrors stemmed less from political issues than the loss of a religious feeling of that enduring chain of being. A dauntless critic of all forms of materialism and utilitarianism, his philosophic and historical works always aimed at restoring the perception that man is not simply animal but also spirit.
Read more in Providence.
