Pre-emptive Quote on Halloween

Tomorrow is October 1, and with this month comes an increased focus on Halloween by evangelicals. Radio programs, websites, and books will raise serious concerns about the holiday, and the things they usually associate with it. In order to get a jump on the critique I present the following quote by historian Ronald A. Hutton from his book The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 383-4.

"An attack upon the celebration of Hallowe'en, especially in schools, correspondingly developed in the late 1980s, and continues at the time of writing ... It has been organized by evangelical groups in Protestant denominations ... and rests upon two arguments. The first is that Hallowe'en is a glorification or glamorization of evil powers. The second is that it is essentially unchristian ... a Christian feast of the dead is thoroughly embedded in the history of Hallowe'en and that its legacy is usually impossible to distinguish from that of paganism in the practices and associations of the night. It is of course maintained by what is still by far the largest of the world's churches, the Roman Catholic. To describe the feast as fundamentally unchristian is therefore either ill-informed or disingenuous."