Kirk Cameron on Halloween

On the heels of last weeks comments from Pat Robertson denouncing Halloween comes a reminder that in fact not all fundamentalist Christians hate the holiday. Actor Kirk Cameron, a prominent evangelical who starred in the first film adaptation of the Left Behind series of books and who has produced some silly videos promoting creationism, issued a statement that Christians should embrace Halloween because the Pagans stole the holiday from them.

Cameron observed that mocking President Barack Obama with a Halloween mask was similar to when “Christians would dress up in costumes as the devil, ghosts, goblins and witches precisely to make the point that those things were defeated and overthrown by the resurrected Jesus Christ.”

“The costumes poke fun at the fact that the devil and other evils were publicly humiliated by Christ at His resurrection,” he continued. “That’s what the Scriptures say, that He publicly humiliated the devil when He triumphed over power and principality and put them under his feet.” But according to Cameron, pagans had tried to claim the Christian holiday for themselves.

“Over time you get some pagans who want to go this is our day, high holy day of Satanic church, that this is all about death, but Christians have always known since the first century that death was defeated, that the grave was overwhelmed, that ghosts, goblins, devils are foolish has-beens who used to be in power but not anymore,” he insisted. “That’s the perspective Christians should have.”

Given that historians agree All Saints Day, the ancestor of Halloween, was created by the Christian church to co-opt the Pagan holiday of Samhain, the problem here may just be that Cameron is irredeemably stupid.

In one of his creationist videos he argued that because the banana fits in a human hand it must have been intelligently designed - which is true, except that the intelligent designers were human plant breeders. The image above is from an appearance on Fox News where he asked the burning question, "If evolution is true, where are all the crocoducks?"

Truly, the man has a dizzying intellect. But as I see it the advice stands despite the source. Whether you're a Christian or not, if you enjoy celebrating Halloween, just go for it.