Moving is a funny thing. We in the good old U.S. of A. like to complain how there’s not enough state pride or identity (with the obvious exceptions, like Texas); how technologies like television, TikTok, etc., have homogenized regional accents; and remote working has diminished regional particularity when it comes to local industry. There’s something true to this lament, although if you were to pack up all of your earthly belongings and relocate from what was once northern Mexico to the land George Washington once called home, the Commonwealth of Virginia, differences in local culture might lie lurking behind the trees, waiting to jump out at you. Or perhaps they’re not hiding that well—they’re on the lawns of your small-town neighborhood. By “they,” I mean the giant, poseable lawn skeletons, anywhere between five and twelve feet tall, which, far from being mere Halloween decorations, present us with the aesthetic form of a growing cult of death which, despairing of eternal life to come, celebrates hedonism as the best strategy for present happiness.
While Halloween can be a touchy subject for Christians—with some Catholics arguing that rather than dressing up as fictional characters, ghosts, or ninjas, it would be better to honor the saints whose vigil it properly is—I’ve never been too averse to celebrating the day. Our family incorporated the saints into Halloween, attempting to leaven the secular, and I remember dressing up both as St. Francis of Assisi and Harry Potter. Growing up, I would have a party every year, where my parents would exercise great creativity in devising games so that all my friends and I, outfitted in silly costumes, could have a good time playing together. While there were clear lines between acceptable and unacceptable costumes and activities—no devils or serial killers here, nor Ouija boards—we generally saw Halloween as a fun time for mildly spooky activities, like the game where the kids were blindfolded and had their hands put in bowls of wet spaghetti noodles and “severed hands” made of gelatin.
But what’s happening in smaller cities and towns today is not your millennial child’s Halloween observance, even considering more mundane happenings than the Halloween vandalization of a Catholic cemetery with satanic graffiti in Bishop Barron’s Diocese of Rochester two years ago. Here in Warren County, as soon as the temperatures dropped below the typical summer heat (say the mid-20 degrees Celsius, the low 80s Fahrenheit for the Americans here), the skeletons and other creepy lawn decor began to appear. Not in the stores, where the capitalist class has loved to anticipate whichever holiday is on the horizon to bring in a bit more lucre to the corporate coffers—but on the lawns around the local neighborhoods. Not in late September or early October, about a month before Halloween, but at the very beginning of September. Such a spread makes Skeleton Season a good 33 percent longer than your grandmother’s usual Lenten observance.
Losing Christianity does not mean becoming ritualless agnostics, but rather, becoming more pagan . . .
The more libertarian-minded among us might, at this point, scoff under their breath and murmur, “Who cares? Let people decorate their property however they want.” But imagine this is your community. On a nice fall day, you’d love to take a walk, feel the wind blow through your hair, perhaps walk your dog or push your babies in a stroller—but the garish skeletons, posed in hideous situations, interrupt your sight all along the path. One need only search “poseable skeletons” on Facebook or the social media of your choice to see a variety of examples. A particular post that was suggested to me revealed that my friends who had expressed disgust at the sight while on a drive to the movie theater were not alone; one skeleton owner expressed dismay that a neighbor had criticized his display. Group members were quick in the comments to express solidarity, not with the neighbor, who simply wanted a neighborhood free from public grotesquery, but with the original poster. One resident made the most fascinating comment of all: “Your public display,” (I paraphrase), “would obviously be covered under our freedom of religion.”
One shudders to imagine what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison would say should they know their struggle for independence were being claimed for such an excess of the bourgeois, no, the merely tacky and kitsch (for one remembers with historian John Lukacs and the fictional character Charlie, from Whit Stillman’s film Metropolitan, that there truly was a discreet charm of the bourgeoisie). But nonetheless, the defender of the display noted above certainly has a point—namely, that the emergence of a two-month long liturgical season to death and horror points to a reality about America’s contemporary coastal elites. Losing Christianity does not mean becoming ritualless agnostics, but rather, becoming more pagan, following not, as G.K. Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, the paganism of the shepherds but that of the demons. This is not a new claim. Louise Perry made it powerfully in First Things last fall, discussing the eerie resemblance of ancient Roman abortion practices to those of our own society; Christopher Caldwell made it in the New York Times three years back, examining a new book by French philosopher Chantal Delsol, particularly examining the rise in those who identify with no organized religion in particular, the “nones.”
Certainly compared to the killing of children and the death of faith, the exposition of lawn skeletons and horrible grim reapers is a paltry matter, but it provides another symptom of the underlying condition of our societies, one more tangible in our daily experience of community. One might argue, on the other hand, that such macabre displays provoke us to contemplate our death, and that memento mori has a place within the Catholic tradition—after all, Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble was valiantly promoting the practice a few years ago on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Worth remembering, however, is that the practice had its adherents among the Roman pagans as well, and for less benign reasons. Witness, for example, the character of Trimalchio in Petronius’ The Satyricon. “Trimalchio’s Feast” is likely the most known part of The Satyricon; it inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best known novel, The Great Gatsby, which he originally wanted to title “Trimalchio at West Egg.” T.S. Eliot quoted it to provide an epigraph for The Waste Land. Its title character is a Roman member of the nouveau riche who throws lavish parties involving large birds made out of pastry and riotous entertainments. These latter include, surprisingly enough, memento mori like a silver skeleton that is thrown on the table, but the moral of the story that Trimalchio draws from this image for his guests is pointedly not to repent and believe in the Gospel, remembering the limitations of our human nature and the God-man who trampled death and bestows life abundantly.
As St. Paul asks, “What doth it profit me, if the dead rise not again? Let us eat and drink, for to morrow we shall die” (1 Cor. 15:32 DRA). For the unbeliever, considering one’s death more often than not will lead to escalating hedonism; occasionally, it might lead to philosophy and potentially even to faith. The death of a loved one, for instance, always has the potential to bring back wayward youth (and even their elders) to the Church. We should not despair of the possibilities, then, but should not be naïve either to the new religion of death gaining prominence in our neighborhoods.
As Fr. Steve Grunow wrote,
The current secularized version of the festival has no salvific content and has been loosed from its theological moorings. It looks very much like a festival of death for a culture of death, and for that reason I can see why parents might be concerned. . . . Halloween should not be a day when our churches go dark and Christians retreat into the shadows, but when we fill the darkness with Christ’s light and go out into the culture, inviting everyone to prepare for the festival of the saints with all the joy we can muster.
Christ continues to have the power to trample death, but his Body on earth has to bear him outward, so that it will not be the case, as one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters says, that “Jesus been a long time gone,” but rather that his presence among us will be enshrined in our culture.