Breakpoint

Breakpoint A daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. with a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends.
(702)

Since 1991, Breakpoint—a program of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview—has provided believers around the U.S. Our daily Breakpoint commentaries, co-hosted by Colson Center President John Stonestreet, air on some 1,400 radio outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Its "Breakpoint This Week" counterpart, also hosted by Stonestreet and Shane Morris in

cludes a weekly conversation with leading Christian writers and thinkers on topics ranging from the sanctity of life to marriage, religious liberty, and the restoration of virtue and ethics to public life. Over at Breakpoint.org, Stonestreet is joined by other thoughtful Christian writers through columns and feature articles equipping believers to live and defend the Christian worldview. Check us out online for great worldview content and resources, including book reviews for teens and preteens, need-to-know news headlines and more.

Islam’s Growth in the West Less than 25 years after Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, New York City,...
06/11/2025

Islam’s Growth in the West

Less than 25 years after Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, New York City, home of “ground zero,” just elected a Muslim as its next mayor. Some European cities are already majority Muslim, so what does this mean for America?

Today on Breakpoint, speaker and author Abdu Murray takes a closer look at Islam in America and how Christians should respond.

The truth, as usual, is complicated. There are legitimate concerns about Islam’s growing influence in Western life. But there are also exaggerations—or flat-out falsehoods. Take the rumor that Dearborn, Michigan, has implemented anti-Christian missionary laws. It hasn’t. I’ve read the ordinances and confirmed with Christian friends who live there that they can still share the gospel in Dearborn’s parks and streets.

Still, there are real tensions. When Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, told Christian Dearborn resident and street preacher Ted Barham that he wasn’t welcome in Dearborn, the backlash was swift. In response, Hammoud issued a “sorry, not sorry” statement that Dearborn is open to people of all faiths. But he didn’t apologize or even address Barham. With a population that’s roughly 55% Muslim, Hammoud likely feels no need. His base will keep him in office.

That’s what makes the situation interesting—and instructive. Islam’s growth in the West isn’t hypothetical. It’s real, and it’s reshaping local cultures and politics. But contrary to some fears, Shariah law isn’t taking over Western legal systems. Islam’s spread in America isn’t primarily legal or coercive. It’s cultural, demographic, and deeply spiritual.

Despite its global PR problems—association with extremism, restrictions on women, authoritarian regimes—Islam continues to grow in the U.S. Yes, that’s partly due to immigration and birth rates. But it’s also because Islam offers what secularism can’t: a clear message and a sense of belonging.

For young men especially, Islam presents masculinity as virtuous, not toxic. It calls them to discipline, duty, and identity. In a culture that sneers at male strength and a mainline church that too often avoids moral rigor, Islam’s conviction can look like courage.

Islam also carries an underdog appeal. In the Western imagination, Islam is often the David facing a secular (or Western colonialist) Goliath—a minority religion maligned by elites. For younger generations trained to root for the oppressed, that story resonates. It resonates so strongly that some Western youth support Hamas despite knowing that Hamas wouldn’t return the favor. Meanwhile, many churches have grown timid. We’ve replaced persuasive proclamation with emotional appeal, trading substance for sincerity. In that void, Islam’s stridency looks refreshing.

It’s important to remember that Islam is not just a religion—it’s a total worldview that encompasses politics. Many Muslims envision a world submitted to Allah’s law. Muslims differ on how they think that should happen. Most believe in persuasion, service, and exemplary living. Others rely on demographic growth and migration. And a smaller—but concerning—minority openly speaks of Islam’s global dominance and rejects religious pluralism altogether.

Even secular observers have taken notice. Years ago, atheist Richard Dawkins remarked that “I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, insofar as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.” That’s a remarkable admission, and it underscores that gospel proclamation to Muslims and serious Christian discipleship are not only spiritually vital, they’re essential to preserving the moral foundations of the West.

None of this justifies hostility or paranoia. But neither does it allow for naïveté. As Muslim populations grow in key Western cities, the temptation to use social or political leverage to silence criticism or limit evangelism is real. Dearborn’s situation reminds us that political pressure to self-censor can emerge even in democratic societies. History shows that when fear of backlash overrides justice or truth, victims suffer and wrongdoing festers. Moral clarity must outrank cultural sensitivity.

But the greater danger isn’t that Muslims are gaining power. It’s that they’re gaining people. Islam is winning some hearts that long for meaning, conviction, and community—hearts that should be hearing the credibility of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The tragedy isn’t that Islam is advancing. It’s that the Church has been retreating. Islam’s growth doesn’t prove that the religion is true. It proves its followers take their faith seriously, and that should wake us up.

The Christian response must be urgency, not alarm. We need to recognize what makes Islam appealing—its conviction, its courage, its sense of mission—and rekindle our sense of those same virtues, but undergirded by the truth of Christ.

Our witness must be both persuasive and personal. Muslims and secular seekers alike should see in Christians a faith that is intellectually credible, morally grounded, and compassionately lived. The gospel doesn’t offer domination, but deliverance; not control, but communion with the living God. So, let’s engage our Muslim neighbors, not avoid them. Let’s support those ministering in Muslim-majority communities. Let’s disciple men and women who embody truth with humility and conviction.

Islam’s rise in the West is not a reason to panic—it’s a reason to preach. Our Muslim neighbors aren’t the enemy. They’re people made in the image of God, searching for what only Christ can give.

The Most Important Question about AI A recent story at Fox News described a new app that allows people to cut out the m...
05/11/2025

The Most Important Question about AI

A recent story at Fox News described a new app that allows people to cut out the middleman, so to speak, when talking to God. “The ‘Text With Jesus’ app allows users to message AI-generated biblical figures, including Mary, Joseph and Moses.” Despite being lambasted for the app, its creator reports that many users are “embracing the new way of worship.”

Eerily reminiscent of the story of the Israelites and the Golden Calf, this is yet another example of the many “should we” questions created by artificial intelligence. And there are many. In a recent interview with MSNBC, actress and director Justine Bateman slammed TV and movie producers for choosing cyber-shortcuts to genuine human creativity:

"I think they sort of like to think of themselves as being tech barons themselves or something. But this, doing projects that don’t involve humans is not … in the film business anymore. They don’t know what it’s like to make a film."

A few weeks earlier, Zelda Williams, daughter of the great Robin Williams, issued this plea to her late father’s fans:

"Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t . . . to watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them...’ just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening.. . .You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings . . ."

A few months ago, former CNN reporter Jim Acosta interviewed an AI avatar that claimed to be Joaquin Oliver, one of the students killed in the horrific 2018 Parkland (FL) school shooting. Not to be outdone, at least three megachurches played an AI version of Charlie Kirk the Sunday after he was assassinated, with one pastor announcing the clip as “what Charlie is saying regarding what happened to him this past week.”

Continuing down this rabbit hole, the BBC recently reported that the Chatbot Truth Terminal had managed to “earn” millions in cryptocurrency. Not only that, but according to its creator, “Truth Terminal claims to be sentient . . .” But, he continued, “. . . it claims a lot of things. It also claims to be a forest. It claims to be a god. Sometimes it’s claimed to be me.” The program is now pushing for its own legal rights as a person.

What each of these stories reveals is how confused we are about the fundamental question that must be answered when it comes to artificial intelligence. In fact, we are confused about what the most important question even is. Many people wrongly think, as one author posted on X, that we need to decide what humans should do and what AI should do:

"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

However, the question is deeper than who (or what) should do what. The most important question is who are we as humans? What makes humans exceptional and distinct from machines?

For the last hundred years or so, in the wake of Darwinism, the essential question was how and why humans were different than animals. Many believed there was no essential difference. For example, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote,

"We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during the ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer, but none exists."

What we should have known were the implications of this belief for morality, meaning, and social cohesion.

Today, to settle the “should we” questions about artificial intelligence, we have to know whether humans are different than computers. Are we “meat machines,” as some have said, or something more. That question will help us distinguish between Elon Musk’s promises to restore health and ability to people with disease and injury and what he calls “cybernetic enhancements” through “human-AI fusion.”

The problem with his idea, that humans can “effectively become one with the AI,” is not just that it is too science fiction-y. Given his vision, track record, and resources, it’s not even that such dreams are beyond his reach. His confusion is the confusion of our time: What does it mean to be human? What is it about us that is distinct and exceptional?

That Tucker Carlson Interview: Why Anti-Semitism Must Be Condemned The Christian idea that humans are made in the image ...
04/11/2025

That Tucker Carlson Interview: Why Anti-Semitism Must Be Condemned

The Christian idea that humans are made in the image and likeness of God is the only source for universal human dignity, human rights, and human value in human history. As philosopher Luc Ferry wrote in his book, A Brief History of Thought,

"Christianity was to introduce the notion that men were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which the world owes its entire democratic inheritance."

Of course, Christianity received its understanding of how God created people from the Hebrew Old Testament.

A commitment to the doctrine of imago Dei requires that Christians oppose any idea that reduces humans to some other identity. Just as Christians must reject LGBTQ ideology and critical race theory for saying what is not true about the human person, Christians must reject anti-Semitism, especially in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s soft-pedal platforming of Nick Fuentes. Hateful views about the Jewish people have been prevalent on the political Left and have now emerged on the political Right. These views must be repudiated no matter which side of the political spectrum they are found.

What will happen now in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s interview may well determine whether Fuentes and his “groyper” movement is mainstreamed or is pushed back beyond the shadowy margins of the conservative movement. Either way, Christians must be first and foremost committed to the biblical description of the universe and the human person over and above any political loyalties. Thus, this growing anti-Semitism coming from the political Right must be soundly condemned. Whether from the Left or the Right, anti-Semitism is morally evil.

Chuck Colson used to say that ideologies are best understood based by how they answer the question, “What’s really wrong with the world.” Throughout history, anti-Semitic movements have answered that question with a who, not a what. Columnist Rod Dreher recently offered this summary of Hannah Arendt’s definitive post-World War II analysis of anti-Semitism in the context of the N**i rise to power during her generation:

"The basic argument Arendt makes is that anti-Semitism provides a scapegoat that can unite a badly fragmented society around a common enemy, even if it is detached from reality. Jews become the all-purpose enemy whose existence explains society’s troubles with deadly simplicity. The more popular it becomes, the more society becomes conditioned to think of individuals as faceless collective groups.
. . Moreover, anti-Semitism exploits the willingness of atomized people, devoid of meaning and structure, and their willingness to believe any fiction that restores purpose and order to their lives. And it justifies terror against the Other as a way of restoring the lost order for which people long."

The greatest evils in human history, including the Holocaust, began by identifying a group of people as the problem with the world. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn answered those who demonized a specific group of people this way:

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But ... [t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."

In “groyper” ideology, the evil and irrational hatred of certain groups, especially the Jews, is offered in place of a Christian understanding of Creation and the Fall. If the biblical understanding of imago Dei has been the most consequentially good idea in human history, racialized ideas about people have been the worst. They must not be tolerated. They should not be platformed. They should not even be left unchallenged. At least in terms of numbers, these are the bad ideas that have claimed the most victims.

Christians will find enemies to the left and to the right. There, people themselves made in the image of God, have been taken captive by what Paul called, “hollow and deceptive philosophies” and, elsewhere, “spiritual forces of evil.” Our job, Paul said, is to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.” We do this in hopeful prayer that,

"God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will."

The Gap Between God and Science is ClosingIn a recent article in The Spectator, a French engineer, investor, and author ...
03/11/2025

The Gap Between God and Science is Closing

In a recent article in The Spectator, a French engineer, investor, and author argued that “It’s getting harder for scientists not to believe in God.” According to Michel-Yves Bolloré,

"More and more convincingly, and perhaps in spite of itself, science today is pointing to the fact that, to be explained, our universe needs a creator. In the words of Robert Wilson, Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the echo of the Big Bang in 1978, and an agnostic: ‘If all this is true [the Big Bang theory] we cannot avoid the question of creation.’"

For centuries, the inherent conflict between faith and reason and between science and religion has been widely assumed. For example, in their 2003 book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, scientists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee argued that, contrary to science fiction, there is little chance of complex life existing anywhere but Earth. However, just because our world is kind of special, they carefully pointed out (multiple times), does not imply it came from a Creator.

Bolloré thinks that this philosophical cold war is thawing, and not because scientists are abandoning facts and reason. Rather, facts are convincing them of the truth:

"With sets of converging evidence from different scientific disciplines—cosmology to physics, biology to chemistry—it is increasingly difficult for materialists to hold their position. Indeed, if they deny a creator, then they must accept and uphold that the universe had no beginning, that some of the greatest laws of physics (the principle of conservation of mass-energy, for example) have been violated, and that the laws of nature have no particular reason to favour the emergence of life."

The long-running conflict between science and religion was entirely unnecessary. The Bible affirms the goodness of God’s creation in multiple passages. Genesis 1 describes the cosmos as a glorious Temple built for the fellowship of God and man. Psalm 19 argues that the beauty and order of creation points us to the Divine Artist behind it. Job 28 encourages human curiosity and exploration of the material world. By studying His world, humans are led to worship God.

Even without getting into the intricacies of Scripture and theology, the stereotype that science is rooted in the neutral investigation of facts and religion rooted in imagination and feelings is historically idiosyncratic. That claim was more reflective of Scientism than actual science or scientists, as is the claim by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion that freethinking scientists will lean toward atheism. The history of science is the history of hundreds of scientists—like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, and others—who both believed in God and played foundational roles in establishing the scientific disciplines.

The change Bolloré has described in the Spectator article is primarily among the emerging generations of scientists, prompting the author to ask:

"Could they be the ones showing older generations a new way forward, one in which religion and science can coexist? And, more to the point, we now have the scientific evidence that would support a big shift in perspective. In the words of 91-year-old Carlo Rubbia, Professor of Physics at Harvard and Nobel laureate: ‘We come to God by the path of reason, others follow the irrational path.’"

Of course, the false dichotomy between science and religion is still deeply imbedded in many universities and scientific institutions. But that can be changed. Granting that a Designer exists can only make attempts to uncover and understand design in the world easier. Plus, it gives meaning to scientific work. What if a new generation of scientists see their work like Johannes Kepler did, as “thinking God’s thoughts after Him?”

In his 2000 book God and the Astronomers, Robert Jastrow predicted:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Well, to put it mildly, theology has had its own issues. Still, we can all be hopeful that the war between science and religion is coming to an end. It should have never started in the first place.

Help us reach our goal of 220 new Cornerstone Monthly Partners by October 31! Your monthly partnership will support th...
31/10/2025

Help us reach our goal of 220 new Cornerstone Monthly Partners by October 31!

Your monthly partnership will support the daily work of Breakpoint, which means you’ll help us bring clarity to more believers around the world.

Become a Cornerstone Monthly Partner by October 31 at https://www.ColsonCenter.org/media25

Honoring the Witnesses: All Saints’ DayEvery autumn, in a sort of seasonal ritual, the leaves start turning, the air tur...
31/10/2025

Honoring the Witnesses: All Saints’ Day

Every autumn, in a sort of seasonal ritual, the leaves start turning, the air turns chilly, and Christians argue over whether to celebrate Halloween. While I’ve never been a huge fan of the dark, sketchy costumes (and I’m talking about what adults wear), there’s a whole history to this day, unknown to most people. In fact, there’s an even more amazing history behind tomorrow, All Saints’ Day.

Back in 2007, Chuck Colson described that history in a Breakpoint he called, “Honoring the Witnesses.” Here’s Chuck Colson:

It is Halloween again, and to be frank, I really don’t look forward to talking about it on Breakpoint every year. At best, Halloween has become an excuse to ask total strangers for candy. At worst, it’s a celebration of the mindless paganism our ancestors wisely turned their backs on. So, this year, I’d like to turn your attention to the often overlooked celebration that Halloween calls to mind. In case you’ve missed it before, the name Halloween is a shortening of All Hallows’ Eve and signifies the night before All Saints’ Day. For centuries on All Saints’ Day, the Church celebrated the lives of Christians who went before us. And rightly so: We can learn so much from those whom the author of Hebrews calls that great cloud of witnesses.

The tradition of remembering the Church triumphant dates back to the time of the first Christian martyrs. When soldiers of Marcus Aurelius Verus came to arrest Polycarp, a beloved church leader, Polycarp greeted them kindly. According to the third-century historian Eusebius, Polycarp “ordered a table to be laid for them immediately, invited them to eat as much as they liked, asking in return a single hour in which he could pray.” When Polycarp later stood in the coliseum, accused and surrounded by the jeering crowds, the governor pressed him to recant his faith. Instead, this man, who himself had been discipled by the Apostle John, said this: “For 86 years, I have been [Christ’s] servant, and He has never done me wrong: How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” As they were preparing to burn him alive, Polycarp offered up prayers of faith and praise.

In the years following Polycarp’s death, Christians would gather annually to take communion beside his grave. There they would remember his brave witness and take courage from his example. As the years passed, the day shifted in focusing from remembering Polycarp to honoring all martyrs. By the seventh century, the Church created a holiday to honor all of God’s saints—heroes of the faith. One of my favorite heroes was a woman named Monica, who lived during the fourth century. She would never face flames or jeering crowds, as did Polycarp, but she did face testing. That testing came in the form of her own longing for the return of her prodigal son, Augustine. His licentious lifestyle made this Christian mother weep. Later, when Augustine, who is now known as one of the foremost theologians of Christianity and scholars of Western civilization, did come to Christ, he wrote this prayer: “My mother, Your faithful servant, wept to You for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than others shed for the bodily death of a son. You heard her.”

I could tell you story after story like this, from Justin Martyr to Martin Luther to Amy Carmichael. But let me encourage you to do something this All Saints’ Day. Take the lead in your church to honor the great saints who set examples for us. Reacquaint your children with Halloween’s Christian origins. Research together and talk about the lives of Christian heroes. Sure, go ahead and let the kids dress up like Batman and hit up your neighbors for candy. But when the hoopla of modern Halloween is over, encourage your kids to imitate some real heroes—not in what they put on, but in how they live their lives.

That was Chuck Colson, from October 31, 2007, describing the rich history behind All Saints’ Day.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to Breakpoint.org

Colorado and Assisted Su***de In 2016, the nation of Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD. Less than a ...
30/10/2025

Colorado and Assisted Su***de

In 2016, the nation of Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD. Less than a decade later, the practice accounts for one in 20 of all deaths in the country. How quickly the deadly practice expanded underscores how, anywhere it has been legalized, the “right to die” soon becomes the “duty to die.”

Assisted su***de is the definition of a slippery slope. Once passed, these laws always expand. In Canada, the law was recently amended to allow anyone with a mental illness, such as PTSD or depression, to obtain life-ending drugs. In the Netherlands, government surveys recently uncovered “thousands of cases” in which doctors “intentionally administered lethal injections to patients without a request,” including “children, the demented,” and “the mentally ill.”

It was also in 2016 that Colorado voters approved the End-of-life Options Act, to allow physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to adult residents with a so-called “terminal” diagnosis. Last year, the governor signed legislation to also allow some registered nurses to prescribe the lethal drugs and to reduce the waiting period from 15 to seven days. This year, a pair of lawsuits demonstrate just how slippery the slope is here, as well.

One of the pending lawsuits seeks to expand Colorado law even further. The euphemistically titled group Compassion & Choices, formerly known as the “Hemlock Society,” is challenging the residency requirement, arguing that it is “discriminatory” to prevent out-of-state residents from receiving drugs for assisted su***de. If this lawsuit is successful, Colorado would become a “su***de tourism” destination, allowing individuals anywhere in the United States to “shop for death.”

The other Colorado lawsuit seeks to curb the disturbing trend of prescribing lethal doses to patients with severe eating disorders. Under the guise of “terminal anorexia,” some doctors claim that, due to long-term effects of malnutrition, there are patients who lack the will to live and “simply cannot continue the fight.”

However, according to Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Patricia Westmoreland, anorexia is primarily a psychiatric condition and is treatable not terminal. Even more, according to Dr. Westmoreland, “Patients suffering from extreme anorexia are not mentally healthy enough to make a decision with such dire consequences.”

Doctor-assisted death is always sold to the public with promises of safeguards, such as consent, but these safeguards are quickly compromised. So is the meaning of what is considered a “terminal” condition. Predictably, Colorado is following the same troubling global trends as everywhere else medicalized death has been legalized.

Behind the second lawsuit to challenge Colorado’s assisted-su***de law is a group of disability-rights advocates led by the Institute for Patients’ Rights. They claim the law inherently discriminates against people with disabilities by singling out individuals with disabilities or medical conditions who struggle with depression and other mental health issues, including suicidal ideation. Rather than offering mental health care and su***de prevention services, as it does for non-disabled people who express a wish to die, Colorado offers those with disabilities the “option” of killing themselves. In effect, Colorado law tells people with disabilities that their lives are less valuable and not worth preserving.

At the center of their case is the story of Jane Allen, a 29-year-old woman who struggled with anorexia. In the midst of her mental health crisis, a Colorado doctor diagnosed her with “terminal anorexia” and issued her a lethal prescription. Thankfully, Jane’s father intervened, and a court ordered the drugs removed from her possession, saving Jane’s life. Her health improved, and she was able to live independently before she tragically died of a heart condition a couple years later.

Jane’s case illustrates the problem with assisted-su***de laws like Colorado’s. These laws prey on the most vulnerable, poison family relationships, and corrupt the medical profession. Rather than embracing the call to heal, doctors become dispensers of death. Even worse, they are forced to decide whose life is worth living and whose isn’t. This is not “care.” Nor is it “medicine.”

Every single life has inherent, eternal value. Lawmakers and medical professionals cannot change what the Creator has already decided. Christians must be clear on what is true about human value.

The slope of medicalized killing is slippery indeed. The safeguards cannot hold. Christians must pray for and push for laws that recognize the central truth that every human being, from conception to natural death, is made in God’s image and worthy of life. More importantly, believers must be discipled in this essential and consequential doctrine so that the unjust taking of life will never be accepted as normal, even where it is made legal.

For more resources to help those struggling with these issues, check out our free Hope Always course available on Colson Educators. https://courses.colsoneducation.org/hope-always

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween? Every Halloween resurrects an annual debate among Christians: Should we celebrate...
29/10/2025

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?

Every Halloween resurrects an annual debate among Christians: Should we celebrate Halloween? This year is no different. For some, Halloween is harmless fun. For others, it’s an excuse to celebrate darkness, sketchy costumes, evil, and death.

For Christians, the essential question about Halloween is whether we are loving God and our neighbors, and proclaiming what is true about Christ’s victory over evil. A helpful video in the What Would You Say? series offers insights that every Christian should know (and what your kids need to know) about Halloween.

First, what is often claimed about the history of Halloween is wrong. Some people claim Halloween comes from a pagan festival called Samhain, when Druids of old would commit human sacrifice under a full moon. But according to historians, and even many modern pagans, most of that story is made up. In fact, no detailed records of Samhain or other Celtic festivals survived, so we know very little about it. And the way modern pagans practice is more of an imaginative reconstruction that has little in common with Halloween historically, other than occurring at harvest time.

A more accurate explanation for the date and name of Halloween, and even its emphasis on the dead, is the Christian feast, All Saints Day, which was celebrated on November 1. This day was also known as “All Hallows,” so the night before (October 31) came to be known as “All Hallows Eve,” or “Hallow’een.” At some point, traditions like dressing up and going door to door to collect treats developed. In England, the idea of a night of mischief probably came not from Halloween, but from Guy Fawkes Day on November 5.

It wasn’t until the late 1700s that Halloween lost its Christian associations and took more of the ghoulish, plastic, teeth-rotting form that we know today. It’s not a coincidence that most of the day’s transformation happened in America and, like what we now think of as “Santa Claus,” that it had so much to do with selling merchandise. As it turns out, all the witches and jack-o-lanterns and spider webs and skeletons have commercial, not historical, origins. Halloween has more to do with department stores than with Druids.

Even if Halloween isn’t a revival of an ancient paganism, that doesn’t mean it’s morally innocent. Many sinful and destructive practices have become associated with Halloween over the years, including sexually provocative costumes, drunkenness, drug abuse, and vandalism. These are as wrong on October 31 as any other night, and Christians are right to avoid them.

There’s also the general ugliness that’s often present on Halloween. Imitations of murder and mutilation are disgusting and rude, and those are not things to decorate with. We age-restrict those kinds of images on television, but for some reason it is culturally acceptable to display the same images on front porches.

Halloween is no excuse to engage in destructive and sinful activities. Christians aren’t granted a day off from the first Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And gross, gory, or excessively scary imagery is not a way to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

No matter what we do or how we celebrate, Jesus was clear that these two commandments should govern all our behavior. Halloween is not a valid excuse to ignore them.

Christians should ask, Why are we celebrating a defeated foe? In Colossians 2, Paul proclaims that Christ has “disarmed the powers and authorities.” In fact, He “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” In His crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus has defeated Satan and his hosts.

There are real forces of spiritual darkness, but according to the Bible, they are in retreat. Their power was permanently broken when Christ rose from the dead. We need no longer fear death because Christ has destroyed “the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” His fate is sealed, and life has the last word.

Any message that Christians send, including with our celebrations, should proclaim the victory of Jesus, rather than glorify evil, death, or darkness. Paul offered guidance on the right way to celebrate when he wrote to the Philippians, “[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Christians should always consider what our celebrations say about evil, and the Savior who triumphed over it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong to enjoy Halloween, or even perhaps to mock the forces of evil. However, it does mean that the love of God and neighbor should guide our fun, and that we should do everything we can to tell the truth about who has won.

To find the full video, Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?, check out the What Would You Say? channel on YouTube, or visit https://www.WhatWouldYouSay.org

Address


Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Breakpoint posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Breakpoint:

Shortcuts

  • Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company?

Share

Our Story

The truth is a powerful thing.

We live in a moment of cultural confusion. Fewer and fewer of the things that give meaning to our lives come easily. Family, community, beauty, truth seem to be constantly eroding around us—while our news feeds are full of despair, anger, and division.

How are Christians to make sense of the world around us? How can we make sure we have clarity in our daily lives?

Welcome to BreakPoint. A program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, our commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion.