Doug Van Dorn- Subverting Halloween

So this is James Jordan's paper over on the Theopolis website.

And what is this thing called? I don't even bring that up.

It is called... concerning Halloween.

All right? So this is how he starts it off.

He says, it's become routine in October for some Christian schools to send out letters warning parents about the evils of Halloween, and it has become equally routine for me to be asked questions about the matter.

So, yeah, I agree with both of those, and this is why I wanted to talk on this particular paper, because the take that he's going to have on this is incredible.

something that I had not come across even when I was investigating this 10 years ago.

And to kind of lay it out up front, I'm going to talk about the difference between taking a subversion view of Halloween versus taking a syncretistic view of Halloween.

And I want to explain what the differences are between those two things.

I think people confuse these.

I don't think people have a good understanding at all of what subversion is.

I think they understand syncretism, but they kind of confuse that with actually subversion.

So subversion takes an existing cultural form and it redirects the meaning so that the original pagan rival religious content is either emptied or contradicted or replaced by a Christian one.

The form can be retained, but the theological content isn't.

is changed.

I've talked a lot about subversion on the Reform Fringe and on other podcasts that I do.

I really took this term from my friend Brian Gadawa, who writes some of the best stuff that I've ever seen online about subversion.

He's a Hollywood, you know, script writer, and he talks about how important it is in telling stories to be subversive about them, to take somebody else's story and import your own meaning into it.

We see this all the time.

I met Brian, actually, when he was writing his screenplay for his screen film for his Noah, what ended up becoming his Noah book.

And that – it just so happened that the Aronofsky film on Noah came out right as he was doing this.

And he was like, man, I can't come out with a movie now because they will never make two movies in the same year or even the same decade about the same topic out in Hollywood.

So he ended up turning those into books.

But if you watch that – Noah movie, you will see an excellent example of the subversion.

In his case, he takes all the biblical form, the name, the flood, you know, the names of Noah's sons, the flood, the situation surrounding it, and he gives it totally different meaning.