Halloween and praise music

# Chapter 85

Cultural incongruence.

Halloween just passed us by. The social version of this holiday is benign and fun and community-building. The spiritual version of this day is death and darkness, a celebration of wickedness. I think we all can enjoy and participate in the social side of this day, princesses and superhero’s welcome. The spiritual side of this day is the antithesis of what Jesus-followers believe and trust.

So when I go to my local USA gym, and there are demons and goblins and skeletons and every evil nightmare you can imagine hanging and draped all over the place, and recordings attached to them making sounds of what they imagine demons to sound like, and you have to walk through mock spiderwebs to get from one place to another, you might think that this is a “haunted” house rather than a gym. Or maybe they are just super enthusiastically getting into the “spirit” of the social holiday?

But this is where it gets interesting, or confusing, depending on your point of view. While the entire gym is decked to the gills with every possible murky Halloween Ghoul and Goblin, and each time you come into the gym a demon screeches at you over the door, the music playing in the gym isn’t your typical metal band with a pounding drum or bass beat (for lifting weights and timing and all that jazz). No these characters are playing HillSong United worship music. Yep. You read that right. The praises to Jesus right along side of the demon screams.

This seems to me a perfect picture of the incongruence of American culture.