The Fifteen Foot Skeleton Key

Sugar maples, sourwoods, poplars, and dogwoods are ablaze across much of the country. I am an autumnophile, and I keep tabs open to the 10-day forecast and The Foliage Report to plan my next drive into the Blue Ridge Mountains. With so much color change, even the most unobservant person understands that the country is turning over a new leaf. The chlorophyll has chimed like clockwork.

But there is a subtler change in the cultural seasons, and I see one when I am walking through my neighborhood and take in the sheer volume of modern Halloween decorations: fifteen-foot polyethylene skeletons, CAUTION tape, animatronic witches, zombie pets, spiderwebs, black cats, and purple-orange lights. Over the past few years, this horror décor has expanded in both scope and size. One lawn in my neighborhood features cardboard gravestones with epitaphs hand-drawn by a six-year-old; another displays a full-sized Mr. Bones year-round (sporting green, gold, and purple beads for Mardi Gras), who is now joined by dozens of other skeletons around the neighborhood. Some of these streets now have more décor for Halloween than they do for Christmas. What does this signify, if anything?

I have a theory about how the Goliath-sized skeletons and witches reveal the season our society is in, and which approach of Christian witness this can invite.

A Postmodern Civil Religion

So how can we tell where we stand in terms of religion in America? The online commentariat tends to gauge this through polls, questionnaires, and podcast commentary. Every year, when new data arrives, the discourse collapses into attention-grabbing headlines: “This generation is experiencing a revival!” or “Should we be thinking about the end of civilization?” Podcasters either declare the Third Great Awakening or lament a spiritually dead generation. Discourse quickly defaults to narratives of winning, losing, fighting, reviving, and clawing back.

Yet our current shift is explained less by big trends and more by fifteen-foot inflatable ghosts. We are witnessing an inversion of civil religion.

Thinking beyond an individual’s private beliefs, we can also say that societies possess a public or “civil” religion. Civil religion is less about personal faith and more about a culture’s shared public heroes, foundational myths, and national holidays.

The sociologist Robert Bellah famously identified an “American Civil Religion” characterized by a messianic belief that America was set apart, anointed, offering freedom to the world, and that this was to be celebrated each Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, and Memorial Day, and made manifest in the monuments of Washington, DC. Its most explicit symbol is perhaps The Apotheosis of Washington, the fresco in the rotunda of the Capitol, 180 feet above the floor, depicting our first president elevated among Greco-Roman deities.

Over the past generation, the erosion of this “American Civil Religion” has created a vacuum of public confidence. It has also inverted our public heroes and holidays.

We don’t cease to have holidays, but now, they are trauma-informed. We don’t cease to have heroes and heroines, but they are almost all individuals who did not possess power, but spoke truth to power. Over the past thirty years, the public holidays newly inaugurated by federal and state governments include Juneteenth, César Chávez Day, Rosa Parks Day, Harvey Milk Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Mother Cabrini Day, and Malcolm X Day.

What individuals believe about all of this is beside the point: this functions in the place of a civil religion to such an extent that it could be thought of as birthing a new, postmodern civil religion. Just as critical theory sought to deconstruct traditional grand narratives, but has, in its own way, generated a new cynical grand narrative, the breakdown of the American Civil Religion has birthed its own inverted postmodern calendar. We still honor heroes and observe holidays, but our calendar is now recalibrated—or, perhaps, “inverted.”

The Inverted Holidays

The easiest place to detect this recalibration is to look at the month of October. This has become the month of inverted holidays.

The first is the second Monday in October, when the commentariat spars on whether we should celebrate Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day or simply “Fall Break.” What was once celebrated as Columbus Day—a holiday aligned with the traditional civil religion—has increasingly been inverted into Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Halloween has an even deeper layer of inversion. The liturgical Christian calendar in the West celebrates All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day between October 31 and November 2. This season of Allhallowtide honors those who are no longer alive with the church militant, but alive in Christ. Its liturgy boldly inverts death and life. It also maintains a variety of subversive traditions, such as reviving the native inheritance of pre-Columbian Mexicans (“Day of the Dead”) and wearing costumes representing darkness. The symbolic world of Halloween—its ghosts, monsters, witches, and tombstones—arises from this same inversion, giving over an evening to that which is normally excluded due to fear or dread.

The Eastern Orthodox writer Jonathan Pageau has noted that inverted holidays (“carnivals”) serve a cultural function: they release the pent-up tension inherent to social order. The ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, for example, temporarily reversed roles when masters offered table service to their slaves. In the Middle Ages, the “Feast of Fools” permitted lower clergy and peasants to briefly assume the roles of church officials and lords, mocking them without fear of retribution. Mardi Gras serves a similar purpose, offering a “release valve” before the forty-day discipline of Lent. Pageau has argued that Halloween is basically the only “carnival” remaining in the Western public calendar. A “carnival” gives license for the sidelined to be in control for a short span of time.

Today’s culture, however, aims for a non-stop Saturnalia. Our civil calendar is adding days and months dedicated to identity groups and dropping holidays celebrating figures representing the old order.

And inverted holidays like Halloween somehow feel the “safest.”

Why Many Prefer Skeletons to Statues

If my neighborhood shows evidence of a resurgence of interest in Halloween, maybe it just has to do with a love of pumpkin spice and Snickers. But I suspect that at some level it represents an apocalypse in one sense of the word: an “unveiling” or revealing of a hidden reality. Tectonic shifts are now fully visible on the surface, not just in academia or public school calendars, but on our front lawns.

My hunch is that our age prefers skeletons to statues. Somehow, it is “safer.” When the past is more or less perceived as a nightmare that we are finally waking up to, it places society in an uncomfortable position. It communicates that the past cannot be trusted, and yet an impulse to commemorate remains. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the seventeenth century, “Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.” It is in our nature to be festive. But when no one deserves a pedestal, who is left to be celebrated? Perhaps Halloween décor has expanded because it provides one of the few culturally “safe” ways left to decorate. There may be danger in giving excessive honor to one’s own nation, but there is no danger in giving honor to a scapula connected to a collarbone. It is dead—it cannot oppress the living. It might feel too pious to place an angel or a saint in a garden, but it is peaceful to put out a zombie. There is something lovely about a lawn ornament of a woman in white raiment, but there is less baggage if you make her a mummy. A European male can be defanged if he is Dracula.

The growth of Halloween décor, therefore, may have less to do with theological debates over whether the holiday is “Christian” or “pagan.” (That is mostly a genetic fallacy.) The resurgence of Halloween displays may arise from a much simpler human desire—the desire to revel publicly, to be unabashedly festive—and the only holidays that retain unambiguous moral legitimacy are the inverted ones.

What, then, does this mean for Christian witness today?

The lawn ornament that embodies our moment is the most disembodied one: the fifteen-foot skeleton. Our age may be comfortable with this skeleton because we have learned to distrust flesh-and-blood. For Christians, the calling remains the same: to be the body of Christ. To be His hands and feet. To be, in all of our humanity, people who break through this cycle of cynicism. This Halloween, beneath the plastic bones and faux gravestones, somewhere there is a desire to celebrate people who are truly worth celebrating, and there are many in your neighborhood who haven’t found anyone like that among the living.