While walking across campus yesterday, I ran into a colleague who asked me where I was going. I told her that I was off to teach a section of US History I (roughly 1492-1876, give or take). She asked me what books I used for the course, and though I started to tell her, stopped me shortly after I uttered "Morgan's Meaning of Independence." As it turned out, she had been a graduate student under Prof. Edmund S. Morgan, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 97. After telling me that she was so happy that I was using one of his books, as well as a few stories about what a wonderful mentor he was, we parted ways, and I started thinking about writing a post about Morgan (as she also told me she was going to a memorial service in his honor this coming weekend) about his influence on me as an historian.
But then the annual "Halloween Controversy" reared its head. As a child, my family always celebrated Halloween. By celebrate, I of course mean wearing costumes, carving pumpkins into Jack-O-Lanterns, and eating candy....and then eating more candy! What my parents didn't confiscate that is. It would be several years after I stopped "trick or treating" that I discovered that my father and I apparently had liked some of the same types of candy for years....but interestingly enough, those had been the ones that had always been confiscated when I was younger! At the same time, we lived in an area where there were many friends and neighbors who did not, often for religious reasons. One neighborhood family, in particular, once referred to it as "celebrating the devil" or some such. That statement aside, we all still played together the next day (and maybe even shared some candy), we just didn't walk around in costume together the night before.
And yet, there it was. All over social media these past few days, people posting pictures of themselves or their kids in costume, talking about parties they had or would attend, but also included in the mix of posts were some about how some friends weren't celebrating Halloween, or had stopped doing so, or who didn't understand why people used Halloween as an excuse to dress a certain way. Now, the point of this post isn't to get into an argument over whether or not Christians should or should not celebrate or take part in Halloween activities (if you want to read something from both sides of that argument you can take a look at this and this). It isn't even to get into the history of All Hallow's Eve, which you can read about here (and while you are at it, remember that the day after Halloween is All Saints Day). Rather, it is ponder ways in which Christians can learn from secular culture even while they engage it.
To do that, I return to Morgan. I am very thankful that a little over two decades ago I decided to take the first half of the US Survey (the very class I talked to my colleague about) as a freshman at Indiana University. Prof. Bernard Sheehan was my first college history professor, and he opened my eyes to what History could be and (and that it might even be a profession). He also introduced me to the work of Gordon Wood and Edmund Morgan (amongst other wonderful historians), and for that I am thankful. Over the years, I think I've read every book Wood and Morgan have written (at least once), and I've also learned more about both men (indeed, I literally bumped into Prof. Wood at a convention, and was so "star struck" that I could only mutter an apology). In the case of Morgan, one of my favorite quotes of his came from an interview in 2006, in which he talked about his conversion to being a "Calvinist atheist."
Those two words aren't often combined together, nor would they make much sense to some either in or outside of the Church. But in Morgan's story, it makes perfect sense. In 1938, after studying under Perry Miller (who shared both his interest in the Puritans as well as his atheism), Morgan found himself in Germany (while doing some post graduate work in Europe), and quite literally just a few feet from Adolph Hitler. It was, while being in the presence of the Nazis, that Morgan suddenly "came face to face with evil" and understood it as such, even before the world knew of such things as the Holocaust or extermination camps, and on another level, the Puritan theology he had studied under Miller suddenly made a great deal of sense. There was evil in the world, and the same people who could accomplish so many good things, were also capable of doing horrible wrongs.
Morgan, the atheist, was also a first rate historian, who probably did more than anyone else (save for perhaps his mentor Miller) to salvage not just the reputation but also the Calvinistic/Reformed theology of the Puritans for future generations. And yet, because he was an atheist, there could be some Christians who would refuse to read him (even, in the case of this historian, Morgan's writings kept me from all sorts of "derange[d] . . . fairy tales" -- to borrow the words of historian Oscar Handlin, written about the work of another practitioner of the historian's craft --along the way.
Professor Morgan may only be "sainted" in the Cathedral of Clio come All Saints Day, but there is every reason to celebrate what he accomplished professionally, and for Christians to find much that is good in his scholarship. Could Christians then, find something redeemable even in Halloween? Maybe. Perhaps it will never revert to All Hallows Eve. Perhaps there are all sorts of problems with it from a nutritional stand point (candy is very tasty, and thus good, but to much of it is very bad as well), or a consumerism stand point (we have to buy costumes, and decorations, and this and that...and surely the money could be better spent on other things), and maybe even a moral ones (I won't speak for others, but there are certainly some costumes I'd never allow/hope that my kids would never wear). There are, in other words, all sorts of reasons one could think to be "against" it. And if that is where you are, I'm not going to say you are wrong. There may even be counter arguments for those who have arguments in its favor (such as, it is just a bit of fun. Or that in dressing up and giving out candy/getting it you are hard pressed to argue that people are really worshiping the devil or consecrating chocolate bars to evil. Or even, to borrow from/paraphrase C.S. Lewis, that it is good to see make believe monsters, so that we might be better prepared to fight real ones). But I'd assert that for Christians, whether inside or outside of the Mainline, there are also much bigger cultural issues facing our nation and world than Halloween. And maybe, rather than focusing on this holiday and arguing over it, we should all turn our attention to those wider issues of much greater importance. After all, it is largely because of the work of a Calvinist atheist that we remember the Puritans for being more than just "kill joys" and people who tried witches.
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