Churches That Opt Out, and What They Do Instead

A number of conservative Protestant and some Catholic communities in the United States decline to participate in Halloween's popular customs at all, regarding trick-or-treating, costumes and related activities as either spiritually risky given the holiday's association, however historically contested, with the occult and the dead, or simply as an unhelpful distraction from the more sombre and prayerful triduum of the dead this entry's first article describes, and many such churches instead organise alternative events on the same night or nearby, commonly called trunk-or-treat or harvest festival gatherings, held in church parking lots or halls and offering candy, games and costumes stripped of any imagery the organisers consider objectionable.

These alternative events have become widespread enough in American evangelical church culture to constitute their own distinct, recognisable form of the holiday, run alongside rather than replacing the mainstream commercial Halloween that has grown into one of the largest annual consumer spending occasions in the United States, so that a single autumn night now supports several parallel, largely separate observances, from purely secular trick-or-treating to church-run alternative festivals to the older Catholic vigil of prayer for the dead, each largely invisible to participants in the others.