Church of God News

Halloween always causes a dilemma when it falls on a Sunday. In Utah where many parents are LDS and don’t participate in certain activities on Sunday, trick-or-treating on the Sabbath is often seen as a no-no.

Many LDS families bump up the holiday to Saturday night to avoid the Sabbath day conflict. This basically means many non-LDS reysidents have to follow suit or their kids will have no one to trick-or-treat with on actual Halloween. Many people won’t even be handing out candy on Halloween because they already participated in “Mormon Halloween.”…

Sure, you could dig down to the core of Halloween to argue that it’s not a good idea to celebrate a pagan holiday on the Sabbath. But the real question then is whether you should ever participate in a pagan holiday focused on the return of dead spirits. http://www.deseretnews.com/blog/32/10010289/Just-4-Mom-Halloween-on-Sunday.html

There should be no question:  the core of Halloween is a pagan holiday and should not be celebrated on any day, Sunday or otherwise by those who profess Christ.  Sunday, of course, is never once referred to as the Sabbath in the Bible.  The Bible enjoins what we now call Saturday.

Interestingly, even LDS scholars realize that Sunday. The 21st century historian and LDS member Craig Harline wrote the following about the early origin of Sunday:

…Sun Day mattered more…among Roman pagans, who still far outnumbered Christians and who may well have influenced how Christians worshiped on their special day. The second century pagan empire was not irreligious…on Sun Day, Roman pagans began with early services in honor of the rising Sun and Sun God… More important in raising the status of Sun Day among pagans was Mithraism… Followers of Mithra did emphasize Sun Day, and with greater impact than early Christians. In fact they may have influenced the Christian choice of the first day of the week for worship and some Christian forms of worship. Purification by baptism, the virtues of abstinence…setting aside heaven for the pure…and celebrating the birth of their God on December 25 are all allowable parallels. Another was Mithraism’s treatment of Sun Day. Christians assigned their own meanings to such practices…Christ was the true Sun, and east was the direction in which Christ ascended into heaven…the similarities in worship, the new status of the first day among both groups at about the same time, the pagan assumption that Christians were fellow Sun-worshipers, and the emergence of the Christian metaphor “Christ the Sun” all suggest a connection of some sort (Harline C. Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl. Doubleday, NY, 2007, pp. 5,9-10).

Since Sunday came from Mithras (and the cross also has ties to that pagan faith), it makes no biblical sense that the LDS would have adopted it, but they did. For more on Mithras, please see the article Do You Practice Mithraism?

Those who profess Christ need to ask themselves if they should allow themselves and/or their children to celebrate a pagan holiday that was not ever endorsed by Jesus, His disciples, or His earliest followers.

Christians should not celebrate Halloween and also realize that Sunday has none biblical connections that caused it to be adopted.

Some articles of possibly related interest may include:

Is Halloween Holy Time for Christians? This article provides some historical and biblical insight on this question.
Some Dissimilarities Between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Living Church of God The Living Church of God is not related to the Mormons and this article explains some differences and a couple of similarities.
The Sabbath in the Early Church and Abroad Was the seventh-day (Saturday) Sabbath observed by the apostolic and post-apostolic Church?
Sunday and Christianity Was Sunday observed by the apostolic and true post-apostolic Christians? Who clearly endorsed Sunday?
Do You Practice Mithraism? Many practices and doctrines that mainstream so-called Christian groups have are the same or similar to those of the sun-god Mithras. Do you follow Mithraism combined with the Bible or original Christianity?