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It’s that time of year again, when certain well-meaning but misinformed Christians sin against their fellow believers by questioning their salvation and accusing them of inviting demonic activity.One young woman told me she is 'called' to spend her time looking into these things, so she can warn everyone about the evil of Halloween.The crime in question? Participating, in any way, in anything related to Halloween. Well, except for denouncing it — the well-meaning/misinformed group enthusiastically participates in things like this: Diane SchraderI appreciate the zeal of the people who came up with this. They want people to stop being evil and turn to Jesus.But there are so many things wrong with this approach.Let’s unpack some of their base philosophies on this — all of them pretty questionable.Halloween is evilThe first false assumption is that Halloween is inherently evil.The history of Halloween is a mash-up of Catholic and pagan traditions. All Hallows' Eve (“hallow” means holy) was the night before All Saints' Day, an explicitly Catholic celebration to remember dead saints, which intersected with pagan harvest time traditions related to the belief that the dead could come back as ghosts — thus the “spooky” imagery of the holiday.Trick-or-treating seems to have emerged from a medieval British practice called “souling,” where the poor would go door-to-door on November 1 or 2, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food, often “soul cakes.”Are some pagan roots evident here? Yep, just like a lot of things in our culture. Our names for the days of the week, for instance, reflect the names of pagan gods — like Thursday is named for the god Thor.The key point here, though, is that nobody will be worshipping Thor this next Thursday, most likely. Because how something started is largely irrelevant. What matters is how it is today.Halloween traditions brought to the U.S. by immigrants from Britain, Ireland, and Scotland became increasingly mischievous and destructive in the early 20th century, sometimes leading to outright vandalism or violence. To curb this behavior, in the 1930s, various community groups, civic organizations, parents, and churches began promoting organized, door-to-door treat-collecting for younger children.Trick-or-treating exploded in popularity after World War II and, as it was heavily marketed by the candy companies, grew into a cultural staple representing good clean fun for America’s kids.That is what changed, and for the vast majority of Americans, that is where we are today.So no, Halloween is not inherently evil, even in its history, nor is the American tradition of trick-or-treating.Light should have nothing to do with darkness ...We can agree on this one; it’s in the Bible, of course — “what fellowship has light with darkness?”The problem is, as we just clarified above, that children trick-or-treating, which is 99.99% of Halloween for most American families, is not “darkness.”Ironically, the misled are actually taking this passage out of context, because it certainly is not arguing that we can’t go out and be around “darkness” (unbelievers). On the contrary, how can we love them if we hide away from them?The real meaning of the passage surfaces when we read the whole thing:Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? —2 Corinthians 6:14This is prohibiting close attachments with non-Christians that might compromise the Christian's faith — think marriage or perhaps a business partner.It’s hardly an injunction against going outside on an October evening and chatting with trick-or-treaters.... but we’re just fascinated with darknessIt is my observation that the misled crowd tends to be more interested in ferreting out sordid aspects of the darkness than they are in bringing light.Some even boast of having “gone down the rabbit hole” of “research” on Halloween. But it isn’t actual research, or they would at least have some of the basics down (see above, “Halloween is evil” section).Instead, they grab onto and fearmonger the most horrific (yet undocumented) claims. We’re talking about TikTok videos from highly questionable “pastors,” spurious claims by “ex-witches,” or paragraph after paragraph detailing pagan gods and occult practices — none of this is a good use of time for most Christians.One young woman told me she is “called” to spend her time looking into these things, so she can warn everyone about the evil of Halloween. She might be called; I’m just not sure who’s doing the calling. Because this is what we’re told to focus on:Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is dignified, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, consider these things. —Philippians 4:8There’s no darkness in that (above) at all!Anyway, here are a few of the claims repeatedly made “from the dark side.”CLAIM: You’re worshipping the devil when you trick-or-treat, whether you want to or not! (A lot of credit is given to what satanists have allegedly said about all this.)FACT-CHECK: You can’t be "tricked" into worshipping the devil.CLAIM: Halloween is the worst day for human trafficking!FACT-CHECK: There is zero supporting evidence; there is no “worst day” for human trafficking, according to law enforcement. CLAIM: Also human sacrifice.FACT-CHECK: Again, zero supporting evidence for this.CLAIM: Witches are out casting spells on Halloween; being outside risks having a demon attach to you. FACT-CHECK: You can’t accidentally pick up a demon; you have to willfully sin to invite that kind of activity.CLAIM: If your neighbor is a witch or a satanist, the neighbor curses the candy, and that demonic presence comes into your home!FACT-CHECK: Your neighbors are most likely not witches or satanists. And if they are? “Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” —1 John 4:4RELATED: The last ethnic Halloween costume nobody apologizes for NBC/Getty ImagesAll demons, all the timeThere is a flavor of Christianity that tends to fall into this obsession with darkness, and it reaches its pinnacle in so-called “deliverance ministry.”Deliverance ministry focuses on casting out demons and tearing down spiritual strongholds and uses language about curses, “soul ties,” and the “legal rights” of demons. Much of this is not biblical. There are people who claim “deliverance” is their gift, and they dig deep into the darkness because of that.The problem is that there is no such gift in the Bible. Only Jesus and the apostles were able to cast out demons. No instruction about that is given to us, and there is not even the suggestion that we should try to interact with demons in any way. On the contrary, actually, as we’ll see below.Instead, every believer is given everything we need to win at spiritual warfare, in the fight against the demonic:We are to put on the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18).We are to resist the devil (James 4:7).We are not to give him room in our life at all (Ephesians 4:27).We are to seek God, who tells us we can overcome the world, by simple faith (1 John 5:4).We are to be alert and of sober mind (1 Peter 5:8-10). A magnificent passage, and not a word in there about ordering demons around.The things I have heard some Christians say about “opening a door to demons” are truly troubling. Touching a crystal opens the door. Stretching your body in a way that yoga teaches opens the door. A pumpkin on your porch opens the door — and the person wasn’t even talking about a carved pumpkin — just a pumpkin. Or my very (least) favorite: Using alternative medicine opens the door.Some of the most outspoken purveyors of this kind of thinking are people who were formerly involved in the occult. I respect their desire to stay far from anything that reminds them of their old lives. But they overstep when they blindly condemn others for a pumpkin, a stretch, or a trip to a functional medicine provider.Believers, of course, cannot “accidentally dance with the devil.” We are sealed in Christ, who never lets us go, as multiple Scriptures attest. We have nothing to fear from demons while we walk in His light. We can walk outside on Halloween night, and we can even bring home a Hershey bar and not fret that it’s “cursed.”However, Christians can certainly make choices that open them to satanic influence. Mindfully disobeying God puts you in a dangerous place. But we are bought and paid for by the blood of Christ, and obeying the Scriptures above is our ticket to spiritual safety.The bad attitude of the demon-obsessedIt shouldn’t be too surprising that people who get caught up in demon obsession are going to respond very negatively to being told they’re on the wrong track.But they prove they’re wrong with how they interact with the rest of us. Because it is wrong to demonize (pun intended) fellow believers who participate in neighborhood trick-or-treating. The spiritual pride of those who think they have it right leads to them saying some pretty appalling things.This guy on the right below is a prime example, and Red Pen Logic does an excellent job of explaining how he’s wrong in this brief video. The 'Halloween Halters'As for the “Halloween Halt” event advertised in the graphic at the beginning of this article, I think it’s pretty obvious that accosting families with children to tell them that their Halloween celebration is satanic is highly unlikely to win anyone to the cause of Christ, but it will certainly embitter, anger, and antagonize moms and dads just trying to enjoy this cultural tradition with their little ones.Two truths the Halloween halters and haters are missing:God put you in your neighborhood for a reason.One night a year, God literally brings your neighbors to your door.This is called a gospel opportunity, and next week I’ll share some ideas on how to make it truly a night of light.This essay previously appeared at the She Speaks Truth Substack.

Arizona State University’s Ratio Christi chapter hosted Christian apologist Frank Turek Monday night. The topic especially caught my attention as a philosophy professor: If God exists, why is there evil?I call this the major objection to belief in God. Atheists may begin elsewhere, but once the other objections are answered, the problem of evil keeps returning. I have found that true whether I am talking with an atheist at a bar watching a ball game or an elite physicist at Cambridge.What if the very problem of evil that you think disproves God actually points to God?Turek made the question as pointed as possible. He told the audience that when he and Charlie Kirk were approaching Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, Kirk asked him to pray. Turek prayed for the event to be effective and safe.“God said no,” Turek told the audience. About 20 minutes later, Kirk was fatally shot. Turek has asked the same question publicly ever since: Where was God?To some smug atheists, and a few conspiracy-minded people, the story invites a sneer: If Kirk was such a good Christian, why didn’t his God protect him? Why would anyone want to be a Christian if that is the outcome?Turek answered with a challenge: What if the very problem of evil that seems to disprove God actually points toward him?His argument came in two parts.First, before we can say evil disproves God, we have to know what evil is. And to know what evil is, we need some account of the good. Invoking Augustine, Turek described evil as a corruption or privation of something good. Augustine’s formulation is simple: Evil depends on the good it damages.Students are often confident that they can define the good until the examples get difficult. Happiness seems like an obvious candidate, but people can be happy about wicked things. Happiness alone therefore cannot tell us what is good.That is where students often retreat into relativism: What is good for you is good for you, and what is good for me is good for me.Turek’s answer was that human beings share a common human nature. If something is genuinely good for a human being as such, it cannot become bad merely because another person prefers something else.Then he pushed the argument into explicitly Christian territory. If Christianity is true, what could be better than knowing God? He cited John 17:3, where eternal life is described as knowing God and Jesus Christ.That brought him back to Kirk. Kirk’s murder was evil; Turek did not pretend otherwise. But he argued that God can bring good from evil. Turek says he still hears from people who encountered the gospel because of Kirk’s life and death. In his language, the ripple was not merely a ripple but a tsunami.RELATED: What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets Kelsey McNeal/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty ImagesThat was Turek’s first point: The objection from evil assumes that some things are objectively wrong. His argument is that objective moral law requires a standard beyond individual preference and that the ultimate ground of that standard is God. The problem of evil therefore borrows the very moral categories it tries to use against him.Turek then moved from philosopher to pastor.In a philosophy class, people will debate the logical problem of evil. In the middle of intense suffering, nobody wants a philosopher to arrive with a chalkboard and draw syllogisms. They want to know why this happened: Why this child? Why this cancer? Why this death?Turek answers with what he calls the ripple effect. We know very little of the past, only fragments of the present, and nothing of the future except what has been revealed to us. We cannot trace all the consequences flowing from a single event.God, in the Christian account, is not only powerful and good but wise. He knows the whole of history and can order events toward ends we cannot see. Turek appealed to Romans 8:28: God works all things together for the good of those who love him.That reminded me of an old pastoral illustration. A couple had grown cold in their faith. Their child died, and they asked their pastor why. He told them to imagine a shepherd trying to lead two stubborn sheep across a river from danger to safety. They refuse. So the shepherd picks up their lamb and carries it across. The sheep follow.Was that for their good?The point is not that suffering itself becomes good. It is that suffering can force us to confront questions comfort lets us avoid. It exposes our finitude and can make us consider our own sin. When we recognize how little we know and how much God would have to know, Paul’s question in Romans 9:20 becomes harder to brush aside: Who are we to correct God?RELATED: Christians are missing the opportunity next door Banderlog/Getty ImagesWith those two claims — objective goodness and divine wisdom — Turek took questions.One student asked why God creates people who will be damned to hell. Turek answered that people who finally reject God receive what they insist upon: separation from Him. If that is what they choose, he asked, on what grounds do they complain about receiving it?Another asked about animal suffering that no human being ever sees. How could that possibly help us?Turek’s answer was essentially: How do you know it does not? Human knowledge is extraordinarily limited. The fact that we cannot identify a good purpose for some instance of suffering does not prove that no such purpose exists. He also noted that in the Christian account, the whole creation is affected by human sin.So is Turek right? Does the problem of evil point toward God rather than away from him? Are atheists borrowing from an objective moral framework they cannot ultimately ground without God?The audience was clearly intrigued. Skeptics had something substantial to push against, and Christians had to think more carefully about what they claim the Bible teaches concerning good, evil, suffering, and God’s wisdom.As a philosophy professor deep in the heart of Sun Devil territory, I count that as a good thing.

Democrats aren’t hiding anything when it comes to what they want for not only our immigration system, but the future of America — and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sick of hearing it.“They’re just saying it out loud,” Gonzales says, noting that all she has to do is “roll the tapes.”“I’m going to have to remind you guys what this country will look like again with Democrats in power,” she continues, adding, “One of their endgames is to flood this country with immigrants to replace us.”“And this is an area that we really need to have a healthy and robust immigration program,” Democrat Senate candidate Josh Turek said to an audience. “You’ve got around 41% of the direct care workers that are immigrants. And so I think we also need an easier pathway to earn citizenship so that we can bring in more workers, not only for that industry but as well as the agriculture industry and the meatpacking plants,” Turek continued.“I mean, this is a state that’s really, really struggling,” he added.“No, no, no,” Gonzales says. “Literally all across the country, we are all saying the same thing. We do not need more foreign workers. We do not need more immigrants. We actually need less. We just voted in November of 2024 for mass deportations. We want people gone.”“‘Meatpacking plants are struggling, let’s bring in cheap foreign labor,’” she mocks.“Because you know, that’s always the Democrats' plan. The Democrats' plan is always, ‘Let’s figure out how to make slavery legal again in every way, shape, or form,’” she adds.But Turek isn’t the first one to make his case for what Gonzales calls “slave labor” in the United States.“Mass amnesty for cheaper labor,” Gonzales says. “Chuck Schumer actually let that cat out of the bag all the way back in 2022.”“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers,” Schumer said in a 2022 speech. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants. The dreamers and all of them.”“Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” he added.“What are we doing?” Gonzales, annoyed, asks.Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Emma Waters is a proud, Christ-centered patriot. The 28-year-old bioethics researcher at the Heritage Foundation lives by a strict six-word mantra: "Love God, get married, have babies."She married young and recently welcomed her third daughter while working from home in Pennsylvania. When she’s not raising her kids, Waters devotes her time to exposing what happens when human reproduction stops being a natural byproduct of family life and becomes a high-tech engineering project. The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.Waters has made it her mission to expose one of the most seismic shifts in modern medicine. Doctors have moved beyond merely helping desperate couples conceive; now clinics try to control which children are (and aren’t) born, who carries them, and what traits they possess. Waters consistently raises alarms about commercial surrogacy, embryo selection, and a fertility business that treats parenthood like a shady concierge service. Her concern is justified. The most fascinating fight over this issue isn't between traditionalists and the iconoclastic, often idiotic left. The real battle line lies squarely on the political right, dividing old-school social conservatives from Silicon Valley's tech-driven pronatalists. And the battle is growing increasingly ferocious. Can babies be solved?Both sides agree that falling birth rates pose an existential threat to America. But while traditionalists want more babies born into married homes, tech titans want to manufacture them using IVF, surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, and artificial wombs. Essentially, Silicon Valley wants to code a way out of demographic winter. Traditionalists think the answer lies in simple, un-automated human commitment. Silicon Valley wants to solve the fertility crisis in the lab. Traditionalists want to solve it with marriage. And in truth, the traditionalist approach makes far more sense. If young people stop getting married, inventing ever more sophisticated ways to make babies only treats the symptom while leaving the family crisis untouched. Technology itself isn't inherently evil, nor is every fertility treatment misguided. Modern medicine performs genuine miracles by healing broken minds and bodies. The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely. The pitch of the modern fertility industry is pure, unadulterated control. If a couple can’t conceive, technology intervenes. If a woman wants to delay motherhood, she freezes her eggs. If parents want to select specific embryos, technicians run tests. If adults want someone else to carry the burden, they hire a surrogate. RELATED: They met top tech experts behind closed doors. Now these religious leaders are urging Congress to act. doidam10/Getty Images The cultural message has shifted dramatically over two generations. Society used to tell young people that the biological clock actually ticks and that building a life with a special someone matters early on. Modern culture now tells them not to worry because science will grant extra decades. That promise sells a dangerous illusion. It tricks people into believing they can outrun the human body's limits forever. And once people believe technology can overcome every natural limit, the next question becomes obvious.Why stop at conception? When parents screen, rank, and discard embryos based on calculated disease risk, physical attributes, or predicted intelligence, parental love starts looking like a trip to an online retail shop. Historically, a child arrived as a gift to be welcomed and cherished unconditionally. The tech-enabled model treats a child like a product customized before checkout. For 50 years, Western society systematically dismantled the traditional family structure. Contraception severed physical intimacy from reproduction. Abortion severed pregnancy from parenthood. IVF severed conception from marriage. Donor eggs and surrogacy severed genetics from motherhood. Now society is facing the consequences of that perverse experiment. Reproduction is becoming an expensive, institutionalized service completely independent of marriage and even pregnancy. The demographic crisis facing the United States and the West is, in many ways, the logical result of modern incentives. Long-term commitment is treated as an unnecessary drag on personal mobility; marriage is now delayed until every career milestone is unlocked; and having children is viewed as something between a hindrance and a hazard. Silicon Valley can build all the productivity tools it wants, but innovation can't offset a society increasingly uninterested in its own continuation. Eugenics on demandThe tech industry naturally focuses on the paying customer, including the adults writing six-figure checks for surrogates and genetic testing. Nobody asks what the child wants. An infant doesn't choose anonymous genetic donors, years spent in a cryo-preservation freezer, or half-siblings scattered across three continents. The fertility lobby endlessly preaches reproductive freedom for adults, completely ignoring the basic rights of the person being created. No Nazi uniform is required to revive eugenics. Simply give parents enough data, enough options, enough cash, and a well-stocked dish of embryos, and biological selection quickly becomes good parenting. Eventually, this dynamic introduces a brand-new form of inequality, far more consequential than the type blue-haired liberals whine about. Wealthy urban couples will screen hundreds of embryos to secure cognitive and physical advantages for their offspring, while working-class families struggle to afford baby formula. The political left spent half a century agonizing over income gaps, but conservatives ought to ask what happens when the stinking rich can literally buy superior genetics at a boutique clinic. It’s a question occupying Waters’ mind, and the answer should concern anyone who cares about the future of America.