If you’ve been around for more than thirty years or so, you’ve likely noticed that Halloween seems to be growing in popularity as a “holiday celebration.” If so, you’d be correct. Here’s some evidence from various information sources.
About 70% of adults will participate in Halloween celebrations of some type, up from 50% twenty years ago.
Spending on Halloween topped $13 billion dollars in 2025; Halloween presently ranks third in American holiday spending behind Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Spending on costumes ranks first, followed by decorations and then candy; 18–34-year-olds spend twice as much on costumes as any other age group.
In this article, I’m not addressing the question of whether Halloween is something Christians should engage or avoid. Instead, I want to pose an underlying question—why is it increasingly so popular, and especially among younger persons?
I believe one of the major driving factors is the human need to clarify our identity. To put it another way, Americans are increasingly facing an identity crisis, and Halloween serves as a chance to be “anyone else than who I really am” for at least one night. Add to that the growing use of alcohol among American adult Halloween partiers, and it seems to suggest a real effort to “lose myself and be someone else” for a bit.
In a recent Boston College Law School Magazine article, “Facing America’s identity Crisis,” the author notes that Americans are increasingly wrestling with “who are we” and “who do we want to become?” Underlying those questions is an unsettling sense that we aren’t who we were meant to be and may not ever experience that true identity.
If that question is central to many Americans, especially young adults, then no one is more qualified to provide an answer than us as Christians. God in love has provided an explanation for the human “identity crisis” and has also provided “the only answer” to true peace. The Bible is clear that we as human beings were created by God with inherent value as bearers of His image, designed to live forever honoring and enjoying a life-sustaining relationship with Him (“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation…He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Colossians 1.15-17)
The root source of our identity crisis is our human choice to sin against God, which unplugged us from our life-giving relationship with God and left us adrift in a reality of brokenness (“Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.” Ephesians 2.12)
God in love made a way, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to impart to us a new identity as children of God (“Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” John 1.12)
Those who enter into this relationship with God through Jesus exchange our broken identity—“ashamed, insufficient, unloved, unclaimed, alone, never enough”—for our identity “in Christ” (“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” 1 Peter 2.9-10)
For those who see Halloween as an opportunity to hide their brokenness behind a costume for a moment, Jesus offers real identity transformation that is 24/7/365 and forever: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8.1)
This Halloween season, ask God to provide you with opportunities to model what it means to live in the peace and joy of the glorious identity granted us through grace. May God grant you chances to point searchers to Jesus, the only answer for the identity crisis all human beings experience.