On October 19th, Allie Beth Stuckey — host of the Relatable podcast, and one of the most listened-to voices in conservative Christianity — told her audience that Christians shouldn’t be fans of horror, and shouldn’t fully participate in Halloween “in all of its darkness,” and she hung the rule on a phrase from Scripture: do not fear. Within three days she was being answered, in public, by people from inside her own camp — and defended, after a fashion, from inside it too. Yesterday I gave you the fight as a fight. Today and tomorrow I want to lay out the argument itself, both sides, in their own words, and then tell you where I land.

I am an atheist. I make no secret of it; it’s in the banner. So take it from me when I tell you this has been a strange week, because I have spent it nodding along — hard — with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh. Not on everything. On one thing: both of them looked at conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey’s latest pronouncement and said, in public, in their own words, what I would have said. The pronouncement is the problem. And the way it fell apart, inside her own camp, in about forty-eight hours, is the story.