Every October the same fight breaks out: Halloween is either a pagan festival of the dead that Christians must shun, or a harmless night of costumes and candy. The history says both camps are telling it wrong — and the porch light tells you the rest.

Allie Beth Stuckey, who hosts the “Relatable” podcast and has a large following among conservative Christians, took up the subject on her show this month. Her answer on Halloween itself wasn’t stay-home-with-the-lights-off — she laid out four ways a Christian can handle the holiday and picked partial participation, the kind aimed at sharing the gospel. But on fear she drew a hard line: Christians shouldn’t be fans of horror, she said — not the movies, not the scary books, not the true-crime podcasts — because the Bible says “do not fear” over and over, and paying for content designed to scare you is a direct contradiction of it. She’s not alone in it; she says out loud, every October, what a whole camp of Christians believes. Even Matt Walsh pushed back on her — he thinks supernatural horror is often subtly Christian — so the stay-away camp can’t even agree with itself. I just finished writing a post here about whether the Bible forbids horror movies, and my answer was no. So let me take up the calendar-sized version of the same question: should Christians celebrate Halloween?