Are You Ready for JesusWeen?

What are you doing this year for JesusWeen? Wait…what? You mean you aren't familiar with JesusWeen, the holiday celebrated every October 31st in the U.S.? Oh, you think October 31st is Halloween. No, that was before the fundamentalist Christians decided to co-opt it and turn it into JesusWeen. You see, they are terrified of Halloween and needed to Jesus it up a bit. So now we have JesusWeen. Yes, that's a real thing. I know how it sounds, but they are serious about it.

As Gawker noted in 2011,

Jesus Ween is not, in fact, a celebration of Jesus's ween, but rather "a non for Profit Organisation [sic] also known as JesusWin…focused on helping people live a better life."

Those participating in JesusWeen hand out Christian bibles instead of candy (or at least candy with bible verses printed on the wrappers). They do not allow their children to wear costumes. You know, because that would be evil.



If it is fun or feels good in some way, you can bet that fundamentalist Christians somewhere are trying to figure out how to stop people from doing it. Not only is Halloween fun, but many fundamentalist Christians have decided that it is genuinely evil. That means that those who participate in it are evil. You don't want to be evil, do you?

JesusWeen may be a relatively new phenomenon (it appears to have been born in 2011), but the sentiment underlying it is anything but new. I remember the fundamentalist Christian families not allowing their children to participate in Halloween as far back as grade school. They were a tiny minority back then where I was growing up on the West Coast. They are not so tiny here in Mississippi today. I am not even sure that they are a minority.