Halloween's Religious Double Standard

Every year there are slutified nuns and their matching priests strutting around the streets of New York, going from club to club, bar to bar. But that doesn’t hold up to the sightings of a slutty rabbi or Imam—they don’t exist. What’s up with the double standard Halloween has when it comes to religious costumes? 

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The fact that the major religion in the U.S. is Christianity may be the reason. In a 2017 Gallup Census, the U.S. was 45.8% Protestant, 22.7% Catholic, 21.3% people with no religious identity, 2.1% Jewish, .08% Islam, and 2.9% of people who follow a non-Christian religion. But is it because Christian culture is more accepted? If something is accepted it does not mean it is respected. 

Within our Western society, we have become more and more politically correct—but only with controversial issues. The stigma, whether negative or positive, around Islam makes it untouchable to parody. Judaism’s history, for example the Holocaust, has also made it untouchable. 

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But because Christianity is so accepted in the Western world, especially the U.S., society’s need to respect it lowers. If someone does not follow a specific faith, they are most likely to be more morally fixated on the ones who are being ridiculed publicly. 

In reality, all religions are ridiculed. People state that religion is dying or that religion is dead. People get ridiculed for believing anything if others disagree. Whether it’s atheists ridiculing with Christians, Protestant Christians judging Catholics, Jews judging Christianity’s theology—religion is ridiculed.

So why the double standard? 

When the secular and the sacred intermingle, minds are blown and words are spat. But we can’t shy away from the double standard that this costume trend has with other religions.