Many Regard Halloween Celebration as Frightful : Tradition: Conservative Christians in O.C., elsewhere are attacking the holiday, citing its sinister beginnings.

Devils roam the streets while bands of ax murderers go house to house.

Normally, this would be a bad thing.

Tonight it’s par for the course, as America observes its yearly celebration of death and chocolate, also known as Halloween.

For generations, Oct. 31 has been part of life’s autumnal rhythms, like football games and falling leaves.

But, gradually, trick-or-treating is turning into a political statement, with churches, schools and bookstores becoming fierce battlegrounds in the fight over what Halloween means.

In a recent “special report,” Costa Mesa’s conservative Citizens for Excellence in Education proclaims Halloween nothing less than anti-Christian.

“When the roots of this holiday are traced,” the report contends, “nothing but deadly evil is unearthed.”

In Howard County, Md., Spotsylvania, Va., and Des Moines, elementary schools are replacing their customary Halloween parties with less scary fall festivals because of parental concerns about the holiday’s religious roots.

In Denver, one of the city’s largest bookstores this week bowed to community pressure and scrapped a scheduled reading of works about witchcraft. (The bookstore later reversed itself and allowed the Halloween reading to proceed.)

In few places has the battle for Halloween’s soul been more pitched than in Orange County, where churches and fundamentalist Christian groups are scaring the wits out of parents who thought the only danger Halloween posed to children was a wicked sugar high.

In a popular video called “Halloween: Trick or Treat,” the leader of Santa Ana’s 30,000-member Calvary Chapel contends that Halloween is nothing less than a heyday for bloodthirsty Satanists.

“A public-school teacher recently asked her 9-year-old students how they would most like to celebrate Halloween,” Pastor Chuck Smith’s video declares. “Shockingly, 80% said they would like to kill someone!”

Clerks at the Calvary Chapel gift shop say Smith’s Halloween video is their most popular item, with more than 100 copies selling in the past few days.

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“There is a kind of amazing concern for the demonic world among Christians these days,” says Newton Malony, a psychology professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. “A lot of people believe very strongly that there are demons, and to participate in Halloween is to encourage the demons.”

Among this group, Malony includes several of his seminary colleagues.

Still, while growing numbers of conservative Christians decry Halloween, others insist wearily that the holiday is simply good, clean fun.

“Like so much now, it’s just been taken too seriously,” said Diane Brown, a mother of three shopping for costumes at Santa Ana’s enormous Halloween Club, where business has been down this year. “People get offended by this and that. They don’t seem to laugh anymore.”

Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist of religion and the author of “The Spirit of Community,” says the crackdown on Halloween means children are being made to suffer for the anxiety of adults.

“It indicates how susceptible we are to devil theories in our collective mind, an almost unlimited paranoia,” he said. “You can come up with the most crazy ideas and then hang them on innocent children with little costumes.”

Others say the anti-Halloween movement is a sign that conservative Christians, expected to be a significant force in the upcoming presidential election, are testing their political muscle.

“When you’re in range of power, then symbolism becomes more important,” said Martin Marty, a religion historian at the University of Chicago.

Like America itself, Halloween has evolved over time into something that barely resembles its origins.

Even those who enjoy the holiday can’t deny that, viewed in a historical context, it seems an incongruous occasion in a nation founded by witch-phobic Puritans.

Dating back to ancient Britain and Ireland, Halloween was once called Samhain, a Gaelic word meaning “end of summer.”

On this holiest of Celtic holidays, celebrants marked the final day of their calendar year as well as the conclusion of the summer harvest.

While lowing herds returned from pasture, hilltop bonfires were lit and the souls of the dead drew near. For a brief moment, borders between the real world and the spirit world became permeable, and ghosts and demons were thought to roam about.

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Much of the holiday’s demonic and supernatural power has faded since its adoption by Christianity more than 1,000 years ago. But a growing number of Americans cling to those ancient ways, as covens of modern witches and fellowships of Druids report a sharp upturn in interest this time each year.

“The neopagan movement as a whole is humongous,” says Isaac Bonewits, a New Jersey writer who serves as arch-druid of a nationwide pagan fellowship. “There’s somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 pagans in the United States.”

So great is the interest in neopaganism that Bonewits finds the need to maintain an 800 number.

Not every caller is a convert, however.

“If you’re one of those fundamentalists leaving violent and obscene messages on this tape,” a recorded message warns callers to (800) DRUIDRY, “you should know this is a violation of both federal law and your own theology!”

Fears about Bonewits and other pagans gaining a foothold within the culture do seem to drive some Christians.

But many say they simply prefer to avoid a holiday that runs so counter to their faith.

“We are serious about what the Bible teaches,” said John Collins, one of the pastors at Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside. “And the Bible, of course, does talk about powers and principalities that are under the command, or guide the command, of Satan. His troops, basically. And we just don’t want to give them the attention. We’d rather focus on Jesus and the angels.”

As a result, the Halloween party at Harvest Christian Fellowship has been supplanted by Hallelujah Night, an occasion for children to wander through a petting zoo, or dress as their favorite beasts aboard Noah’s Ark.

At Mariners Church, a nondenominational Newport Beach congregation of 2,700, an annual Harvest Carnival also borrows some of Halloween’s fun, while shedding its perceived darkness.

“We don’t want to take away from them the opportunity to celebrate, but we tend not to go on the scary theme,” said one of the church pastors, Spencer Burke.

Burke suspects that Halloween’s fall from grace actually began 30 years ago, when the day became occasionally deadly as well as anachronistic.

“When I was a kid, we were shocked in 1964 when the first razor-in-an-apple came out in Huntington Beach,” he said. “And from then on, I know Halloween for me was not the same.”

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Among the scores of efforts nationwide to restrict or rescind Halloween, some have backfired.

In Bedford, Ohio, for instance, a faction within the PTA forced cancellation of last year’s Halloween galas. But the parties were resumed this year when angry parents raised the dead.

“The only thing we do differently is we encourage children to wear costumes that are as positive an image as possible,” said Margaret Bierman, spokeswoman for the Bedford district, which serves 4,200 students. “By that I mean Disney characters, book characters, positive role models.”

If there has been a lack of controversy about the anti-Dracula edict, Bierman credits the World Series. Rather than the devil, Bedford children are possessed by a ferocious love of the Cleveland Indians, and most are expected to dress as slugger Albert Belle, not Beelzebub.

In the Northern California community of Los Altos, anti-Halloween forces were briefly successful in obtaining a change in school policy this year.

“We had a request from conservative Christian parents, for months and months, to really eliminate anything about Halloween from the curriculum,” said Marge Gratiot, Los Altos school superintendent. “When we came down to really discussing it, the board thought it was reasonable to accommodate the parents.”

But hundreds of parents abhorred the new policy, and successfully fought to have it changed.

“People were seeing something traditional being threatened, and they came out to protect it,” Gratiot said.

Pam Bryant, one of the Los Altos parents who led the fight against Halloween, said Halloween is a holiday with very clear religious roots, and the board is now violating its own policy of limiting religious holidays in the schools.

“Christians don’t want to deal with things that are dark and evil,” she said.

Bryant said one of her fellow parents in the fight against Halloween was treated to a taste of the holiday’s “mischievous” spirit when she found trash and rats strewn in her car.

Meanwhile, Bryant added, pet stores in Los Altos are refusing to sell black cats because some Halloween revelers buy the animals with the specific purpose of abusing them on Oct. 31.

“It’s not a happy holiday,” she said. “The connotations of Halloween are just not happy and fun. They’re evil, horror and death.”

Despite its many opponents and murky origins, Halloween appears to have a healthy future, according to some trend-watchers and futurists.

Besides generating millions of dollars in candy sales (Bryant says several candy companies lobbied the Los Altos school board to reinstate the Halloween parties), the holiday provides an outlet for an otherwise inhibited culture.

“The reason we see Halloween having so much popularity and maintaining popularity is that adults participate in it,” said Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. “It’s one of the only times of year when a generally uptight society can put on a mask and let itself loose.”

* CAUTION IS THE TRICK: Halloween safety calls for care on the part of parents. B1