HOW APOSTLE KIMBERLY DANIELS SAVED HALLOWEEN (BY TRYING TO RUIN IT)
It’s almost Halloween, when Satanists wake with an extra spring in their step while kooks like Kimberly Daniels give the calendar dour glances.
Who is Kimberly Daniels? Well, she’s a Florida preacher and her job title is “apostle.” You can probably extrapolate more from that than she intends.
Her 15 minutes of fame came with a blog titled “Why Celebrating Halloween Is Dangerous.” This is not in fact about how ill-advised your costume will look on Instagram later, but hope springs eternal.
Instead it’s a master stroke of paranoia and upsettingly silly beliefs. Which raises (and then answers) an old question yet again: Remind me why Satanists are supposedly the strange ones?
Although admittedly, sometimes we don’t do ourselves any favors in that department.
The Christian Broadcasting Network originally published Daniels’ text-based hallucination. They pulled it down hours later in embarrassment and it washed up on Charisma News, the pity fuck of evangelical blogs, where it continues drawing seasonal traffic.
If you’ve never read this piece before, strap in, it’s a doozy. For example, did you know that most of your Halloween candy is cursed by “witches?” You can tell because Kimberly Daniels says so right here:
“Most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.”
Well, that’s just an open and shut case.
Note that Daniels cautions she won’t even buy candy before Halloween. Meaning, presumably, that it comes pre-cursed right from the Safeway.
I emailed the PR departments at Hershey and Mars to ask how these witches keep getting into their factories. All they said was:
“Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble!”
Not really sure what that means.
Halloween witchery is no joke, says Daniels. How does she know? “I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon.“
For the record, I would give anything to be a misery tourist at that 12 step meeting. “My name is Janice, I’m a lunaholic.” “Hi Janice.”
“Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms” actually exist, Daniels warns. I think someone might have slipped something more potent than just a curse into her candy, but okay.
Finally, she assures us that all manner of black magic goes down on Halloween night. “Sex with demons, casting spells, revel nights, [and] time-released curses against the innocent.”
Plus whatever the unholy fuck is going on here.
Apparently Halloween in Kimberly Daniels’ neighborhood is just like the final 15 minutes of Cabin In the Woods.
I’ve never been to Jacksonville, Florida, so far be it for me to scoff. Maybe they really do have an annual werewolf problem. It is Florida, after all.
Daniels is not an isolated case. Just this year CBN ran Halloween-themed blogs with titles like, “A Christian Mother’s Fear,” “The Dark Reality of Halloween,” and (of course) “Former Satanist Warns About Halloween.”
“The only harvest we should celebrate is the harvest of souls,” traveling fraud Johnny Ramirez warns in the latter piece. Which I believe are the same words the Vegas shooter carved into his own flesh.
Anyone who’s not so far out of their mind that they’ve lost radio contact may find these annual evangelical tricks frustrating.
But myself, I find the Kimberly Daniels’ of the world encouraging. Sure, it’s troublesome that she has an audience. But the very fact that she has to rail against the Halloween tradition reminds us that these people are not the norm.
They like to accuse the rest of us of “living in a bubble.” They use terms like “real America” and “silent majority” to disenfranchise us. And words like “values” and “Christian nation” to stigmatize and shame us.
But the truth is, they’re the weirdos. They’re the outliers. They’re the freaks. Sitting around and praying about witches and “Dracula” hexing Hershey bars is not normal behavior.
And we knows this because Halloween only happens because people love it. It’s not a federal holiday. It’s got no religious backing, except Satanists and certain pagans. Only popular inertia keeps it alive.
So Kimberly Daniels can rail against curses and warlocks every year. But it’s a losing argument. They’ve got no hex appeal.
They don’t look like they’re here for Chick Tracts.
I just heard a great podcast from “Adam Ruins Everything” in which he was talking with a researcher about cognitive biases and how people sustain them. One of the thing he discussed–if I don’t bungle re-stating it–is that these days people tend to insulate and surround themselves (online and real social circles) with only people who agree with them, or at least don’t disagree with them, and this results in the phenomenon where a vaccine denier, climate denier, or flat-earther ends up genuinely believing that a substantially larger number of people hold the same view, and sometimes even a majority hold the same view. Seems to go a long way toward explaining how fundy lunatics (and people like President Trump, perhaps?) feel so confident in their views and indignant at what they believe to be unjust opposition and even persecution.