There were angry Trump supporters shouting to our left, and enraged Black Lives Matter protesters on our right. A snide demon slithered from one side to the other, proudly exclaiming, “Welcome to my world, where anyone different from you is a threat, where evil grows and hatred runs deep! It’s one of my oldest and most successful tactics!”

Smiling through ominous goth makeup, the demon whispered in the ears of each protester, planting racist slurs and stirring up divisions. The verbal combat was punctuated by the sound of an exploding handgun fired by a Trump supporter into the chest of a BLM activist, who collapsed to the ground, dead.

“You cannot escape my hate!” the demon roared. “Now get out!”

It was in the wake of the deafening gun blast at Trinity Church’s Hell House 27: No Escape in Dallas, Texas, that I remembered just how toxic an evangelical hell house could be. The overarching message of this—and the countless other hell houses happening this Halloween—is that every ailment plaguing society today (drug addiction, domestic abuse, sex trafficking, gun violence) is evidence that there are demons around us aiming to seduce us into sin, death, and eternal torment in hell.