Dec
2
Reasons for Occult Revival in the Western World
“It makes sense that witchcraft and the occult would rise as society becomes increasingly postmodern. The rejection of Christianity has left a void that people, as inherently spiritual beings, will seek to fill.” — author Julie Roys, formerly of Moody Radio
A recent article in The Christian Post discusses the dramatic rise in self-identifying witches in the United States, “as interest in astrology and witchcraft practices have become increasingly mainstreamed.” Current estimates put the numbers at approximately 1 to 1.5 million people identifying as Wiccan/Pagan, rivaling even the 1.4 million members in mainline Presbyterianism. (Of course, with the dwindling memberships in “mainline” denominations these days, that shouldn’t be as surprising as one might think.)
Readers may remember that my Halloween-oriented post this year was “Witchcraft and Satanism in the Middle Ages through 20th Century”, in which I cited an excerpt from Demon Possession (1976), a collection of symposium papers edited by James Warwick Montgomery. I’d like to follow up that post this week with another excerpt from the same chapter/paper by Richard Lovelace (ThD, Princeton), this time looking at why the Western world has seen such a revival in occultism in recent decades.
—
“The devil has been playing dead in Western Christendom for the past several centuries — roughly since 1692, the date of the Salem witchcraft scandal. In the pre-Reformation period, his strategy was rather to bluff — to terrify Christians, as well as tempting and oppressing them and taking advantage of every deficiency in the Catholic understanding of redemption. The pre-Christian Era, and even the medieval period within the church’s history, were ages of superstition about the powers of darkness. One of the possible etymologies of the word ‘superstition’ interprets the root combination of super and stare to mean ‘overcommitment’ or ‘overbelief.’ In contrast to the relatively terse and chaste treatment of angelic and demonic powers in the Bible, the pagan world developed a luxuriant overgrowth of belief in superhuman agencies, and Christianity itself came to be infected with the same attitude.
The Reformation made an effort to return to a biblical balance in confronting the powers of darkness, although the Puritan casuistry that was developed to handle witchcraft still retains traces of overbelief. One of the most dangerous of these was the fear that sorcerers could actually cause harm to Christians supernaturally, despite the principle stated in Num. 23:23 that “there is no omen against Jacob, nor is there any divination against Israel.”
Christian apologists in the late seventeenth century were also making use of witchcraft and other evidences of demonic reality to prove the existence of God. When the misuse of spectral evidence (hallucinatory or demonic apparitions of accused witches) at Salem resulted in disastrous injustice, skeptics were able to turn the tide against superstition by making any belief in demonic agency seem not to be respectable. The rug was neatly pulled from under a good deal of Christian apologetics, and the devil went underground as the Western world moved into a new era of what might be called ‘substition.’ There are perfectly natural causal explanations for the whole sequence, but there are also things about it that make us suspect a little direct devilish intervention. Certainly the devil had a lot more freedom to carry out his characteristic strategems of deceiving, accusing, tempting and otherwise manipulating Christians and non-Christians in the clean, well-lighted room which was the post-Enlightenment universe, in which all created beings intermediate between God and man had supposedly suffered intellectual fumigation.
We have seen that virtually all forms of occult practice have been enjoying a renaissance since the late nineteenth century, at first in a relatively covert and quiet way, and then openly and dramatically within the last decade or so. The structure and timing of this revival must be understood by analogy with the growth of the evangelical movement during the twentieth century, I believe. The present apparent upswing in evangelical renewal is not an outpouring of the Spirit in discontinuity with the past, but rather the result of decades of reformational ploughing and evangelistic sowing which have finally led to a time of extensive reaping. In a similar way, the occult revival is the end result of something which has been steadily building throughout the twentieth century, but has gone unnoticed until recently.
Why has this steady buildup occurred? Authorities on the occult have ventured a number of answers. One of the most ingenious is that of Os Guinness. Guinness suggests that the doctrinal decay of Protestantism in the twentieth century has permitted us to be reinfested by the same forms of superstition which the Reformation drove back. The Western world today is consequently like a clearing in the jungle in which the central fire has burned low at night, and now the camp is surrounded with a ring of encircling eyes belonging to the jungle creatures which have moved up close.
Guinness and Francis Schaeffer also suggest that the pervasive anti-rationalism in many sectors of the twentieth-century intellectual climate has helped breed this kind of movement. Donald Nugent strikes some similar notes. He notes that the occult revival during the Renaissance and the present occult expansion have many factors in common. There is in both a degree of primitivism and psychic atavism, with an underlying substratum of despair. Both are eras where power is sought by the disenfranchised, especially women — Nugent comments that in the Renaissance one finds only one warlock for every 10,000 witches — and both have seen a growth of sexual license and pornographic literature. Each has been influenced by a new measure of contact with Eastern culture, and each has seen an increase in the use of psychedelic drugs. If we postulate that late medieval Christianity is decadent, so that it both provokes and is powerless to restrain a rebellious neopagan movement with an occult fringe, we have an etiology which closely resembles that suggested by Guinness.
It might be argued with equal force, however, that the occult revival is one instance among many of the gradual re-emergence of paganism from the underground existence forced upon it by the theocratic restraints of the Middle Ages. Western Christendom accepted Locke’s principle of a free market of ideas at least theoretically, but it took several centuries for a post-theocratic outlook to penetrate its institutions. A double bind of legal restrictions and societal taboos has kept many deviant forms of behavior under cover, and hence has limited their growth, until quite recently. As we have seen, the laws against witchcraft have remained in force if not in use until the middle of this century. The surfacing of the occult underground could well be compared to the emergence of the homosexual minority which has come ‘out of the closet’ in the last decade. The lesson would seem to be that if Christians adopt a hands-off policy with respect to the corporeal restraint of paganism, sooner or later they are going to see the return of at least a little paganism, and perhaps a great deal of it. And the occult is simply one of the common forms of paganism. From this perspective, what we are observing today may be merely a return to normal, and not an unnatural, result of decline.
Hippie pagans (or, pagan hippies)
Another explanation for the occult revival is suggested by Theodore Roszak’s analysis of the counterculture. According to Roszak’s first book, the hippie movement was a religious counter-revolution among young people disgusted by the failure of scientific technocracy. In his second book, Where the Wasteland Ends, Roszak celebrated the potential for a religious renaissance based on a return to old-fashioned paganism. Judging from what we have seen, there is no more authentic form of paganism than the occult movement. For the first time in centuries, the biblical condemnation of the worship of Baal and Ashtaroth is beginning to have direct reference to contemporary culture. If we are nearing the end of history, the Scriptures may turn out to speak more bluntly than we might have imagined to the habits of the greatest mass of humanity in history….
As a church historian, I am automatically rather cautious about the assumption that these are literally the last days. There is no depressed era in Christian history which has not felt itself to be on the verge of Christ’s return. And as a historian of revival, I have observed that depressed eras have a way of turning into Christian resurgences that regain the lost ground and move beyond it to embrace a larger area with purer expressions of the Gospel. There is one possible scenario for the future in which misdirected technology, the god that failed, combines with religious decay to destroy humanity. There is another one which postulates that a revived and reformed Christianity regains a degree of dominion over the conscience of the Western world, and technology is harnessed to solve at least partially the ecological, population, and hunger problems of the underdeveloped countries, while these are simultaneously experiencing powerful Christian development.
The second scenario would be that which the greatest theologian of revival, Jonathan Edwards, would project…. According to Edwards’ postmillennial optimism, Christianity is destined to sweep outwards in a series of [] pulsations until the whole earth is full of the knowledge and the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea. History may be considered as a series of stages in which one territory is substantially conquered for Christ, then a contraction occurs as the war is opened within a wider radius, and then a renewed Christian assault sweeps outward…. Thus a revival of paganism, or atheistic humanism for that matter, is not necessarily a sign of Christian weakness. It may simply be a signal that our troops are on the move, and that a wider field is opening.
I am personally inclined to believe that from the standpoint of transcendent causes there is an element of all three of the possibilities mentioned above involved in the occult revival, along with a mixture of the immanent causes already mentioned. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Christian church was considerably weakened and divided, and during this period many forms of devilish ideology gained considerable ground in the West. The occult was one. Atheistic humanist materialism was a considerably more dangerous antichrist, and some of the most effective activities of Satan were probably within the Christian church itself. Since the middle of the century the evangelical sector of the church has begun to be revived and reformed, and at the moment there are many evidences that other areas of professing Christendom are being touched, although it is still a question whether the bulk of the institutional church is enjoying the awakening which is occurring around its edges among the young people. In the meantime, technological revolutions in the areas of transportation and communication have turned the world into a village, as Marshall McLuhan says.”
—
As evidenced by the data referenced in the Christian Post article, the occult revival has continued to rise in the 40+ years since Dr. Lovelace wrote his paper. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was correct that the reasons for it are a combination of the factors he brings up. Add to that the “increasingly postmodern” worldview being adopted by millennials in particular. As Roys continued,
“Plus, Wicca has effectively repackaged witchcraft for millennial consumption. No longer is witchcraft and paganism satanic and demonic, it’s a ‘pre-Christian tradition’ that promotes ‘free thought’ and ‘understanding of earth and nature.’ [This is a deceptive repackaging] that a generation with little or no biblical understanding is prone to accept.
It’s tragic, and a reminder of how badly we need spiritual revival in this country, and also that ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers of this dark world.’ [Eph. 6]”
Amen.
