The siren song of the paranormal
The death of a pope prompts much talk about spiritual matters.
The world is watching to see if the papal conclave of Roman Catholic cardinals will replace Francis with another left/progressive or someone more like John Paul II.
Recent surveys by Pew and others show an increase in “spirituality” but that more people are leaving traditional Christian denominations and identifying as “nones.”
The only churchgoing group showing a slight gain in America is nondenominational evangelicals.
Some of the “nones” are people who may be Christian or Jewish or even Muslim but don’t identify with a particular religion, while others trend toward no faith or the occult.
One marker of the latter is the box office hit movie “Sinners.” The thriller by Ryan Coogler is about modern-day vampires, music, and, according to Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, the evils of white supremacy.
I confess not having seen the film. All too many Hollywood movies pour salt on various wounds instead of helping to heal them, and this seems to be right up there from all I’ve read about it.
More troubling is the movie’s portrayal of the unseen spiritual world around us in which the main character’s music can “summon both the living and the dead,” in Ms. Attiah’s words.
Well, OK, we’re dealing with a vampire movie, so we know it’s just fantasy, right?
Maybe not. Noting that she herself grew up in an evangelical Christian home, Ms. Attiah laments that she was taught that “the ability of Black people to summon spirits was demonic.”
She leaves no doubt where she’s coming from now in describing access to “portals between the material and spiritual world.”
“It’s why drums and singing in the West African traditional practices I follow are used to summon spirits and orishas, allowing them to temporarily inhabit the bodies of the initiated.”
If this sounds like demonic possession to you, I’d say you won the cigar.
Britannica defines orishas as: “primordial divinities, deified ancestors, and personified natural forces and phenomena.”
Ms. Attiah also managed to work in a shot at President Trump, but let’s not digress.
In his book “The Paranormal Conspiracy,” Timothy Dailey, a biblical scholar with a Ph.D. from Marquette University, examines worldwide evidence of people’s encounters with ghosts, aliens, and other mysterious beings.
His factual, tight passages make fascinating reading. One of them is about a meeting between Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, a professed Spiritualist. Others involve the search for the mythical lost city of Z in the Amazon, and the early 20thcentury psychic Helena Blavatsky.
Mr. Daily concludes that the most credible phenomena he researched were real, not imagined, but that they were manifestations of demonic forces posing as something else.
The human race has been faced with two theological systems, he writes.
“The first is the Judeo-Christian worldview, which affirms a universe bursting with meaning and purpose, ruled by a God of love and mercy. The second is the paranormal worldview – belief in a world controlled by unseen forces, variously called ‘gods,’ ‘demons,’ ‘spirits’ and a multitude of other names across times and cultures.”
To have a good life or to get to heaven, nirvana or Valhalla, people believe they have to appease the deities in various ways. Some even involve killing infidels.
This sharply contrasts with biblical Christianity, in which salvation cannot be earned because Jesus already paid the price, as the apostle Paul wrote:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8,9).
During the 1960s, a plethora of New Age religions sprouted in the soil of a drug-fueled culture that questioned everything that came before, especially America’s Christian heritage.
Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda hit a nerve with three books on his own shamanistic experiences in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. Beginning with “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge” (1968), he sold 28 million copies.
Recalling out-of-body trips while stoned on peyote, a hallucinogenic plant, he followed the shaman Don Juan into bizarre, psychedelic realms, guided by spirits of varying kinds.
The hippie movement used his books as a sort of Bible. Despite his relentless spiritual “warrior” quest, “his hoped-for enlightenment was always just out of reach,” Dailey writes.
In real life, with his fame fading, Mr. Castaneda ended up a recluse, living near UCLA with three self-described witches who cut him off from all family and friends. He died at age 71 of liver cancer on April 27, 1998.
In a new book, “Blazing Eye Sees All,” author Leah Sottile writes that “ever-growing numbers of ‘spiritual but not religious’ people seek meaning, purpose, ritual and community in loosely defined, New Age-influenced narratives of flowing energy, inner light and the search for divinity within.”
Seems nice, but it sounds more like pixie dust than something from Solomon, whose God-inspired proverbs have imparted life-affirming truths for 3,000 years.
In any case, today’s upsurge in spiritual curiosity indicates that the universal yearning for meaning has not changed, nor has the nature of the battle for men’s souls.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Given the importance and influence of the papacy to the whole world, even non-Catholics should pray that God grants wisdom to the College of Cardinals.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.