Discernment

Not So Wild About Harry

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I’ve ignored writing on all things Harry Potter over the years, but this weekend forced me to change my mind. With my wife’s sister’s family down for the weekend, we were looking for things to do. Unfortunately for us, the city we live near was in the grip of Pottermania and half the activities in town were geared to the release of the latest book.

I’ve written a few posts about the world of fiction in the last couple weeks, but this isn’t going to be a diatribe about J.K. Rowling’s billions or the quality of her writing. The problem is not one of literary aspirations. To me, Harry Potter is a symptom of the much larger problem.

When I was a kid I watched Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and any host of shows that featured magic. Some Christians would say that I was leaving myself open to all sorts of negative spiritual forces for doing so, but what no one could claim then is that they knew real witches. I certainly didn’t at that time. There weren’t any girls in my school that fancied themselves to be a witch (or even sympathetic to the witch’s cause.) The worst thing you could say about some young woman was that she had the lousy ’70s and ’80s fashion sense to dress just a little too much like Stevie Nicks. But witches? Nah. In fact, it was more likely that guys could be accused of witchcraft because Dungeons & Dragons was insanely popular by the time I graduated from high school. At Carnegie Mellon University in the early 80s I knew guys who skipped all their classes just to play D&D, sitting around getting high and drawing arcane symbols on the walls of their dorm rooms.

While some of the signs for a groundswell were in place even when I was a child, it can be argued that the later syndication of those TV shows I mentioned above lowered the defenses for witchcraft for the generation that came after mine when added to later societal changes. Today, everywhere you look, you can’t seem to get away from all things Wiccan or pagan. In fact, I have to believe that the fastest growing religion in the United States is not Islam, but the same one that has captured so much of the British population in recent years, Neo-paganism. Sorcery, vampire cults, an affinity for the goth lifestyle, even postmodernism—all of it has roots in paganism. Couple this with a societal outlook that is rational but growing more irrational by the day, and Neo-paganism looks ready to explode in the West.

Why? Nature abhors a vacuum. Especially human nature. With Christianity on the down side in the Western world, people who are searching for answers, particularly those answers that cater to humanity’s fallen need to have power and control, are finding what they want in paganism.'Astarte Syriaca' by Dante Rossetti Earth religions are picking up adherents left over from the New Age movement, the children of the Haight-Ashbury crowd, and the rise of “organic culture.” (My wife and I are trying to get an organic farm going and it is shocking how much the “religion” of some organic farmers is rooted in goddess worship and fertility cult thinking.)

Earth religions have been around nearly as long as there has been a planet with that name. The Bible contains numerous commands of God to keep trees and natural distractions away from His altars lest they be construed to have anything to do with the worship of nature (Deut. 16:21 is an example.) The entire religion of Astarte/Ashera/Ishtar that bedeviled the prophets and kings of the Old Testament is the same earth goddess worship we see today (much of it penetrating Christianity in the form of the Roman Catholic Church’s Marian cult.) There truly is nothing new under the sun.

With the desire to worship the creation rather than the Creator comes the desire to control the creation; this leads us to witchery and the rise of Wicca as a religion to be reckoned with in the United States. While the number of self-identified witches, pagans, and Wiccans is wildly variable (anywhere from 100,000 to over three million adherents in the United States), the one truth is that their numbers are growing rapidly.

But nowhere has there been greater capitulation to Neo-paganism than in the UK. With studies showing that less than 3% of the population of Great Britain attends church on the weekends, Neo-paganism has filled the void left behind by the abandonment of Christianity. Even some high-ranking church officials in that country have been linked to the ancient Druid religion, and druid gatherings have been picking up in number, with more and more people flocking to see druidic ceremonies performed.

So it comes as no surprise that Britain gave Harry Potter to the world. Say what you will about the books, they are certainly a phenomenon we’ve never seen before. The problem here lies in the fact that Harry Potter could very well be the poster child for Neo-paganism. As a recruiting tool par excellence, nothing will break down the walls to the further acceptance of Neo-paganism than a boy sorcerer intent on saving his friends, his school, and the confused, non-“gifted” Muggles from evil machinations that threaten the world.

The problem then of Harry Potter that separates him from other books featuring magic is not only the craze that has developed around the books, but that reality is being blurred. When I was watching Bewitched I knew that witches weren’t real. People didn’t go around saying that they were witches. It put a kibosh on anyone thinking that being a witch was a likely choice of religion. But not so today. In my county alone there are several recognized covens. Elsewhere I had mentioned that a young couple came into the Christian bookstore I worked in many years ago and told us they had just left a coven that was actively attacking the bookstore via prayers and incantations. Needless to say, I was naive to this modern reality.

We cannot afford to be naive. If Harry Potter had hit the scene in the 1940s, I believe his impact would have been negligible compared with today. But given that the environment into which he’s flown is primed for his brand of Neo-paganism, I believe the influence of Rowling’s books is far more dangerous. While some might claim that I’m cutting my own throat as a writer of speculative fiction, I can’t keep silent while a generation’s defense against Neo-pagan thought is being systematically disabled by what many Christians consider a harmless story. Fantasy novels of all kinds are some of the bestselling books in bookstores and it is safe to say that the most rabid fans are the ones who are most likely to self-identify not as Christians, but something more akin to Neo-paganism.

Although this may seem like a broad brush, the fact remains that the Harry Potter generation will be the backbone of Neo-paganism in the next dozen years. They’ve been groomed with what on the surface was a mere gripping read, but which planted a seed that will grow into a noxious fruit that we Christians of 2020 will have to confront. We must fight it now and work to deprogram kids before they grow up as enemies of the Lord.

Isolationism, Materialism, and the Evils of Our Age

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Just a monkey in a cageIt doesn’t take a genius to see that something is drastically wrong at the very heart of our daily living. After reading Brad over at The Broken Messenger blogging about the American Dream and how it is destroying us through our materialism and outright stinginess toward tithing, I have to wonder if the cure we Christians are offering is just a Band-Aid pasted over something gangrenous.

Though I want to charge ahead in this post, let’s first consider Brad’s lament:

We blend the definitions between “need” and “desire” such that they are indistinguishable so that we can justify not giving to the Body of Christ our time and or money; yet somehow we find the means to set aside regular portions of our wages and time in our lives for our dreams – all with the expectation that once the allotted time has passed, we will reap the rewards for our patience and self sacrifices. But in the same manner that we pursue our earthly dreams, Jesus has asks us to abandon them along with everything else. He asks that we sacrifice all for a little while, for inconceivable and imperishable riches later.

With all respect to Brad, there is a far deeper problem here. Not only do we suffer from the very things Brad so rightly accuses, but we cannot NOT suffer from them because of the way we’ve setup our societal structures.

I’ve blogged about this many times before, most recently in part in my business series, but it bears repeating. I own a large farm tractor. I bought it when we moved to our property with the idea of having a small farm. All my neighbors own farm tractors, too, in various sizes, capabilities, and vintages. There are five families that live on about sixty acres of land. We all have need for a tractor, but do each of us have to have one that is strictly ours?

With our island mentality of existence, each man must have his own self-sufficient world supplied with things that keep him isolated. A man must have his own tractor because he rarely interacts with his neighbor at all, so it makes borrowing an issue.

It goes beyond sharing commonly used items, too. If fifty acres of wheat need harvesting, he, his wife, and his 2.1 children can’t do it by themselves if they try to do it by inexpensive hand labor—they need the machinery that will enable them to work alone. The machinery costs money—a lot of money. Now they’ve got to work even harder to make more money to afford the expensive machines, the fuel to power them, and their upkeep. Maybe the wife takes an outside job now. And the kids wind up latchkey kids because he’s moonlighting at night and there’s that overlap when both he and his wife are gone. It’s all too common and the reason is that there is no community left that will come to his side to eliminate his need for the expensive equipment in the first place.

What if instead of going bankrupt trying to buy a $75,000 combine, all his neighbors came over and helped harvest the wheat using little more than a horse-drawn scythe or two? Inexpensive and communal, too. The labor is divided. Repeat that pattern over a number of families and many hands make for easier work.

Sure, that may work for organic farm communities, hardcore Amish-types, and the like, but what about the VP of Operations at the soap making company? Well, what about him? What are we Christians failing to work through when it comes to problems like this?

Brad’s issue over the American Dream and how it afflicts us Christians will NEVER go away no matter how hard we try unless we jettison our self-sufficiency. If you aren’t part of a community that strategically works to see that no one gets left behind in the grinding wheel of modern life, then each one of us has to have a complete set of stuff to be self-sufficient enough to live. Even Saint Francis could not have been Saint Francis unless some person out there included him in the life of a community. Yes, a few people can drop out altogether and live like hermits, but all of us can’t do that. The only answer is for Christians to start abandoning the pie-in-the-sky idea that we will somehow stop with the self-sufficiency and the requisite materialism that naturally attends it without covering each other’s backs!

Initially we put our parents into nursing homes when they were aged not because we have hard hearts, but because no one would be there to support us in our support of them. Pull the right stick out of the Kerplunk game and all the marbles will fall. Name a problem in our society and I bet you can trace it back to our misguided belief in self-sufficiency.

Ever wonder why there are a hundred different types of breakfast cereal in the grocery store? Self-sufficiency breeds self-centeredness. Self-centeredness naturally evolves into the concept that I am the master of my own kingdom. As a king, I need something that sets me apart from the commoner. They may eat cornflakes, but I need the organic muesli with non-GMO, freeze-dried ollaliberries added. The common becomes despised because I require something better. Whining for “better” promotes greed. Need I say more?

Folks, being more holy won’t fix this. We’ve tried that route and failed miserably. Nor will attempting to live a simpler life get us out from under the burden that reinforces the very complexity we try to avoid. The brick wall awaits and we’re going ninety even with the brakes on. The system is broken at a fundamental level: We lack real, connected community and our need to overcome that lack results in our becoming self-sufficient. If I don’t need you, I need everything that is not you that might replace you. And soon enough, the thing that replaces you is viewed as more essential than you are. Is it any surprise then that we live in such an angry society? If I don’t need you, then all you are doing is competing against me. There’s that Darwinian ethic again—seems to crop up everywhere.

Our self-imposed isolation is destroying us on the inside and driving us to lengths that dishonor God. But a Christian community founded upon the ideals that no one is ignored and that your problem is my problem will not succumb to isolation, self-sufficiency, and materialism. It will naturally avoid living out a disconnected, stingy, ungrateful life before God.

Trying to undo entrenched societal structures that diminish our potential for the Lord takes brave men and women. Any of them still out there?

That Nutty Small Group Dialectic

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Diane over at Crossroads: Where Faith and Inquiry Meet discusses one of my pet issues when she takes on the Hegelian dialectic. For those unfamiliar with this philosophical term, Diane explains:

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelHegel basically created his philosophy to explain the process of history. First there is one view or event called the thesis. Then there is the opposing view or event called antithesis. Out of these two (many times a compromise of the two; other times simply the end process of the two clashing) is the synthesis.

Here is an example from Hegel’s writings:

THESIS: In Ancient Greece the stoics believed in a moral absolute that applied to everyone.

ANTITHESIS: During the Enlightenment period, Rousseau believed that the individual decided what was right and wrong for him.

SYNTHESIS: Society decides what is right and wrong for its citizens.

In the continuing process, the new synthesis then becomes the new truth or thesis. Then an antithesis is introduced which culminates into synthesis which becomes the new truth or thesis and so on—the process continues ad infinitum.

The obvious problem with the dialectic is that it can be used to come to a synthesis that is blatantly false. As a perfect example of this, consider

    Thesis: All men are sinners and doomed to hell unless their sin is dealt withAntithesis: Jesus took away the sins of the world

    Synthesis: Because Jesus broke the power of sin, now no one will go to hell.

If this kind of reasoning seems familiar to you, it’s because nearly all small group Bible studies are beholden to the Hegelian dialectic. After nearly thirty years of Christian small group experience, I can say without reservation that every small group I have been in (spanning ages, sexes, denominations, and maturity levels) has employed this kind of faulty reasoning at some time or other to make pronouncements on spiritual truth.

The crux of the problem is the group leaders. By and large most small group leaders are either too passive to rein in flawed group synthesis or they lack the command of the Bible they absolutely must have to counter a heretical synthesis with the actual truth of God. Fast-growing churches are bedeviled by this, assigning (or allowing) group leaders who have no business leading a group because they lack Christian maturity and the inner witness needed to stop mangled synthesis in its tracks.

Now here comes the controversial part.

Though I have studied under some of the best-known small group proponents in Christendom, I believe with all my heart that small groups are a disastrous place for people to learn the Scriptures. Let them be about fellowship, prayer, worship, service to others, or anything else, but not about studying the Bible in depth. The tendency for synthesis of ideas that contradict the Scriptures is rife within these groups. Time and again I’ve heard leaders assent to heretical ideas synthesized by a group trying to reach some consensus. The need for group leaders to maintain peace at all cost necessitates this, even if truth is sacrificed.

I have come to this sad pronouncement because too many churches are using small groups as their main means to teach the Scriptures. Seeker-sensitive churches where the preaching on Sundays is more chatting than teaching, where the sermons are not sermons on the Word but reflections from life on some topical idea that demographic studies say the people want to hear, suffer from this to an extraordinary extent. The outcome is that a person desiring sound biblical exposition and a knowledge of the Scriptures instead sits through a small group study where the conclusions reached by the group may contradict the word of God. That person never develops a comprehensive view of the unity of Scripture because the topical teaching doesn’t provide it, nor does his small group.

The naivety of church leaders is to blame for this. A couple hours of weekend trainings for a month doth not a small group leader make; it is silly for churches to believe that small groups can possibly provide the depth of Bible exposition that a trained and approved handler of the Scriptures—supposedly the pastoral leadership of the church—can provide. Yet too often the pastor in the church preaches topically on Sundays and believes that a small group meeting during the week led by someone with a passing comprehension of Scripture can make up for what he’s leaving out.

That’s just plain crazy, if you ask me.

The small group movement and its emphasis on moving Bible study to these groups to make it more accessible has instead compounded the very lack of understanding of the Scriptures that it sought alleviate. Preachers who abandoned expositional preaching and teaching made this worse because they gave no opportunity for their best seekers to hear the Bible in its complete context. Is it any wonder then that the people who fill our churches on Sunday have no holistic Christian worldview?

Unless we have small group leaders who know the Bible inside and out and can take firm control of a group striving for heretical synthesis and steer them back to real truth, I think we should stop studying the Bible in our small groups. Put Bible study and teaching back into the hands of workmen approved to handle the Scriptures. If that can’t happen in small groups or adult Sunday School classes, then put it back into the pulpit. As the word of God says,

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge….
—Hosea 4:6a ESV

Thanks to the Hegelian dialect and the loss of sound expositional preaching from the pulpits across America, the destruction continues unabated.