Three years ago, an alarmist email chain letter heralded a news story headlined "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism." To the dismay of some evangelicals, the article reported that J.K. Rowling's bestsellers had seduced millions of children to abandon the Bible for books of magic. But the email failed to mention one thing. The article was a spoof published in the satirical paper The Onion.

Still, the hoax underscored an existing paranoia. We all know Christians who'd go ballistic at the sight of their children reading Harry Potter, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, doing card tricks, wearing goth, or invoking spirits at a slumber party.

If only these well-meaning guardians of young people's souls understood that—barring rare exceptions—magic is good! It grants refuge to the oppressed. It empowers the powerless. It legitimates the marginalized. It provides a rite of passage to the uninitiated. It subverts repressive hegemonies.

Here's an irony: For all their outrage, the magic-phobic right-wingers will be surprised to learn that they have actually fertilized the soil in which the supernatural flourishes. Who knew? Were it not for Neil Anderson's Bondage Breaker or the demonization of Harry Potter on Christian radio talkshows, the spirit world wouldn't be half as alluring. But, again, that's okay: magic is healthy and useful. Those who castigate it are actually doing others a favor by drawing attention to it.

Yeah, right. Only if you buy the logic of two disenchanting tomes.

First is Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture by Bill Ellis, folklorist and associate professor of English and American Studies at Penn State Hazleton. In his previous book, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media, Ellis argued that when religious institutions embark on metaphorical witch hunts, they can end up doing more harm than the modern equivalents of witchcraft they're ostracizing.1 Now, in Lucifer, he sifts through the ways in which people have trafficked with the supernatural apart from established religion. The bizarre stories he digs up are fascinating, but he's such a clinician about them! Introduced as myths, legends, and folktales, they don't terrify or awe as much as they would had the powers at work in them been taken seriously. But Ellis presents the uncanny tales mostly as proof that the occult has provided ways for many to gain a kind of social authority or autonomy.

Spot an African American carrying a rabbit's foot in certain regions? It's probably her way of challenging "a white-dominant legal system," since "social power resided in being able to take and carry such fetish." And it's not by chance that women and teens, who have lacked power in many societies, have been especially drawn to witchcraft and the occult. Ellis explains that practicing magic has not only given women "ways to vent their own social aggression" but also has empowered them to defend themselves against potential attackers or to obtain autonomy and respect in patriarchal cultures.

The same principle is at work when it comes to teens. If a group of youths visits—and, on rare occasions, vandalizes—a reputed witch's grave, it's most likely just a rite of passage, a way for them to prove their bravery.

Our second genial disenchanter is Lynn Schofield Clark, whose more narrowly focused study examines the psychological and social motives that attract impressionable kids between 12 and 21 to the powers of darkness. In From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, the assistant research professor at the University of Colorado's School of Journalism and Mass Communication argues that, as teens' loyalty to religious institutions is fading, their interest in the supernatural, the afterlife, the paranormal, and even the extraterrestrial, is on the rise. It's a good thing, she contends.

Clark's composite sketch of teenage beliefs in the supernatural—on a spectrum that comprises the Traditionalists, the Experimenters, the Intrigued, the Mystical Teens, and the Resisters—will make her research valuable not only to sociologists of religion and other researchers but also to parents and youth ministers.

Unfortunately, she is not as precise when it comes to describing evangelicals. Her provocative contention—highlighted in the material promoting her book—is that evangelicals have played a significant part in fueling teenage fascination with angels, aliens, demons, ghosts, and witchcraft. "Ironically," she writes, "by drawing attention to what they believe to be the consequences of such practices, evangelicals may actually be inciting more teens to engage in them." But the evidence she presents for this conclusion is surprisingly thin. Her list of evangelicals decrying the occultist influence of Harry Potter, Buffy, Charmed, and The Fellowship of the Ring, disappoints. The footnotes reveal idiosyncratic sources—a student publication at Regent University, for example—that are hardly representative of the majority of evangelicals. Absent are evangelical pop-culture gurus, university professors, and mainstream evangelical media reviews.

Yet while it's not true that mainstream evangelicals suffer from Potterphobia it is true that they believe—and therefore teach, tell their children, and claim in media interviews—that it's dangerous to dabble in the occult. What's wrong with that?

"The problem that I was trying to highlight comes in because evangelicals have access to the public stage and are able to create a culturally legitimate viewpoint that's taken seriously by journalists and by other people," Clark recently told me in an interview. "By saying, 'We know what's bad, and we're going to claim the cultural authority to say what's bad for everyone,' it becomes an issue that is more problematic."2

Hmm … Seems to me that Clark's problem with evangelicals is that they are sometimes taken seriously. Supposing that was a crime, what are they to do? Not articulate their negative opinions publicly for fear that it might incite people to do exactly what they're advising against? What if we applied this logic to any group wishing to express their negative opinions—the anti-slavery groups, the anti-abortion groups, the anti-war groups? Should they just shut up, in order not to draw attention to the very thing they protest against?

But even if evangelical prohibitions feed the obligatory teenage rebellion, steering kids toward the occult, that's not so bad anyway, at least on Clark's own terms. Evangelical watchdogs are merely providing a chance for teens—especially those from families alienated from the elite culture's norms—to question religious authority, something Clark sees as healthy. So, bring on the slumber-party and drinking-aided experiments with ouija boards, spells, séances, and legend tripping! Let the healing begin.

Unless, of course, we take the magic censors seriously—as if they were talking about something that's true. Wild and mysterious and far-fetched maybe, but true.

Unless, of course, we take seriously the reports of encounters with the forces of darkness—as if at least some of them were based on an untamed reality.

Unless we take the supernatural seriously—as if it existed.

Unless, finally, we take seriously those drawn to the supernatural—as if they were attracted to the world beyond because they know it to be real, and not because they need a socioeconomic boost or a shot of self-esteem.

For all their defense of dealers with the supernatural, Ellis and Clark actually belittle both them and their critics. It's as if a sociologist explained marriage solely as a social construct that helps people live a little longer, on average, forgetting to mention its initial catalyst: the often befuddling way men and women find one another and fall in love. While it may be true that trysts with the supernatural end up elevating the social status of those involved, is this what fundamentally attracts people to toy with dark and mysterious powers? Or is it the possibility that magic is real, that there are forces not explained by a tidy materialism, that perhaps those forces are subject to human desires? After all, as both Clark and Ellis grudgingly acknowledge, some people use magic to hurt or manipulate others. Fascination with the occult is not only a way for the powerless to get a measure of justice. Anthropological studies show that those in charge of tribal societies often resort to magic not to gain power but to abuse it.

Lucifer and From Angels to Aliens are welcome counterbalances to alarmist tales of occult influence. Clark is right in advising parents to ask their teens why they want to watch Charmed and Buffy (and then actually listen to their answers). And Ellis is right in pointing to all the mundane reasons why people cast spells and visit graveyards.

One only wishes to turn the tables on Ellis and Clark: that they, too, would see the strange experiences they purport to explain not just through the lens of the detached wisdom of their expertise, but also through the wide-open, believing eyes of those who report them—at least considering the possibility that these stories point to something more potent than myth, legend, social rite of passage, venting, or subversion.

Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor of Christianity Today.

1. Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2000).

2. See www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/127/51.0.html.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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