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Notes -
Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.
Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.
It turns out the real problem was
the dawning of the age of Aquariusthe hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.
But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)
The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.
Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.
Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.
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