Rod Dreher: "On Leaving The Occult"

Rod Dreher has an interesting article at The American Conservative entitled, "On Leaving The Occult." The bulk of it is actually a letter he received from a woman that had spent some two decades involved in occult practices before becoming converted to Christianity and joining an orthodox church. She explains her history and how and why she got involved in the occult, some thoughts about her experiences with different occult groups, and then provides a list of what Christian ministers should know about people that have been in the occult but have returned to Christ. An interesting read.

    There are a few points that stood out to me. First of all, her gateway into the occult was accepting the concept of God as being a female. She writes: 

    I was raised Southern Baptist. Lots of activities. Not much faith. I remember being a little soured on church when I was 11 when my elderly Sunday school teacher broke down in tears talking about how boys were going to use us and pass us around like a pack of cigarettes. You had a reader write about this unsettling phenomenon of sexualizing Sunday school and youth groups before. When someone is hyper-focused on your virginity, you become aware they don't care about your soul. 

    ... I was confused and the impression that Evangelicalism left me that God was hyper-focused on my sexuality as a young woman only taught me to read the Bible via a very gendered and sexualized lens. After my father died, I left Christianity. All the women in the Bible, with precious few exceptions, it seemed to me were defined by sex. I was a deeply traumatized, broken, overweight 17-year-old with no future, who didn't know where her next meal was coming from and had just lost the last semi-stable person in her life. Of course I was vulnerable to the occult.

    In that moment, the concept of God as female was so incredibly healing for me. ...

From there she went on to embrace witchcraft and sorcery.  Of course, her delving into these groups didn't save her from the preoccupation with sexuality that soured her against her church in her youth: 

Ironically, these communities were obsessed with sex. There was this idea that sex abuse wasn't a thing in pagan and occult circles because they were more enlightened. But in truth if you objected to sexual abuse or harassment you were merely labeled uptight. I thought I was sexually enlightened until my poor decisions put me in a vulnerable position and I was raped. 

    Second, although she doesn't go into much detail on the summoning issue, she had this to say about demons:

So what do I mean when I talk about demons? I don't like talking about this, but maybe I should talk about it. It's inviting something in, and that something is dark and has a heaviness to it. It's something that sits and lurks, like the spiritual equivalent of an oil slick. It's scary, especially the first time, but often it isn't as scary as whatever very real need you have that drove you to this. It feels benignly malevolent, as if it isn't particularly interested in you, but doesn't exactly mean you well either. And it's easier the second time, and the third, etc... You romanticize it, like a spiritual drug that offers you the illusion of control. It doesn't really bring you what you want, but you cling to any small perceived success as vindication. Your life becomes more confusing, more filled with lies and cognitive dissonance. Everything feels like an illusion. Your relationships suffer. You realize the ritual and the "magic" isn't doing anything so you seek a relationship with the demon, but the demon doesn't want a relationship. It wants to consume you.

She further notes that "[w]ith some distance, I now believe that the real goal of demons is to drive you to suicide, so you are theirs forever." If she only knew. Demons hate us because we have things they will never have: a physical body and the opportunity for spiritual growth and redemption. Their only purpose in existence is to try and deprive us of what they don't have and suicide effectively does both, even if the loss of the body is only temporary until the resurrection.

    Third, out of her list of advice for teachers and ministers, I found this one particularly interesting: "You don't have to convince them of the reality of evil, but it's going to be hard to convince them of the reality of good. The idea that God loves and forgives them is going to be incredibly hard for them to accept."