Heathens at Heart

When did you last chant an incantation, cast a spell, or fashion a talisman? Have you recently attempted to purchase spiritual influence or power? Or do you think birthright citizenship in America automatically confers immunity from superstition, like an unwritten twenty-eighth Constitutional amendment, along with freedom of speech and the right to a fair and speedy trial by an impartial jury?

The truth is our most basic spiritual foundations can become corrupted; even in America, even in conservative Christianity. We can easily become superstitious heathens at heart; yet serious, critical self-analysis is often shunned. Faith and piety, we are often taught, do not dig around too curiously at the foundations of our religious assumptions. Just carry on, don’t rock the boat; believe harder.

But there are times that we ought to dig, inspect, and not carry on. How else will we know if we have slipped from faith into something dark?

Superstition is one of those funny words in which its “otherness” seems a basic part of its definition. It is a negative term one uses to describe the folly of someone else, like “conspiracy theorist” or “spineless.” No one wants to be superstitious, but many claim to be spiritual.

If genuine spirituality is simply a recognition of the real spiritual nature of humanity, the real existence of God, and the struggle to align those two realities as they ought to be aligned, then superstition is the dark corruption of this good struggle, just as lust is the corruption of love, possessiveness is the corruption of protectiveness, and sarcasm is the corruption of irony. Vice lurks ever near to virtue, and superstition is always closer than we think, though the hooves, the horns, and the pitchforks have mostly been traded in for more modern accessories.

Spirituality is trying to understand God and align ourselves with Him; superstition is the attempt to utilize and channel Him for our own purposes. Christianity is serving God on the throne and bearing His image to and in my environment; superstition is placing self on the throne and using God to force my environment to bear my own image. Superstition, or magic, is where I make the nearly imperceptible yet cataclysmic shift from aligning myself with God to using God to align my world with myself. For magical thinking and superstition, spiritual reality is not so much a Person to be known, but an impersonal Force to be studied, domesticated, and harnessed to plow one’s own fields.

The devil strives to draw people, perhaps especially Christians, from spiritual truthseeking to magical success-seeking. He appears as an angel of light and tempts us with alluring spiritual shortcuts which promise to bypass the long hard work of real life and thorny relationships – both with God and with our neighbor. He tempts us with the promise of a backdoor to life, VIP leverage, a cheat code to the game of life. Magic is seeking the ultimate life hack. And he packages it all in the daily Christian terminology of miracles, mystery, spirit, deliverance, or faith.

Once sucked into this religious avarice, life quickly spirals into an unpredictable and unreliable wilderness of mirrors. The Answer is always just around the corner, down another alley—except it never is. There will be enough half-truths and brief successes to keep the chase alive, down a relentless path of increasing darkness and fear and confusion, all of which can take place in the seeming light of day, in the lives of happy families going to church.

A person becomes confused, desperate, and fearful, grimly praying and hoping and trying anything and everything to apprehend a vague magical elixir which promises to fix the relationship, heal the bitterness, break the bondage, and “set the captive free.” This is not Christianity; this is heathen superstition with a Christian vocabulary.

We forget that God is a person who speaks common English (or whatever language you like) and not a mysterious, semi-malevolent Force to be manipulated with key words, formulas, and special rituals which may or may not work. Those who worship Him, worship Him in spirit and in truth, according to a man who knew.

Like Jacob with his peeled rods and Gideon with his fleeces, can we recognize the signs when our faith has drifted far from authentic, spiritual truth-seeking, and has been reduced to grasping for spiritual leverage and magical success-seeking? How would I know if I have become a heathen at heart, claiming allegiance to the Christ and using Christian language, but living out of a semi-pagan ideology, a spiritual twilight zone? We do not need to guess and wonder; there are some warning signs of magical thinking that we do well to recognize.

(1) Fear. We can differentiate between genuine spiritual sensitivity and pagan superstition by honestly considering whether most of our spiritual activity is driven by fear rather than love. There is a place for healthy fear. I recently came across a beautiful little prayer that goes, “Teach us the fear that leads to wisdom; and the love that drives out fear.” I’m not talking about the first fear, I’m talking about the second fear, the dark spiritual fear that trails a man all day and perhaps drives him to witness, pray, teach, sacrifice, and confess in a haunted selfish campaign to deliver his soul from hell.

Perversely, one of the most common ways we become ensnared in superstitious fear is a result of undue intimidation by demons, magic, hell, and spiritual darkness to begin with. Christianity is fueled by the power of love, not fear. Which is driving me? (1 John 4:18, 2 Timothy 1:7)

(2) Control and power. When much of my spiritual exertion centers on a desperate attempt to control things, or on beseeching God to give me—or deliver me—from one thing or another rather than seeking to align myself with God and be more deeply rooted in Him, I have fallen into superstition and departed from faith. When I find myself bargaining with God, rather than seeking to follow Him, I am more magician and sorcerer and less Christian.

Another, even darker manifestation of this controlling attribute of superstition is when I weaponize spiritual truths and half-truths to manipulate others. When I leverage the specter of hell fire or the ruined lives of apostate loved ones to obtain cooperation from others and compliance with personal or social goals and ambitions, I am no longer living in the light God’s truth but out of the dark machinations of pagan sorcery.

(3) Ritualism. Discipline, structure, and good habits are part of being a healthy human. Superstitious ritualism is not. When I find myself praying on my knees, not out of respect or reverence, but because I think it impresses God, I’ve left faith behind and have become superstitious. When prayers must be ended correctly, Bibles must be stored correctly, and confession is the art of ducking divine retribution, I’ve become thoroughly superstitious and am more easily manipulated by the devil than guided by God. Obsessive spiritual behavior, even when manifested in Christian garb like Bible reading, prayer and confession, does not come from God but from the darkness of superstition.

There are, of course, more you will think of. Superstition is not content with the wilds of the Amazon, nor with hip, New Age yoga studios. It will absolutely infiltrate your conservative Christian heart if given half a chance. Don’t give it that chance.

Wherever the spirit of control and manipulation and fear and confusion appears, there we are heathens at heart. Where obsessive confession is driven by fear, where reading the Bible is a ritual that dare not be neglected, where prayer slaloms between begging and demanding, where getting the doctrines and formulas wrong is more scary than hating my neighbor, where God is reduced to a cheap mechanism to heal my disease, stop the church fight, customize the weather, and bring that trophy bull just a bit closer, there we are functional heathens.

Are there caveats to all this? Sure, there are. I suppose God does have an interest in the small things, even your bull elk and the condition of your tires, and certainly He’s interested in sound doctrine; but know that the caveats are going to be the first defense mechanism that your inner pagan turns to for survival. Don’t let him fool you.

Track him down and throw him out. True spiritual life manifests itself in wholesome relationship with God, in wholesome relationship with others, and in well-grounded spiritual truth seeking. Yes, it believes in miracles and expects them. It embraces mystery and the Spirit’s moving. It cultivates routine, discipline, and meaningful tradition and embraces the power of spiritual renewal. It invites the Person into the small things of life, as well as the big things, but it aligns itself with God, not God with itself.

If God is reduced to either an unpredictable, short-tempered Force to appease, impress, and bribe, or else little more than a useful lever to bend the arc of our environment towards ourselves, we are heathens at heart, practicing more magic than faith. Conservative Christian heathens perhaps, but heathens all the same.