The Wicked Witch(ery) of the West
We’ve seen that the biblical worldview presents a challenge to the typical Western materialist, who assumes that the spirit world does not exist. And since the flipside of living in a technological world is that some Western materialists do in fact have a genuine interest in encountering the supernatural, the Bible also presents a challenge and a warning, especially for the next generation who will have to deal with a resurgence of witchcraft practices.
But there is a deeper level of application. Even if we have understood the biblical worldview, and even if we are rightly ordered in relation to the spiritual world, we still need to dig further because the Bible’s teaching on witchcraft as an exercise in covert power applies also at the level of the human heart.
We take our cue from the Sermon on the Mount. Here, Jesus takes aspects of biblical law which his hearers can be confident they have kept, such as ‘Do not murder’, and traces the requirement of Torah back to the heart, in this case, not to harbour anger against another person (Matthew 5:22). Jesus showed that those who believed they were innocent of murder could nevertheless share the same underlying attitudes of a murderer (Matthew 5:21–22). The same reasoning can apply in relation to witchcraft. This, too, is an area where some of us might feel we have obeyed God’s commandment not to practise witchcraft, but where we in fact share the same attitudes as a witch. After all, we have seen that witchcraft expresses our desire to carve out a space where we can make things happen apart from God,[43] and that ultimately, the manipulation of spiritual powers for our own ends is a form of human pride, which seeks to replace God with ourselves.[44] Are we not all vulnerable to this?
We may not buy a ‘curse tablet’ on the Internet, to use against a rival. However, we are each guilty, at some level, of trying to manipulate people and events to bring about what we want, without trusting fully in God. We can all live in a way that gives us a sense of power and control, whilst denying God’s control and power over the minutiae of everyday life.
Applying the Sermon on the Mount to witchcraft might produce the following: ‘You have heard that it was said: “There shall not be found among you any one who… [is] a sorcerer” (Deuteronomy 18:10). But when you use subliminal advertising, you are in danger of God’s judgement.’ Or: ‘You have heard that it was said: “There shall not be found among you any one who… [is] a wizard” (Deuteronomy 18:11). But when you become an expert spin-doctor, you will be known as the Prince of Darkness.’
There are many forms of ‘hidden persuasion’ in society: witness the assumptions underlying soap storylines, which become psychological ‘scripts’ for everyday action, without viewers being aware of it. Or consider the application of modern psychological techniques, particularly in ‘people management’, which, to put it crudely, can boil down to finding out what motivates people so you know which buttons to press. As for the extreme behaviour of the Babylonian ‘soul-hunters’, we might think of modern ‘identity theft’. Instead of searching through possessions for hair, or laying curses through a name, we search bin-bags for discarded bank statements, and go ‘phishing’ for passwords.
I am not, of course, saying that subliminal advertising, for example, is witchcraft. What I am saying is that in our modern secular society we give in to the same attitudes that are manifest in witchcraft. In this way, there may be all sorts of ways in which we behave that have the same dynamic equivalent as witchcraft. There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising, or television, or technology. Nor should we find a demon behind every MBA. But we do need to be alert to how some of the ways in which our society is organised lends itself, potentially, to parallels to witchcraft. It may be that the reason why typical Western materialists think they can afford to deny the reality of witchcraft, or the relevance of the Bible’s teaching to our lives, is because we have alternative means of satisfying the desire that witchcraft otherwise would. In this sense, the Western world is steeped in witchcraft.[45]
It may even be the case that the most overt forms of witchcraft are not in fact the most evil. The parallels to witchcraft may be the most controlling. Precisely because they aren’t recognised, these parallels may be working more powerfully than people realise through the context of everyday life, whether in the West or in Africa.
There may be many things we do which, although they are not overt witchcraft, nevertheless are parallels to witchcraft because they do not respect other people’s agency, or seek to relate to them in ways that are transparent. Some people pride themselves on their skills of manipulation (‘I know how to get things from people, and if I don’t get it from one person, I can get it from another’). In a genuine relationship you can know people and you can have intimacy, whereas in witchcraft, and in parallels to witchcraft, knowledge and control is a substitute for intimacy. The essence of a perverted relationship is getting information about someone else, and then working out what I want to do, so I get what I want. We get things done in hidden, subversive and manipulative ways, without trusting God or fully respecting the humanness of others. They are parallels to witchcraft because they share the same attitude. They are part of the same paradigm, which is concerned with the exercise of covert power. In the mundane things of life, Screwtape is there.[46] The goal is to be able to say, with Paul, that we have ‘renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness….’ (2 Corinthians 4:2; KJV), because our ways of relating to people are transparent.
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