“Pledge alliegance to the flag,
Whatever flag they offer;
Never let on what you really feel…”
– Mike and the Mechanics, “Silent Running”

I quickly learned to hide my interest in D&D, but for another reason.

Around 20 years ago, I was tangentially-involved in an Evangelical church. Whenever someone found out I was a gamer, I’d immediately get “volunteered” to exorcise somebody’s kid, i.e. “My cousin’s kid is getting into D&D! You have to talk him out of it before the Demons come out of the rulebook and Get Him!”

Needless to say, they didn’t like my answer.

Remember, DnD was/is based almost entirely on the Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth written, as we all know, by a Christian.

I love DnD but I had to give it up. God was convicting me about it not because of it but because it rendered anything I said moot after your average Christian found out I played DnD. Once they knew, I was just a tool of Satan.

It was clearly a major stumbling block so it had to go.

DD

That was something I never could quite understand, and likely never will. Back in 4th-6th grade I was in a D&D club with a bunch of my friends (with our science teacher originally as DM – imagine that!) and I never once thought about the theological implications of playing an elvish magic user in the Forgotten Realms.

The whole topic of religion only came up once when we looked in the AD&D (2nd ed.) Player’s Handbook at the various fictional deities (shamelessly ripped off from Norse and Greek mythology) you could have your character pledge allegiance to, but the only reason why you’d want that was to get potential bonuses to your character (at the cost of potentially getting the other deities’ followers peeved at you).

To me, this really ties back nicely to an old IM podcast episode on the Christian Fear of the Imagination.

“Men of Sin” will glom onto any cosmic-level authority — in Evangelicals’ case, the Bible — to justify what they wanted to do anyway.

Objectively speaking, Warnke and his imitators do bear the biggest part of the blame. Yet if they had had an audience who knew their Bibles and who reflected more deeply on the matter, they may never have succeeded at all. — Bill

The saddest part of Selling Satan is the aftermath of the original Cornerstone expose. Warnke claimed “PERSECUTION!” by the Vast Satanic Conspiracy (which obviously included Cornerstone) and his fanboys and the other Satanic Panic preachers circled the wagons and starting shooting. His publishers originally dragged their heels (he $old lot$ of record$) while the fanboys justified everything he did with the Christianese equivalent (he $aved lot$ of $ouls) — apparently “Saving Souls” justifies any sin. (Re my “Men of Sin” comment above.)

And Warnke still has fanboys. Just last year my writing partner (a burned-out country preacher) had to sever connections with another church because the other church invited Mike Warnke to preach — KNOWING he was a fraud!

Objectively speaking, Warnke and his imitators do bear the biggest part of the blame. Yet if they had had an audience who knew their Bibles and who reflected more deeply on the matter, they may never have succeeded at all.

Again, you display your annoying habit of putting things better than I could myself. Your rant echoes precisely the same thoughts I have on this topic every year at this time. Halloween was just so much fun when I was growing up. And nobody got tempted into witchcraft. Nobody. It was the last true neighborhood tradition in the U.S.A., the last slender thread linking our suburbs to a time when people gossiped across back fences and borrowed each others tools and went over to each other’s houses to watch “the game.” It was the last true neighborhood tradition we had, and we killed it. (No, inviting people to drive 15 miles to your church’s fall festival just ain’t the same thing.)

I don’t think evangelicals don’t get all the blame for it. The Pagans turned it into this weird thing that scared the heebie-jeebies out of alot of people, and when corporate America discovered Halloween as a new cash cow, that didn’t help matters at all. And riding on this, the yuppie subculture decided it would make a great time for parties where adults could dress up for all intents and purposes like pimps and prostitutes. But I just figure Pagans and greedy execs and shallow yuppies are going to do things like that. We evangelicals should have known better. And it was largely our fault, along with our fundamentalist cousins.

When I read Selling Satan, the book-length version of the expose, I discovered a LOT of the Satanic Panic preachers hung out together — Warnke, Constance Cumby, Johana Michaelson (herself Hal Lindsay’s sister-in-law, which provided the End Times/Here Comes the Antichrist crossover), citing each other for “Larry-Moe-Curly-Documentation” in the manner of Conspiracy Theory fanboys everywhere.

I got dragged into the Satanic Panic because I played D&D. You know, the Harry Potter of its day? The original paper/pencil/funny-dice FRP game about “Dungeons and DEMONS and The Occult!!!!” that spawned all those awful “CHRISTIAN (TM) games”? With the 700 Club article (researched from Weekly World News) about demon-possessed 25mm miniatures screaming as Christians melted them down? Satanic rituals in the steam tunnels and all?

Well, here’s a scholarly paper on how the Satanic Panic affected FRP gaming. Apparently the Christians-vs-Gamers feud is still going on, except the ball’s now in the gamers’ court. Reaction to the Satanic Panic apparently spawned all the White Wolf-style Uber-Goth Dark Fantasy games and made Game-buring Christians the stock bad guy in the genre.

Legacy: A wedge between gamers and Christians, driving those with a foot in both camps (like me) way underground. As this article from the Youth Specialties site puts it, starting out like two closet Christians talking around the subject until they make sure the other isn’t a secret police informant.

P.S. IMonk, anybody: Could someone doctor that pic of Osteen’s Wife at the top into an animated GIF including Osteen blinking eyes? And sparkling gleams from the teeth?

That’s “Blinky” Osteen’s squeeze? Looks like he got the eyes (blink blink blink) and she got the teeth (smile smile smile). There’s something just… WRONG… about that picture; it’s like some sort of Stepford Trophy Wife or something. The smile just seems so… FIXED and artificial, especially when combined with the eyes.

In the looks department, she’s Awesome Babe material, but there’s just something Totally Creepy about the angle and her expression. About halfway down the slope of the Uncanny Valley — like she’s not human, but some sort of animated Real Doll or something.

I never really cared because I got candy from folks anyway.

A lot of churches out there wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t mad at something, and Halloween is an easy time to put the whole thing on auto-pilot.