Evangelical Neglect Of The Paranormal

Steve linked to a video by Jon Topping about paranormal issues. I've addressed these subjects many times before. You can find an overview here. That overview discusses some Biblical evidence for ghosts that Topping doesn't interact with, among other subjects.

What I want to focus on here is some comments Topping made about paranormal research. Start watching (here) at the point where there's about 6:30 left in the video. He makes the broad comment that "anything to do with the occult" is prohibited. He goes on to say that "we should have nothing to do with that" in reference to practices like speaking to a ghost or using a Ouija board. He then cites academics who have come out of the occult, people who do a lot of research in other contexts, saying that we shouldn't even do research on matters pertaining to the occult. We shouldn't even "touch" them. We shouldn't allow them to have "a place" in our lives.

I've already addressed why we should study the paranormal, including what's often labeled as "the occult". (The ambiguity of so much of the terminology involved in these contexts is problematic.) I think the article I just linked is largely sufficient to answer Topping's comments, but I want to supplement it.

Earlier in the video, Topping cited a statistic on how many people experience apparitions of the dead. How would you get such a statistic without doing research? And isn't that research a form of research on the occult (or whatever you want to call it)? When Topping gathers paranormal accounts he received from his relatives and other sources and thinks about those accounts, prepares to discuss them with other people, etc., aren't those activities forms of research on the paranormal? How do you do research on what the Bible says about such matters without thereby doing research on such matters? How do you know what activities occur in these contexts without studying them? How do you know that what happens in the relevant contexts is caused by demons? How many Christians who claim that these things are demonic are even aware of the other explanatory options, and how much to they know about how to determine which explanatory option is the best one in a given case? We know that Luke did research in order to compose his gospel and Acts (Luke 1:1-4). That includes material he wrote about paranormal matters, such as demonic activity. Some of what he wrote about demons isn't found elsewhere in scripture, so he wasn't just repeating what he found in one or more of the other gospels. Even if he had just repeated what he found in such sources, that would still be a form of research, and it would raise the question of where the other author(s) got the information in question. What about other religions? Should we avoid doing any research on them as well? Many people think that Islam had demonic origins, and people often associate Hinduism with the demonic. Should we try to avoid doing any research into such religions, not do any missions work among people who follow such religions, and not interact with Muslims and Hindus in our neighborhoods and workplaces, for example? And so on.

I've been discussing the problem of Evangelical negligence on paranormal issues for many years. It seems that the large majority of Evangelicals study the subject much less than Topping has.

We don't have to know why people are wrong in order to know that they're wrong. But I'll mention some of the factors that seem to be involved in Evangelical mishandling of the paranormal. Most people don't want to give much of their lives to religious matters to begin with, and they especially don't want to give much time, attention, and such to a field as large and complicated as the paranormal. They also find the paranormal repulsive for other reasons (superstitions they have about it, fear of the unknown, the social cost of being associated with it too much, etc.). It's simple (to the point of being simplistic) to dismiss all of these matters you don't want to be involved with, or a large percentage of them, as demonic and to claim that you therefore shouldn't think about them, shouldn't research them, shouldn't have any close association with them, etc. For the large majority of Americans, including most Evangelicals, dismissing something like the paranormal that way or in some other way helps free you to spend your life where you want to spend it, on things like movies, sports, sex, food, your career, trivial activities with your relatives and friends, etc. You can sprinkle a little Christianity on top, like occasionally praying and attending church, but it's mostly an American Dream lifestyle, highly secular and highly trivial. Different people live like that to different degrees. Not everybody is equally guilty of it. But it's a major problem and a big part of why the paranormal and some other subjects are so neglected in our culture. They view the paranormal in a simplistic way because they want it to be so simple, partly for reasons like the ones mentioned above.

And willfully ignorant agnosticism isn't much of an alternative. Shrugging your shoulders and walking away is different than dismissing everything (or almost everything) as demonic before you walk away, but both approaches are wrong. When you have the vast amount of data we have on the paranormal, you had better do more than shrug your shoulders. When there's so much at stake, you had better love God and love people enough to do more than shrug your shoulders and walk away. Even if you have good reasons for not studying the paranormal much, such as being occupied with other work of an important nature - and those reasons need to be genuinely good, not just feigned excuses - you should be respectful enough to acknowledge that the work other people are doing in the field is not only acceptable, but also important. It's not something to be dismissed as occultic or to be dismissed with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.

Several months after my father's death in 2012, my mother saw an apparition of him, one that was significantly evidential, including evidence I had firsthand access to. I wrote about it in a previous thread here. I've known a lot of other people, including Christians, who have had paranormal experiences. To get more of an idea of what's at stake for the people involved in paranormal events, see my post here on dreams and trances in the Enfield case. If you don't want to read the whole thing, at least read the first two and last four paragraphs. See, also, my posts on the death of Guy Playfair and the digitizing of his Enfield tapes.