The modern world is permeated with witchcraft. Since the 1960s, rock music has promoted pagan and demonic themes. The Rolling Stones, for example, sang “Sympathy for the Devil” and incorporated voodoo ceremonies into their Goat’s Head Soup album. Hinduism and its popular western counterpart, the New Age, are demonic to the core. The cover story of Time magazine for June 19, 1972, was “Occult Revival.” It described a growing fascination with witchcraft among college educated people. Ancient occult practices such as Tarot, I Ching, palmistry, and Ouija boards have exploded in popularity. In 1969, Anton LaVey published The Satanic Bible, which has gone through dozens of printings and has been translated into Spanish, Danish, and Swedish. The occult is a major theme in popular writing. Even the most mainstream bookstores have sections on the occult and the paranormal. The Harry Potter books, which promote unadulterated witchcraft to children, have sold 450 million copies, and the Harry Potter franchise, which includes the movies, has brought in $24 billion in sales. Science Fiction is filled with occult themes. Hollywood has spewed out occult movies one after the other, such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, Star Wars (promoting the occult concept of “the Force”), Avatar, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Blair Witch. New Dawn Magazine for March 21, 2014, reported that “Russia is currently undergoing a massive occult revival.” Nearly 40% of books in Russian deal with the occult, and popular TV programs promote the paranormal. Astrology, which was born in ancient Babylon, has witnessed an explosion in popularity in modern times. Newspapers carry horoscopes, and Americans purchase 20 million books on astrology annually. In spite of this, you rarely hear of churches burning occult material today. It is more typical for professing Christians to bring their love for the occult into the churches instead of making a clean break with it.
(Friday Church News Notes, September 16, 2022, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)