A Halloween-themed profile of a “teenage witch” in The Washington Post over the weekend reads surprisingly like a backhanded affirmation of the Bible and Christianity. It openly connects gender dysphoria with occult experimentation, and both with unsupervised young people going deep into social media rabbit warrens.
I wrote in July about another profile exploring how TikTok promotes multiple personality disorders that approximate demonic possession. The Washington Post article also reinforces the connections between gender confusion and the demonic, immediately by noting that profile subject Viv Bennett “identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.”
As I noted in July, the use of plural pronouns for a single individual is eerie considered in light of one of the Bible’s depictions of Christ casting out demons. When addressed, that possessed man also spoke of himself in the plural: “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
It doesn’t stop there. The WaPo article also claims that contemporary witches, mediums, and other would-be consorters with false gods and demons strongly support leftist politics. The most prominently mentioned are no surprise to anyone paying attention: child sacrifice, child mutilation, ritual self-mutilation, and sexual abuse. Or, in other words, abortion and LGBT activism. Here’s the Post:
While Bennett mostly does encouraging, how-to media posts, they [sic] also agree with some witches who feel the label obliges practitioners to be politically outspoken, including on issues regarding the environment and the rights of sexual and gender minorities.
Bennett organized a fundraiser with several other occult practitioners running this week to benefit women seeking abortions in Texas, which just passed a highly restrictive law forcing people to pursue the procedure out of state. Bennett and others will hold classes and lectures for a fee, with proceeds going to the Lilith Fund.
According to Wikipedia, Lilith is “a demonic figure in Judaic mythology, supposedly the primordial she-demon. … Commentators and interpreters often envision the figure of Lilith as a dangerous demon of the night, who is sexually wanton, and who steals babies in the darkness.” The Lilith Fund is a Texas-based organization that pays for abortions. “Through organizing and movement-building, we foster a positive culture around abortion,” the outfit says on its website.
It’s not really a surprise that a self-described witch supports child sacrifice, although it is a bit surprising that the Post and the witch are so open about this. Why that is, let’s leave open for speculation.
The Post says this witch, like many other contemporary occult practitioners, also supports child mutilation and sexual abuse (accurate descriptions of what transgender ideology means in real life). How perfectly witchy, and today completely mainstreamed, as the 2021 Halloween Twix commercial underscores.
A witch casts a spell to make a child disappear, they aren’t even hiding it anymore.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) October 27, 2021
While they are described benignly as seeking “forgiveness,” “spiritual power,” and “peace,” these practitioners of witchcraft do hate something: Christians. Again, a bit on the nose, isn’t it?
“Bennett is usually nonjudgmental and nuanced, though if a topic touches disrespect of LGBTQ people, or Christian criticism of other spiritualities, an edge can emerge,” Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein writes in the profile. Fascinating — and, again, something that reflects exactly what the Bible says about spiritual realities.
In tweets accompanying the article, Boorstein reinforced yet again that “political activism is a key part of witchcraft for many practitioners, especially around the environment, LGBTQ equality, and often around poverty, labor rights and other left-leaning causes. … Witches today are deeply discussing issues of identity, appropriation, gender, and colonization.”
And like with society in general, witches today are deeply discussing issues of identity, appropriation, gender and colonization. Witchcraft can mean tapping into as aspect of your own heritage or of another, but witches are debating what's appropriate vs a "closed" practice 7/9
— Michelle Boorstein (@mboorstein) October 28, 2021
It’s a bit shocking just how open both the witches and the Washington Post are about depicting the connections between their witchcraft and the left’s culture war. It puts a bead on something I’ve been pondering for a long time, that what is depicted as a political and cultural divide really has roots much deeper. Our divide is spiritual.
That’s also just plain biblical. The Bible flatly declares: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
The culture war is not about skin color, geographic location, ancestry, income level, or any such comparatively superficial things, but about our hearts, our spiritual allegiances. This war goes right into the deepest parts of our beings and of the universe. It’s typified by whether one will acknowledge any authority over the self, such as the existence of objective truth, truths that are true for all people in all times regardless of their feelings or “experience.” For that’s what worship is: An acknowledgment that one is under an authority.
For Christians, that authority is Christ himself, who is the Word of God. For Satanists — and now leftists more broadly — that authority is the Self. In both literature and religion, Lucifer is defined by denying any authority but his own. While Jesus was defined by His submission to God the Father, Lucifer was defined by his rebellion against God the Father.
This also comes through repeatedly in the Washington Post profile. In another section, Boorstein writes: “Many young Americans are spiritual seekers, it’s just that the places they look for awe and higher truths aren’t necessarily institutions or scriptures but increasingly in nature and in themselves.”
Boorstein also shows the “nonbinary” witch Bennet and a “Florida pagan” friend explicitly acknowledging this on a podcast they host.
Both explain on the episode their spiritual paths, including what they characterize as strongly negative experiences with conservative religion, especially around strict rules and anti-LGBTQ teachings. …
‘No one walks the same path. Even if everyone had the same tradition, everyone will do it their own way,’ says [Bennet’s fellow podcast host] Cuna, who was born into a Cuban Catholic family. ‘There will be some deviation that’s rooted in our own truths. Because that’s honestly what matters in all this: coming back to ourselves.’
‘Absolutely,’ Bennett says.
That’s not only classically Satan but also a classically Christian depiction of rejecting the true God. Just like the Bible does, then, Boorstein openly connects these witches’ rejection of God with the rejection of his created distinctions between the two sexes and their resulting purposes.
Young Americans in particular are revamping mystical language and ancient rituals for their gender-fluid, write-my-own-rules, insta-worthy world. Like Bennett, many other teens discussing witchcraft these days on social media — the hashtag #witchtok on the youth-oriented site TikTok has 19.4 billion views — are looking for a personalized practice that taps into their own spiritual power and identity and feels authentic.
Even if one puts the Bible aside, to anyone who has read depictions of the demonic in timeless works such Dante’s “Inferno,” the Mephistopheles of “Faust,” and “The Scarlet Letter,” this all still fits right in. The chief characteristic of denying God is the elevation of one’s self to his place — just like Satan.
Not only are these witches fully cognizant of that, they are telling us that their demonic rejection of any God but themselves fits perfectly with today’s political left. This is why the leftist project seeks, for example, to overturn a Constitution and society built on natural law, which insists humans can only find true happiness by living in harmony with and submission to the created order.
The left’s culture war is in fact a religious war. Among other things, that means our politics and culture are only going to get weirder and more clarifying, folks. Best get your armor on and your spiritual swords sharpened.
