Two of the most popular 2018 articles on Speculative Faith share a surprising connection.

It’s the word “spells.”

The first popular piece is my article, Six Christian White Magic Spells Worse Than Fantasy Magic. This article actually dates back to 2016, but apparently found some staying power. Of course, this article is more of a primer on the concept that some Christians fall into “white magic” spell-like responses to world. These include (but are not limited to) “white magic” practices, such as:

1. “Health and wealth” prosperity
2. Magic circles, symbols, and verse
3. Personal guidance divination
4. Sorcerous “spiritual warfare”
5. Romance prosperity gospel
6. “If only”: prayer and programs

The second popular piece is a more-recent article, J. K. Rowling’s Progressivist Spells are Backfiring. Apart from the word “spells,” that article’s topic is unrelated. But now that the second Fantastic Beasts film, The Crimes of Grindelwald has limped out of theaters, this article seems a bit prescient. It seems fans really were brewing up backlash and discontent in response to Rowling’s wizarding world.

So why are these two articles so popular?

I’m not sure. But I am concerned about recent headlines, such as “millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology.”¹ I hope that, in an occult-crazed culture, these two articles are not popular because people are actually searching for “Christian white magic” or Progressivist spells. To try out.

By the way, for any aspiring “witches” out there who found this article, Al Mohler offers these reminders:

… Secularism is an unstable condition. The secular space is going to be filled by some other space. It’s going to be an explicitly religious space. But that Christian space, that has become in some in cases a secular space, is now transformed, in so many cases, into a modern pagan space.²

We need to understand where we fit in the universe where we fit in the cosmos. Now here we must understand that the longing that leads so many people to astrology is not only not going to be met by witchcraft, the occult, astrology or any semblance thereof, but we also have to go further and say it will only be found within authentic biblical Christianity. The only worldview capable of explaining why the cosmos exists and what indeed our part is within it. But it certainly is true that within every heart is a desire to try to place ourselves in the context to use those words again of thousands of years of history and the universe. That is exactly what we all need.³