Editorial

Editorial: Will 2024 bring more spiritual violence?

Manny Moreno By |

It’s become something of a tradition at The Wild Hunt that our secular year begins with an editorial outlook of the year ahead. More often than not, I seem to engage in annual handwringing with Cassandra about a rising tide that represents a danger to modern Paganisms.

“There is a new wave that has me and many in the Pagan community concerned,” I wrote last January. “It reminds me in some ways of the Satanic Panic, though that term does not fully describe it; it’s not a panic, but more of a dismay and a display of Evangelical mania.”

I noted the private boldness of many evangelicals to contact The Wild Hunt with a flood of Biblical quotations and subsequent scolding about us validating divination and other “Pagan topics.” They also took the time to try to introduce me to Jesus; despite having been raised in Western culture, they must have assumed I had not heard of him.

Over the next 12 months since the writing of that editorial, we learned and reported on numerous Christian protests of Pagan events and accusations of the dangers of Paganism:

I wasn’t surprised, but I worry that there will be more. In 2024, the United States will be galvanized by the presidential election. There will be some 50 other similar elections in the world.

To me, what that means is that people in power will be seeking every method available to them to segment the population into two camps: friends and enemies. If recent history is a guide, they will use any and all rhetoric to achieve this goal.

What will make 2024 different is that artificial intelligence will be in full swing to detect which message succeeds most in fragmenting the electorate. However, it does not take a computer algorithm to recognize that religion is an obvious and useful tool to accomplish that objective. With that will come more spiritual violence.

By spiritual violence, I mean specifically the no-holds-barred approach to evangelism that has become increasingly favored by conservative Christians and their allies.

The groundwork for that violence has already been laid by insulating monotheistic conservatives with spiritual deafness. We witnessed it last week with Rabbi Wolpe’s refusal to engage in dialogue regarding his article in The Atlantic.

But it is everywhere. Today, I did a Google search for the god Janus and the images told the story. Some included statements like “Seek God First,” “New Year, Same God,” and, unsurprisingly, “Start the New Year with Jesus.”

Earlier this year, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke got mad at Barbie. He believes the movie and the doll are part of a demonic plot involving LGTBQ folks, the media, Democrats, and Anthony Fauci. So, he purchased a Barbie-like dollhouse, attached a Bible to a baseball bat with duct tape and proceeded to destroy it because “the demon comes out when you expel it.”


It was an attack on women foremost but also on enlightenment values, sexual minorities, and us.

Locke is obsessed with unclean spirits everywhere. “We come against every unclean spirit there in Jesus’s name. We bind right now every unclean spirit of infirmity, every spirit of witchcraft and confusion. Satan, we know you’re there and we break your power. You have no legal right over her in Jesus’s name.”

He also dismisses all rational attempts at supporting individuals experiencing mental health challenges. “People come to me all the time, ‘Pastor Locke, I got voices in my head. What do you think it is?’ Oh, I don’t think. I know what it is. You ain’t got no imaginary friend. You got a demon.”

The crafted welcome message on the door from Locke’s actions is clear about who is welcome and what the faithful should do.

The biggest problem with Locke and his ilk is that people are listening. He speaks for more people than many of us might care to admit.  They are our neighbors primarily because evangelism and proselytizing are widely seen as benign by design.

They aren’t. They too are spiritual violence couched in a myth of compassionate action.  That myth makes spiritual violence common and strips it, at least in the eyes of the faithful, from all measures of abuse.

In October 2023, the American documentary The Mission was released by Picturehouse after premiering at the 50th Telluride Film Festival some six weeks earlier. The film recounts the story of John Allen Chau, who, in 2018, attempted to contact the Sentinelese, the Indigenous people living on North Sentinel Island, which is part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. They are one of the last un-contacted peoples in the world, meaning they have had little to no contact with the outside world and have remained isolated.

The Sentinelese are also known for their resistance to contact and actively defend their isolation. Their wishes were meaningless to Chau, who went to the island as a Christian missionary hoping to convert them. They killed him with arrows.

Film critic Felix Vasquez, Jr of Cinema Crazed summed up the documentary as a “stark and grim portrait of another victim of the urge to preach ‘the gospel.’ Though it may not offer many answers, nor provide a ton of insight, it successfully tackles the sociopathic, often sickening urge we continue to have to colonize, and proselytize.”

Chau is not the only missionary out there. There are fleets of missionaries who fail to respect the wishes of the un-contacted. “Forced contact is a crime,” Survival Internal wrote earlier this year, ” and can be genocidal to uncontacted peoples.”

Jaime Saint, the grandson of a missionary to uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, reflected in The Christian Post on the actions of Chau and their portrayal in The Mission. “We aren’t called to obey governing authorities if they say don’t do something other than what the Bible says we must do,” he said. “People throughout history have been put in prison and killed for their faith; the Church did not grow without people who have been martyred. There are always going to be critics anytime someone lives out their faith, but we are not accountable to the critics. We’re accountable to the Lord of the harvest.”

The statement cannot be clearer in offering a justification for spiritual violence. And not one, but many, publications have highlighted Chau’s decade-long preparation for his actions and that no greater honor exists than joining the faithful dead through martyrdom for spreading Christ’s message.

My handwringing on the topic of spiritual violence and what I perceive as a growing Christian nationalist patriarchy are my own concerns, being a minority in many ways, as well as a refugee. My lens might be skewed and I also think we must be increasingly vigilant.

Despite that, I remain an optimist and I hope for the best in 2024. Indigenous teachings have taught us that the best defense against a rising threat is building community with each other and with our ancestors. In times of crisis or challenges, a supportive community is indispensable.

I hope we are listening. We are more creative, we are more effective, and perhaps more importantly this coming year, we are more resilient together.

Whatever may come, The Wild Hunt will be covering it.

Happy Secular New Year! Many blessings ahead in 2024.

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