Across the nation, students will soon pack their bags and head for college campuses for a year of instruction. But some of the classes on their rosters might not be quite what you would expect. According to a recent article, colleges across the US, including Yale, Duke, and Georgetown, are offering classes on witchcraft and the occult. But I’m sure they won’t offer classes on biblical creation—and if they did, they would be teaching against that anyway and denigrating Christianity.
Reportedly, Yale’s History of the Night course features “a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead.”
Duke University’s Radical Magic course culminates in making a personal “spell book” and includes students giving each other psychic readings.
One of Georgetown University’s courses is all about “rituals, symbols, shamanism, expanded states of consciousness, spirit possession, magic, divination and witchcraft.”
And it goes on from there. Answers In Genesis looked at other colleges, including several prominent Canadian universities and found that, yes, many colleges are indeed offering these classes to their students!
It’s a reminder that secular is not neutral. As our culture abandons its once Christianized foundation, it doesn’t become some kind of neutral space with a nebulous worldview divorced from spirituality and grounded in “science” and “reason.” That’s because, contrary to the naturalistic view, we are not mere biological beings. We are a body and a soul. God created us to yearn for him and to desire meaning and purpose—things the naturalistic, atheistic worldview cannot provide. So people turn to “spirituality,” or even demonic teachings like witchcraft, to fill that void—because as much as people want spirituality, they also love darkness rather than light, and these kinds of mystical teachings fulfill that desire (at least temporarily).
Anyone who goes to the waters of witchcraft, shamanism, divination, psychic readings, and so on will be thirsty again. Those “broken cisterns” don’t satisfy. But Jesus does. He is the water of life that will never leave you thirsty. He is the bread of life that lasts forever. He gives meaning and purpose for now and eternity.
Yes, young people are searching—desperately searching. But they are looking in all the wrong places. This should remind us that we have the hope of eternity to share with everyone, even those dabbling in or caught totally up in witchcraft.
John 4:13–14 KJV – “Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”
