The “Charlie Charlie Challenge” has caused something of a moral panic in the Church. Christians don’t need to jump at everything which bumps in the night; but we must not allow spiritual evil to be portrayed as fun.
A group of children draw a cross on the ground, and lay sticks down over it. The words “yes” and “no” are scrawled down, and the children form a circle by joining hands. Seeking a message from another realm, they call on the spirits of the dead. Slowly, inexplicably, the sticks begin to move, spelling out a message… for “Charlie” has arrived.
The “Charlie, Charlie” game has caused a great deal of unnecessary angst amongst children and their parents this week. According to reliable sources on the inter-web, the game is an ancient Mexican ritual which can put humans in touch with a dreadful Mexican spirit; although other sources on the world wide net argue that Charlie is the ghost of a Mexican boy who committed suicide. To be honest, I don’t think many Mexicans, ancient spirits or otherwise, have gone by the moniker “Charlie”. These stories seem a tad implausible – even for urban legends. So, while caution is appropriate, panic is not.
The game is no longer played with sticks (if it ever was) but by balancing one pencil across another. Because most pencils have a slight bend, the natural imbalance is sufficient for the slightest breeze, nudge or breath to send the top pencil spinning – and a gullible teenager screaming from the room. I’m open to evidence for contemporary miracles, and I believe in personal, supernatural evil forces. However, a moving pencil doesn’t seem to call out for a supernatural explanation. Critically, I reckon that the powers and principalities who mobilised to oppose Christ’s mission are unlikely to be at the beck and call of a teenager with a couple of HB pencils.
Some Christian writers have suggested that the popularity of the challenge reveals a deep spiritual hunger which haunts secular society. The idea is that scientism has removed spirituality from the world, so teens are desperate to rediscover it by playing with the occult. Yet many evangelicals and Catholics also seem desperate to believe that the game is real. And, at the time of writing, there seems to be very good evidence that the popularity of the game has been driven by a viral marketing campaign for a new horror film “The Gallows” (in which, seemingly, the ghost of a teenage suicide victim pursues a group of documentary makers who accidentally summon him). So it seems more likely that people just enjoy the adrenaline produced by a good scare. Unfortunately, evangelicalism’s desire for a scare story can make us all look like fools.
Presumably, it is only a matter of time before those spinning pencils also send fundamentalist preachers into a panic. Perhaps exorcists trained in cyber-warfare will be recruited to drive Charlie from the web. That’s not as implausible as it sounds. Doug Geivett and Holly Pivec report that in 1997 a crack team of exorcists, specially trained in mountaineering, were sent to drive a demon named the “Queen of Heaven” from Mount Everest by writing“Jesus Saves” on the mountain with their ice-picks[i]. I imagine such athletic, rock-climbing spirit warriors would dismiss me as “anti-supernaturalist”; but to my mind they were neglecting the biblical worldview for an expensive game of make-believe. There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus to suggest that evil spirits need to be driven out of territories with rites and rituals.
In fact, the apostle Paul warns Christians against telling tall tales about the spiritual world. Such notions, he warns the Colossians, lead to arrogant idle minds.Jews and gentiles shared Paul’s belief in demonic forces; so it is revealing that Paul forbade his churches from dabbling in Jewish demonology and magic. He did not counsel his churches to learn the names of demons or to ward off spiritual forces with amulets containing pages of the Torah. He believed in the powers of darkness, but he did not subscribe to a magical worldview. For Paul, humans could not manipulate and control the spiritual powers; only God could. Spiritual warfare was a matter of prayer and faith, not bell, book and candle.
So can we dismiss Charlie as a bit of harmless fun? Heaven forbid. First, Christians believe that it isn’t healthy to trivialise the demonic. The game is nearly always make believe; demons are not. Malevolent forces are unlikely to leap from the page into a child’s soul; but we do not want our children to grow up thinking that evil has no more substance than a fairy tale.
Second, many children find these games frightening, and some even find them terrifying. And many children, not all of them religious, find the idea of chatting to an evil demon both spiritually and morally disturbing. Even the most ardent secularist should acknowledge that it just isn’t healthy for young people to upset their friends this way. And the whole point of the “Charlie, Charlie” challenge is to scare participants and onlookers. (So Christian parents would be best not to do the game’s work for it; it is better quietly dissuade children from participating in “nonsense” than to tell them scary stories about demons.)
Third, perhaps we ought to take the reaction of this second group of children a little more seriously. They are pointing us to a blindingly obvious fact – there is something psychologically unhealthy, and morally and spiritually wrong about wanting to play with an evil, occult force. I suppose many parents think that the world of the supernatural is make believe; but what on Earth leads them to conclude that talking to dead spirits is a healthy way to play “let’s pretend”? When it is acceptable for toy shops to sell Ouija boards to youngsters for profit, everyone should agree that something has gone wrong in popular culture.
Finally, I accept that the demonic is real on the testimony of Jesus Christ, the apostles and God’s scriptures. But this is not a doctrine I struggle to accept. Most of the testimony I have read about demonic activity in the contemporary world is unconvincing. Most of the evidence has a straightforward naturalistic explanation. Most, but certainly not all. Some reports of spiritual experiences of evil are believable and striking; some testimony of demonic oppression is plausible enough to be authentic; some stories of supernatural events are just strange enough to be true [ii].
It’s not that demonic activity is the best explanation of this evidence. It’s just that sometimes there seems to be no style good explanation. Scripture tells me little about demons and angels, other than they are immaterial, personal forces that I cannot comprehend or predict. So, when some evidence of malign, personal force cannot be neatly explained by naturalism, and when the evidence does not neatly fit anyone’s expectations, I find my belief in the demonic reinforced.
In other words, there are real dangers here. As I have said, two HB pencils will not provide a conduit for evil. But a life-long fascination with occult forces could have very unpleasant results. The Christian believes that personal evil forces have a malign intent towards us; they are stronger than humans, but are no match for God. They cannot be controlled by men, and they are certainly not to be played with. The Christian should not be fascinated with them; the secularist should not dismiss them. So it is best to insist that our children do not treat them as toys.
[i]The exorcists belonged to the New Apostolic Reformation movement. This movement has a worldview which differs significantly from that of evangelical Christians, including traditional Pentecostal and charismatic theology
[ii]For example, some of the stories collected by Craig S. Keener in Miracles (Baker Academic: 2011). As a rule of thumb, the easier it is to identify the eyewitnesses, the more credible the witnesses, the more reluctant they are to tell the story, the less they have to gain personally from telling the story and the less the story sounds like it’s strayed from a draft script of “The Exorcist”, the more plausible their testimony seems to me. Above all, the story must closely cohere with what I read in scripture. If a credible story strays from the portrait given by scripture, I will simply categorise it as “unexplained” rather than “possibly demonic”.