Still Against Fiction

Christian book-burners are at it again. Do they ever stop? For a little while there it seemed like the more dramatic stunts had dropped off, even if schools were still receiving plenty of requests to have books removed from libraries by a lot of the same folks. But controversial Tennessee pastor Greg Locke held a book-burning event just last week, in an effort to save his religious beliefs from the scourge of fictional magick.

Greg Locke, head pastor at Global Vision Bible Church, held a book burning event Wednesday night, and urged followers to burn “evil garbage” like young adult fantasy books, tarot cards, “voodoo dolls and crystals.”

“Bring all your Harry Potter stuff. Laugh all you want haters. I don’t care. IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT,” Locke said in an Instagram post Monday. “All you ‘Twilight’ books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism.”

In a video livestreamed on Facebook, churchgoers hurl books and other items deemed associated with “witchcraft” into a massive bonfire on the church’s parking lot in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The burning begins about an hour into the livestream. At least one counterprotester claimed to throw a Bible into the flames, Nashville Scene reported.

“We have a constitutional right and a Biblical right to do what we’re going to do tonight,” Locke said in the livestreamed video. “We have a burn permit, but even without one a church has a religious right to burn occultic materials that they deem are a threat to their religious rights and freedoms and belief systems.”

Now J. K. Rowling has shown herself to be problematic of late, and Twilight is just plain bad. Still, I'm absolutely and unswervingly opposed to book burning regardless of content, and as a practicing worker of magick I can also assure everyone out there that both the Harry Potter and Twilight series are fiction. The "spells, demonism, shape-shifting, and occultism" portrayed in those books has nothing to do with magick in the real world.

And these folks honestly have to know that the magick in these books is actually 100% fake and poses no real occult threat. The reason they persist in this nonsense is that to some kinds of Christians - to be clear, the wrong kind - there's nothing more dangerous than imagination. It's no wonder that so many young people who grow up in those churches leave. I have trouble contemplating an existence in which no one is safe even in their own thoughts, and can think of few things more existentially depressing.

Obviously, a belief system that awful is under threat from anything fun. It's not just fantasy fiction, which remains popular because people like it, but anything at all enjoyable. As I see it, joy and spirituality should go hand in hand, and any belief system that can be destroyed by something as trivial as fantasy fiction should just be destroyed and get it over with.