The Occult: A Substitute Faith

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At least a quarter of the Rev. Geh-man's work is in health readings for those who seek her help in detecting illness; several reputable doctors in the area bring patients to her for diagnostic clues. Her information, in true spiritualist tradition, comes from "spirit guides," friendly sources on the "spirit side" who offer secret information to the "earth plane." On Sundays, standing in a pink chiffon dress in her pulpit, Bonnie will call out, "I want to talk to the lady in the pretty white dress. Those on the spirit side tell me to pass on to you a message not to worry about your lower back." To another woman: "Your husband has applied for a new job. They tell me it will be a choice of two things. Everything will be all right."

No skeptic has proven spiritualism to be valid, but there is a residue of the unexplained in these claimed psychic events, some occurrences that seem to defy the laws of chance or mere coincidence. It is just such phenomena that are currently being investigated by parapsychologists under the general heading of ESP, extrasensory perception: telepathy, communication from one mind to another without normal means; precognition, the prediction of future events; clairvoyance, the power to discern objects not present to the senses; and psychokinesis, the movement of material objects with the mind. While investigations go on, though, such gifts pose a problem for Christians. The Old Testament expressly forbids soothsaying; but the prophets' sort of future prediction was an obvious exception. The New Testament phenomenon of spiritual prophecy among early Christians was seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit —although Christians are warned to discern "good" spirits from bad.

Demonic Dangers. At least some clergymen have chosen the path of investigation. The late Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike was probably the most enthusiastic—and for more orthodox Christians, embarrassing—investigator, claiming to have communicated with his dead son with the aid of the minister-medium the Rev. Arthur Ford. Ford and other, somewhat less flamboyant Protestant ministers had even earlier formed a group known as the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship to open a bridge between traditional Christianity and the occult. For evangelicals and fundamentalists, on the other hand, nearly every aspect of the occult still remains a demonic danger, from ouija-board prophecy to the evocation of a personal and malevolent Satan. Some fundamental ists even attribute every non-Christian spiritual movement to the inspiration of demons.

Whether as a threat or a promise —or as an object lesson—occultism is a phenomenon with which a growing number of churchmen realize that they must come to terms. One who sees it from a particularly revealing angle is the Rev. Festo Kivengere, an Anglican evangelist in Uganda who has been on a speaking tour of the U.S. Kivengere, who was raised as an animist, discerns in occultism "a trend toward the kind of religion that most of my people were converted from."

Though his family worshiped the "Great God," he says, they sought the aid of spirits to prevent "catastrophes that were beyond our control." He senses a