A near Wiccan speaking spells

When my father and his brother, Lief, were children, their mother took them to see Oral Roberts. My father, who spoke Swedish at home and English at school, had a terrible speech impediment. My Uncle Lief had stabbed himself in his eye, losing his vision, as a child. My Swedish grandmother, like so many mothers today searching for cures for themselves and their children, believed by faith that Oral Roberts would heal them.

As my father tells the story, he and my uncle were summoned to the stage. Roberts asked my father to say his name. “Oral Roberts,” my father said. Roberts slapped him in the head, knocking him back into the arms of an assistant, as Roberts screamed “HEALED!” Then my uncle approached. “What color is my tie?” Roberts asked. “Red.” “HEALED!” My father had a speech impediment but could talk. My uncle had one working eye. My grandmother was convinced Roberts had performed a miracle but would take the boys back for more healing anytime Roberts went through Miami.

People often search for explanations and in a post-Christian nation, where people search for their truth instead of the truth, doubts sprout conspiracy and people waiver from truth to mythology. The theology of illness is simple. Illness, like death, is a byproduct of sin. As sin more and more pollutes the world, so too does disease, illness, and death. The theology of suffering can be difficult to grasp, but at its root is a simple concept. We cannot escape the fallout of the fall, but Christ entered the world, lived a perfect life, suffered, died, rose again, and conquered death. We get no shortcuts and Christ took no shortcuts. Bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes those bad things are without explanation, including illness.

But people crave answers. We can capture a picture of the black hole around which our solar system orbits. We can turn lead to gold with the large hadron collider. Surely, we must know the cure for cancer too. Perhaps our scientists are hiding it for profit. Surely, we must have done something to cause autism or a host of other illnesses and, therefore, we can fix them. Into the mix come many voices and, increasingly, they are voices that sound reasonable, but are not just outside science, but outside compatibility with Christendom.

One of those voices is Casey Means, nominated by Donald Trump to be the next American surgeon general. Dr. Means went to medical school but does not practice medicine. Instead, having dabbled in occult practices that amount to witchcraft, she now excels at providing answers to many unanswerable questions and reassuringly false hopes to people with sicknesses who have given up on science and modern medicine.

These are, in Casey Means’ own words, some of what she has done. “I set up a small meditation shrine in my house and prayed to photos of my ancestors asking for support on my personal journey, and wrote mantras and manifestations on small pieces of paper and tucked them around the shrine.”

She also “worked with a spiritual medium who helped [her] try to connect with [her] spirit guides for support and guidance.” She “did full moon ceremonies with grounded, powerful women where [they] called in abundance and let go of what wasn’t serving [them].” She also claimed to practice the “Silva Method” which is a pagan religious practice developed by an electronics repairman who became convinced his daughter was psychic. Means also has experimented with psychedelic drugs, which more and more Christians realize is just another pathway into what Scripture refers to as the unseen realm that includes “the spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12).

Christ and the apostles admonish us to live in the present reality. Means has engaged in occult practices to connect outside this present reality. But some Christians with illnesses or with children who are ill have bought into Means’ repackaged occult beliefs in good and bad energy.

It sounds good to people who have given up hope in modern medicine. But it is dangerous to put a new age occultist in a position like that of surgeon general. A growing number of Christian and conservative influencers, particularly among moms, cannot see what is staring them in the face—behind all the jargon and medical language is a foundational system premised in pagan occult practices that Scripture warns against.

Christians in politics keep making compromises with the world. They abandoned character counting because they needed a fighter to fight the left. Now they want a near Wiccan as the nation’s surgeon general because she speaks spells using medical jargon that provide answers to questions for which there are often no real answers, just suffering. Oral Roberts claimed to heal many, and many claimed he healed them. My grandmother insisted he had done so. But before the people of faith went in search of their own truths instead of the truth, we would have all recognized Roberts would not be fit to be surgeon general. Neither is Casey Means.

Editor’s note: For a counterpoint, see “A focus on the roots of chronic illness,” by Ericka Andersen.