Is DnD Okay For Christians?
Criticism of Dungeons and Dragons includes that it teaches witchcraft, causes suicide, and is of the Devil. We’re here to explore the source of these claims from a Christian perspective.
Since the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1974, there have been a lot of questions about the game. Is it safe to play D&D? Are there demons in D&D? Can Christians play D&D? The answer, especially throughout the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s seemed to be a resounding “no,” but the years since have given people a chance to reevaluate. I’m Jaclyn Lewis, former youth minister, current professional Dungeon Master and parent, and I had the chance to interview Pastor Derek W. White, a minister with the United Methodist Church, long-time Dungeon Master and the creator of the D&D satanic panic movie documentary. We’re here to explore what is controversial about D&D, what the Bible has to say about D&D and what Christians need to know about Dungeons & Dragons.
What is Controversial about Dungeons & Dragons?
Groups like Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons claimed that DnD taught witchcraft
When Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1974, and it didn’t receive much moral criticism for the rest of the decade. All that changed when James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his dorm room and private detective William Dear publicly theorized that Egbert had become so obsessed with D&D that he could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality and had gotten lost in the tunnels beneath the campus. Then psychologist Thomas Radecki testified in several cases alongside bereaved mother and founder of B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) Patricia Pulling, claiming D&D was the cause of several suicides and murders committed by young people. Christians like Bob Larson, Pat Robertson and Jack Chick joined the scrutiny, accusing D&D of teaching players witchcraft and sorcery. Alarmed by these claims, people began to boycott Dungeons & Dragons.
These are quite severe accusations – D&D would be a dangerous game indeed if they were true! But by the 1990s, these concerns were all addressed with resounding clarity. Egbert was found in Louisiana on a trip totally unrelated to D&D, while the detective who theorized about his disappearance went on to “investigate” aliens. Thomas Radecki had his license revoked and was convicted of crimes I cannot share on a website for kids. His claims were researched and debunked by organizations like The Center for Disease Control and the American Association of Suicidology. Overall, the story is clear. But what about the witchcraft and demons?
Does Dungeons & Dragons Teach Sorcery?
This famous Chick Tract told a story of DnD teaching sorcery and indoctrinating someone into a cult
As far as the game teaching sorcery, well, it’s easy enough to look to the game itself. In a nutshell Dungeons & Dragons is a game where you play a character and tell a story. Sound weird? Pastor Derek puts it this way. Did you ever play Cops and Robbers as a kid? Any other kind of pretend? Most people have. When you played, did you ever argue about who shot who or who won the battle? Well, instead of arguing (or getting into a real fist fight), D&D players roll dice to determine who wins the outcome of an event. There’s a referee, called the Dungeon Master, who knows the rules, decides when dice get rolled, and creates worlds, characters, and challenges for the players to encounter on their journey. D&D usually takes place in a high fantasy world – think Lord of the Rings: elves, dwarves, magic, dragons, and treasure. Some characters (usually wizards, like Gandalf), do cast spells; to do this, the player simply says “my character casts Fireball,” and the Dungeon Master has them roll to say how much damage it does. No secret chants, lit candles, or pentagrams. I’ve been playing D&D for years (sometimes with actual pagans!) and the most witchcraft I’ve ever seen is someone waving their hands dramatically like The Scarlet Witch in Avengers.
But seeing a group of people, especially grown adults, gathered around a table playing pretend can seem a bit odd, especially when they seem so immersed in rules and a world that you don’t understand. What’s more, many of the fantasy worlds people play in have elements like magic or demons, which can be sacrilegious and sometimes even dangerous in certain contexts. Fortunately, both the creators of Lord of the Rings were men of faith, and they put this worldview in the game. Characters have an alignment (Good, Neutral, or Evil), and the game is designed to be played by Good characters, heroes. Any demons, necromancers, or vampires that show up are not only imaginary, they’re also totally 100% Evil (it literally says right in the book), and it’s the character’s job to defeat them.
So it’s pretty obvious that D&D isn’t Satanic. In fact, when Derek’s documentary Satanic Panic was released at Gen Con back in 2022, he had a lot of Christian D&D players his age come up to him, saying “Dude we settled this a long time ago. Why are you even doing this documentary now?" Then a 19-year-old came up to him. He said "Derek I appreciate this documentary so much because I'm at Gen Con to play Dungeons and Dragons. But my parents still think it's evil because of the misinformation and the disinformation from the 1970s and 1980s." That’s decades before that young man was even born! Sadly, many people, both Christians and not, still think of D&D as dangerous.
Is It Safe To Play Dungeons & Dragons?
C.S. Lewis’ Christian faith inspired him to write The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Many Christians ask Pastor Derek if D&D is evil. He responds with a question (like Jesus often did). He asks them what they think of books like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, A Wrinkle In Time, or The Fellowship of the Ring. If they say they have a problem with those things, Derek knows they can’t stand magic in fiction at all, and the conversation is over. If they love these books (and in our opinion, they’re right to), Derek points out that C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, and J.R.R. Tolkien were all Christian writers using their imagination to create stories – stories inspired by their faith. “That is what Christians are doing [in D&D]. We are claiming this space as a place of imagination and imaginative Christian play,” says Pastor Derek. “Because one of the things we experienced in the 80s in the 90s, and we still experience today, is that old saying: ‘An idle mind is the devil's playground,’ which is a bunch of hokum. An idle mind is the place where imagination comes to play, and imagination is the gift of God. We are created in the image of God, so to engage in imagination is to engage in Godly play.”
Pastor Derek grew up in a very fundamentalist tradition and was, in fact, a fundamentalist Pentecostal preacher for almost a decade. There, he said, he saw some people thought that “imagination during a religious service is okay, and imagination that is guided by the church is good…but imagination that is not controlled or monitored is scary. Of course imagination that's not controlled or monitored is scary! It's supposed to be!” So is Dungeons & Dragons safe to play? We’ll answer with this quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (note here that Aslan is an allegory for Jesus).
“Who is Aslan?” asked Susan.
“Aslan?” said Mr. Beaver, “Why don’t you know? He’s the King. . . . It is he, not you, that will save Mr. Tumnus. . . .”
“Is—is he a man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh!” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
To use imagination is to venture into something very powerful. Christians like C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle used their imaginations to tell stories about God and his truth, which is a concept straight from the Bible.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. – Philippians 4:8 (ESV)
These days, Christian imaginations aren’t limited to writing books. We can make movies and TV shows and YouTube videos and, yes, even Dungeons & Dragons games!
Can Christians Roleplay in D&D?
This movie depicted the perceived dangers of DnD, where a player is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality
Unlike TV or books, D&D is fully interactive, which is a powerful way to tell stories. “I learned that as a Pentecostal preacher if you could get the congregation to interact with you and interact with the message they tended to remember the topic of the sermon and what you were talking about a lot better,” says Pastor Derek. “Children like interactive stories. Adults like interactive stories. We like stories where we can take part. So when we play games like Dungeons & Dragons [where] we can be the Davids facing the Goliaths.” He points out traditions like the Jewish Purim or the Catholic Eucharist – both interactive stories where we get to take part. In fact, when I was writing the Sunday School curriculum, I used my experience playing D&D to write an interactive story for the kids to teach a verse from the Gospel of Luke.
“And he said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics.” – Luke 9:3 (ESV)
The “adventurers” started out with nothing and went on a D&D-style adventure where they had to cross a chasm, brave the cold, and, of course, slay an evil dragon. At each step of the journey, God would provide them with whatever they needed (rope, coins, and a sword) and they would have to decide how they would use it!
As Derek points out, we do this kind of imaginative storytelling in our daily lives, even if we don’t think of it that way. We imagine a scene where our boss confronts us with questions about our work and what we would say. We imagine what we might do on a trip and pack the things we need. We imagine what might be said on job interviews, first dates, and more. The roleplaying element of D&D isn’t something dangerous that will suck us into the imaginary world; it’s a helpful tool we can use to practice anything from public speaking to working through conflict.
Is Playing D&D Sinful or Immoral?
Here, Pastor Derek leads a gaming group, showing that Christians can in fact play DnD!
But, as some people point out, D&D isn’t about pretending we’re in a job interview. It’s about pretending we’re casting spells and enacting violence. Will that make us want to do those things for real? For the vast majority of players, playing a game of D&D brings them no closer to such things than, say, watching Lord of the Rings. In fact, being able to play things out can “guide people to make good decisions…or tell them it’s okay to make a bad decision and you can move on from that….If you make a mistake in a game of chess, you're going to lose. But if you make a mistake in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, it might open up an opportunity to do something even cooler!” I myself run games for a lot of young people who are still building up their resilience to failure and who have a hard time accepting bad dice rolls. But as they play, their friends encourage them, and I give them alternative ideas, they get to practice accepting failure and understand that they can think of other solutions to problems. Research has shown that D&D helps us increase creative thinking, lets us build up confidence and empathy, and even helps teach emotional regulation and communication. Rather than being bad for mental health, Dungeons & Dragons is actually quite the opposite, allowing players to explore danger, creativity, and teamwork through the lense of imagination and gameplay. Pastor Derek says “it's in the midst of all of that that we grow and learn and develop….Our faith is often strengthened in times of trial and in times of fear.”
There’s also research that imaginative play and storytelling in Dungeons & Dragons can actually lead to moral growth. In Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development: Dungeons & Dragons Provides Moral Training (Wright et al., 2020), researchers gave college students a D&D-style game that contained a series of moral choices (like whether or not to torture someone for information). They saw that these games actually increased scores in moral reasoning and theorized that D&D can be used as a “moral training ground,” especially for young people learning about complex morality for the first time in their development.
D&D’s Gameplay Exemplifies the Body of Christ
Pastor Derek’s Christianity affects all aspects of his life, and that includes how he plays games. He told me that his faith influences his game preferences; he likes playing cooperative games, like D&D, rather than competitive ones, which is a very Christian concept.
“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” – Hebrews 10:24-25, ESV
As Christians, we are called to give up our own selfish desire to control others or go through life relying on our own strength. Instead, God tells us to work with one another, relying on him and the people he’s has put around us to help us through the many trials of life. When Jesus was here on Earth, he gathered his twelve apostles around him to pray, eat, travel, and learn together, loving and supporting each other.
In Dungeons & Dragons, working together is baked into the core assumptions of the game. It’s is designed so that each party member has their own skill set, and each of them compliment one another. Say the party is in a dungeon looking for an ancient treasure. A clever thief might be the best one to disarm the trap on a door, while the burly barbarian is the one to smash the goblin guarding the way. Or perhaps they’ll work together to figure out the order they must light the temple torches, then rely on the fire magic of the wizard to execute their plan. This is remarkably similar to the metaphor of the Body of Christ.
“For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” – Romans 12:4-5, ESV
Players of Dungeons & Dragons get to put this into practice in the game by cooperating with one another and considering each of their characters’ different strengths and weaknesses to achieve their goals.
D&D Games for Christian Families
It’s pretty clear, from what we’ve seen of the game (and we’ve seen a lot of it!) that Dungeons & Dragons is not only okay for Christians to play, but even something that can help them exemplify Christian values. Pastor Derek’s church actually asked him to run games of D&D there because so many people wanted to play together! There are now two D&D groups totaling about 15 people who meet every week to go on adventures and roll dice together.
Pastor Derek and his son. They play DnD as a family together!
Derek and I also both play D&D with our families. He’s been playing with his 20-something daughter since she was 10, occasionally pulling in his wife and son to join them; I met my husband through ministry, but partially got to know him playing D&D and have played multiple games with him, my siblings, and my cousins (my kid’s still too young, but the time is coming)! If your child has an interest in playing Dungeons & Dragons, but you don’t know anything about the game, here at Young Dragonslayers would be a great place to start. Professional Dungeon Masters like me teach tweens and teens how to play and run safe, PG games entirely online for players with similar ages and play styles so they can get into this world of imagination together. There’s always an adult present, and we’re all experienced working with children, so we can help guide them into heroism and cooperation and away from chaos and vice. If you’d like to hear more about the intersection of Christianity and geeky interests like D&D, check out Pastor Derek at The Geek Preacher and be sure to read the second part to this blog post when it comes out next week. There, we will go into how D&D can be used in uniquely Christian ways.
