Introduction
Historically, theonomists have not quite known what to do about drugs. On the one hand, we are massively skeptical of attempts by the state to enforce morality beyond what God has explicitly granted. The state should not be in the health care business because the state sucks at health care. The state’s ministry is primarily one of violence: punishing evil doers, protecting the innocent, and enforcement of private property and equal weights and measures. You don’t want the magistrate taking care of your newborn baby or great-grandma because they will inevitably harm them, but enough about Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
On the other hand, the proliferation of psychedelic drugs, the legalization of marijuana, and the mass destruction of meth and fentanyl all around us seem to be screaming for some measure of criminalization. For many years, I’ve fallen back on a defense of criminalization from a tactical standpoint: it’s unwise to remove the ancient landmarks – the laws have been on the books, we are clearly not in any kind of position to handle this “freedom,” so keep the laws until great maturity breaks out in our land. Hey, we can hope can’t we?
However, I had a high school civics student recently suggest that mind altering drugs (THC, meth, fetanyl, ayahuasca, etc.) ought to be banned by law for their close association with witchcraft, demons, idol worship, and the occult. And I think he’s right.
Theonomy has often leaned libertarian on drugs because it has assumed that plants and chemicals are just materials. But contra materialistic libertarianism, some materials are used to commune with the dead and demons and therefore should be illegal in Christian nations.
Of Witches & Familiar Spirits
One element of biblical law that may leave many Christians scratching their heads is what to do with all the passages about witches, wizards, divination (consulting with the dead), and summoning up “familiar spirits.” We can certainly begin by prohibiting public worship of false gods, legally suppressing Islam, Hinduism, etc. While some well-meaning folks have decided that means Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are all inherently immoral (but Moses and Elijah and Jesus were types of wizards), there would seem to be a far more hideous application in hallucinatory, mind altering drugs.
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. 22:18).
“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer” (Dt. 18:10-11).
“And [Manasseh] caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger” (2 Chron. 33:6).
Are those ceremonial or moral laws? It would seem very straightforward to see them as moral laws, right there with, no worshipping false gods or passing your children through the fires of Molech. And if they are moral laws then they likely have judicial/criminal applications since in Israel witchcraft and idolatry had potential death penalties tied to them. These are not ceremonial death penalties (ordered directly by God) because they require witnesses and legal due process (e.g. Dt. 13).
While there is certainly a resurgence of occult activity and full blown Satan worship and idolatry in Hinduism and Islam in the West, the gateway into idolatry and witchcraft is not usually a direct leap from a broadly Christian culture to putting fruit in front of statues or communing with demons. And the story of Israel suggests the path: drunken and drugged revelries and orgies. In Exodus 32, when Aaron makes the golden calf, the people offer sacrifices, begin eating and drinking, and Scripture uses a euphemism, “and rose up to play,” which is clearly sexual (cf. Gen. 26:8, 1 Cor. 10:7). This pagan worship is a sort of gluttonous, drunken frenzy. The historical connections between pagan worship, mind altering drugs, drunkenness, and sexual deviancy are well established: temple prostitution, pederasty, peyote, cannabis, opium, etc.
There is no doubt a complex psychology of despair, boredom, lust, and stupidity that leads many people into sexual debauchery and mind-altering drugs. But the search for euphoria through sexual highs or chemical highs (or both) is a deep-seated craving in the human heart, especially in contexts of deep depression, anxiety, fear, and loneliness.
But the Bible clearly teaches that we are not merely chemical animals, and the world is not merely a chemical junkyard. We are also spiritual creatures made in God’s image, and the world around is far more alive and haunted than we often realize. And there is a deep hatred of God, His image, and His world that drives these cravings and urges, a hatred which loves death and in some perverse way sees power in death (and therefore the powers of death).
Pharmaceutical Witchcraft
Paul teaches this in Galatians 5:20 listing the works of the flesh: “Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies.” There are the close associations of wrath and hatred and strife with idolatry, witchcraft, and heresies. In fact, the word for “witchcraft” is the Greek word “pharmakeia,” from which we get modern words like “pharmaceutical” (related to medical treatments) or “pharmacy,” (a place to buy medicine or drugs). In the ancient world, medicine and drugs were often closely connected to religious rituals, shamans, and “witchdoctors.” But despite the claims of the Enlightenment, we haven’t actually left that world behind.
In C.S. Lewis’s book That Hideous Strength, he suggests that certain pseudo-scientific meddling with the universe can summon up dark powers and demonic entities. In another children’s story, The Last Battle, a dark deity is summonsed accidentally by lust for power and manipulation. While it may at first seem relatively harmless or merely superstitious, there really are dark powers in the world and the Bible prohibits us from seeking them out for a reason. Pharaoh’s magicians used some real sorcery, and the witch of Endor really did summon up Samuel’s ghost. And when Jesus came into the world the demons and evil spirits were swarming everywhere.
The repeated commands in the New Testament to be sober and sober-minded are not merely a matter of clear thinking and physical safety (though they are certainly that).
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). Sobriety is particularly necessary because the Devil is looking for victims to devour, and insobriety is apparently one of the ways into human cultures and societies and souls.
“But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation” (1 Thess. 5:8). Again, sobriety is part of our defensive armor against the “thieves of the darkness and night” (1 Thess. 5:4-5), which is known for drunkenness and sleepy stupors (1 Thess. 5:7). In other words, people putting themselves into drugged stupor are making themselves available and opening themselves up to dark forces and spiritual thieves.
The irony of course is that initially, the euphoria can feel powerful. It provides chemical highs that feel beautiful, poetic, and can even seem to give dreams and visions of enlightenment and wisdom. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were notable examples of this pseudo-scientific-psychedelic crossover with their Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s. It’s no accident that Richard Alpert ended up as a Hindu guru renamed Ram Dass, teaching eastern meditation and yoga techniques to the West.
The witchcraft and wizardry that God prohibits is attempting to manipulate the world, to access power apart from the God who made the world. All sin is a bit of sorcery, attempting to trick blessing out of disobedience: “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Sam. 15:23). But if left unchecked, there is a certain hardness of heart that will continue down that dark road until dead spirits are coming out of the ground. And hallucinatory drugs are often involved. And what might begin as mere hallucination may end up more real than we imagine.
Conclusion
The overall point here is simply to point out that the civil magistrate does have a role to play in defending citizens from demons and false gods. This is primarily done through encouraging Christian worship and practice (praising righteousness) and through punishing true criminals. But it cannot be an accident that the kings of Israel and Judah are primarily evaluated on whether they destroyed demon shrines and high places or not.
The problem with idol worship is not merely that it offends the goodness and glory of the true and living God (though it does). The problem is also the fact that idol worship invites demons and dark forces into a land. And pot shops are some of the high places of modern society. The same thing should be said about abortion. It is not merely mass genocidal murder (it is that), it is also the modern day shrine of Molech, where we pass our children through demon fires. As Megan Basham pointed out one time, while Francis Collins was head of the NIH he, “not only defended experimentation on [babies] obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies.”
You cannot have mass human sacrifice without demons involved. Yes, fallen human beings are desperately wicked, but the sadistic celebration of child sacrifice and the experimentation on aborted baby bodies is the kind of witchcraft Lewis was warning about. The N.I.C.E. hooked up a decapitated human head to a machine and called down demons, and we have been grafting infant scalps onto lab rats. The demons have been summonsed. Tash is not far off.
And the mass legalization of THC is part of the play. The proliferation of increasingly deviant pornography is part of the play. Anti-depressant drugs are also in the mix. And then comes the meth and fentanyl and LSD and ayahuasca, in the aftermath of the guilt and shame and despair and loneliness and searching for meaning. And the accusers whisper darker and darker lies in their ears.
We do have witches and wizards and demon shrines that must be destroyed. They are pot shops and abortion clinics and sex-change operating rooms and porn studios, all of which traffic in human flesh, and none of which are limited to human flesh. Theirs is a lust for “strange flesh,” like the men in Sodom seeking to rape the angels, “relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones” (Jude 8-9 ESV).
The law of God prohibits idolatry because idolatry is the worship of demons, and demons are thieves that steal, kill, and destroy, but Christ has come that we and our neighbors might have life. The church and families certainly have significant work to do in this area. Discipleship and discipline in the home and the church contribute enormously to sobriety and fruitfulness in society, but magistrates also play a role in prohibiting public celebration of immorality and demons. While I continue to be highly skeptical of much of the modern “war on drugs” since it appears to have been massively confused about biblical principles of criminal justice (e.g. what is the “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” equity for drug trafficking, selling pot, or communing with demons?), I am convinced that magistrates of Christian nations do have some duty to protect the life and livelihoods of their citizens from the ravaging of drug-induced demons.
Photo by Mishal Ibrahim on Unsplash
Leave a Reply