Neo-Witchcraft Mentality in Popular Christianity

Abstract

The belief in witchcraft and practices associated with it has in recent times gained prominence especially in the Neo-Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches and in Charismatic Movements within the mainline churches. The prominence given to witchcraft in these churches is gradually crediting what can be described as a revived witchcraft mentality in popular Christianity. The result is that today in Ghanaian popular culture, Christianity is perceived as a religion with the power to deal with the old threat of witchcraft. The result is the emergence of what might be called a neo-witchcraft mentality in the neo-Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches, which uses witchcraft as an interpretative scheme for dealing with misfortune. This new prominence of witchcraft has become one of the dominant features of popular Christianity in Ghana today. This mentality is sustained by a dualistic worldview in which one can account for almost every misfortune in terms of the activities of evil forces and witches. This dualistic world-view or ideology raises serious theological questions with implications for the future of African theology and the mission of Christianity as an agent for change and transformation. (Akrong 1991:31). The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship between the emerging neo-witchcraft mentality in the Charismatic movement and the traditional theory of evil. It also analyzes this witchcraft mentality theologically to show its implications for the mission of the church and our place in the modern world. Witchcraft mentality in contemporaiy Ghanaian society can be described as a theory of evil that allows one to concretize evil by making it specific and identifiable with an external agent. It can also be viewed as an ideological construct that provides an interpretativ e scheme or an existential hermeneutic for making sense out of life, providing meaning especially to those aspects of life that are perceived as inimical to. human existence or dangerous to human well being. It operates on a dualistic construction of reality in which events in human life are viewed in terms of a struggle between the forces of good and evil, and human existence is believed to be caught up in this complex web of interaction between good and evil forces. The witchcraft mentality creates structures that allow one to deal with what one experiences as negative, dangerous or inimical to his/her well being as the result of the intervention of evil forces in our lives. Sometimes the presence of evil is conceived of in terms of an evil principle in the terms of the devil or in concrete personal manifestations in the form of the evil spirits and witches variously conceived as agents of the devil.