Back when I was a TA at Harvard, possibly my favourite student was an evangelical Christian. He was an economist, so his written work wasn’t as good as some of his other students, but his participation was essential to my seminar discussion, within Diana Eck‘s world-religions class. Many of the students were at Harvard Divinity School and drawn to a view that the “world religions” were all basically the same and all basically good. This student was having none of it: to claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, he would insist “Either God had a son or he didn’t! That makes a difference!” The discussion was far richer for that counter-perspective.

We remained in touch for a little while afterwards; he even interviewed me for an evangelism class. He went off to do missionary work in Brazil, and was struck by the role that folklore creatures like shapeshifting spirits play in local lives. “They may not be real in the US,” he said, “but they’re real here.”

What really sticks in my mind about that conversation, though, was what came next. He thought that if the locals were to become Christian, they would need to stop making offerings to the spirits. After all, the Christian God admits no competition, no idolatry, no “other gods before me”. But, I asked my former student, would offerings to spirits necessarily be idolatry? What if the interactions weren’t worship, but transactional? In many cultures, one leaves offerings to spirit beings in the hope that they will provide some sort of good fortune in return. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with worship. If one pays a doctor or a mechanic, that’s not idolatry, it’s just fee for service. Why would it be any different to pay a faerie or a river spirit?

I was brought back to those conversations last year at the Psychedelic Science (MAPS) conference. In a room set up for strangers to have conversations with one another, I wound up talking to another young evangelical. Of course, psychedelic spaces make it natural to think about supernatural beings – on ayahuasca or psychoactive mushrooms, they may well appear before your eyes.

Despite his clear sympathy to psychedelics – being in a space devoted to them – this evangelical was deeply suspicious of any such beings. Not at all in the sense of thinking they don’t exist; quite the opposite. Rather, as I recall the conversation, he was concerned about these apparently real supernatural entities because he thought them satanic, evil. They weren’t of God, they weren’t the angels, so they must be devils, or tools of the devil. I said that they could be neutral, they didn’t have to be one or the other, and he replied “I disagree.” Unfortunately we didn’t have time to continue the conversation further.

But the conversation made me think further about the premises. I’m not a Christian, or even a believer in God as usually defined, so I don’t have much of a dog in the fight myself. But here as with my former student, I was trying to think from their own biblical premises, and it seemed to me that something had gone wrong with this young man’s reasoning even there.

Christianity has long and often tended toward a dualistic view, where the world is a battleground between good and evil. Such a dualistic view is often called Manichean: the Manicheans were a competitor to early Christianity whose whole cosmology was a struggle between light and darkness, and while the Christians and the Manicheans saw each other as foes, many over the years have observed a strong “Manichean” tendency in Christianity. It’s very visible in the meditation instructions of St. Teresa, who treats our minds as a battleground between God and “the devil”. It seems to me that this Christian Manicheanism shows up strongly in Christians’ attitude to supernatural beings like spirits and faeries: if they are not of God, they must be of the devil. But it doesn’t seem to me that that Manichean view is justified on Christians’ own premises.

To be sure, spirits and faeries receive no divine sanction from the Bible, since they are mentioned nowhere there. But you know what else isn’t in the Bible? Cats.

Anyone who’s interacted with cats knows that they are no angels; they act in ways that would be considered morally suspect in a human (considerably more so than dogs, which the Bible does mention). And cats (domestic ones, that is) are not mentioned once in the Bible. But the cultures who wrote the Bible – coming first as they did out of cat-worshipping Egypt, or so the story goes – clearly knew they existed. And more importantly, Christians throughout the centuries have kept cats as pets without thinking there is anything theologically suspect about them. Cats aren’t divine, but they aren’t satanic either; they just are, a neutral feature of the world God created.

And so it seems to me with the supernatural beings that one might encounter on psychedelics or among the peoples of Brazil. Perhaps those beings are more comparable to big cats – the leopards and jaguars and mountain lions that we would rightly keep at arm’s length, concerned that that they can be dangerous to us, not having gone through the domestication process. Christian or otherwise, once one grants that unfamiliar supernatural beings might exist, one has good reason to be cautious of them. (One does not want to end up the supernatural equivalent of the Grizzly Man!) But I see no reason for Christians to think them evil – any more than one thinks that with leopards or bears.