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?