Yale Divinity School Initiates Students With Witchcraft

Yale’s Divinity School now apparently leads its new students in the public recitation of a spell. Perhaps equally as shocking: Yale still has a Divinity School.

A whistleblower who attended a three-day orientation preparing new students for their theological studies reported on the immense pressure to read aloud “line by line and one by one” from Adrienne Brown’s Radical Gratitude Spell. Adrienne has been described by her peers as “a mixed-race Black queer American writer, community organiser, facilitator, witch and – may I say – goddess.”

In a healthy world, she would better be described as an overweight activist and provocateur who wants to tear down the civilization that makes her existence possible. If you read her spell, which Yale apparently found to be worthy of using as a type of initiation ritual, you may notice that even the word “I” is lowercase. The entire thing, which reads like a woke self-help poem, is in lowercase. That’s apparently intentional as Adrienne explains:

“i like to self-determine what i capitalize? and lowercase letters are generally more aesthetically pleasing to me”.

Sure, it’s either that or she has trouble with grammar, so has elected to hide behind an alleged rebellion against heteronormative disciplines. Who in that world of deviance would call her out on it?

If you’ve embraced the nominalist lie that nothing is solid or definable or even good, but rather that everything is a mere social construct, then on what basis could one assert her to be in error? The ‘movement’ becomes a parody of itself in short order. Nobody can say that the emperor has no clothes, or that the word “I” should be capitalized and serious obesity is harmful to the health.

Going back to the spell, we can easily conclude that those who take the Faith seriously will quickly become ostracized or excluded from the “Divinity School”. After all, taking the Faith seriously means taking spiritual warfare seriously—recognizing not just God but also Satan—acknowledging that our souls are being contested for and that we are all engaged in one long spiritual battle. We have the freedom to reject God, which is what we do via sin or through the embrace of the occult.

Some people may not believe this to be true, but it is central to the Christian Faith, and thus ought to be an expected belief among students at a school of theology. One could easily assume that those students were more aware of the spiritual world than average, since they chose studies that are centered in the Transcendent, which is to say, not in the temporal world.

Those who would balk at the ludicrousness of taking the spell “too seriously” ought to consider that the school itself did not introduce the recitation as a joke. It wasn’t engaging in mockery. Instead, this was a serious act. Therefore, it’s not that they’re ignorant of the spiritual world, as the most ardent atheist might roll his eyes at such a public reading. It’s more accurate to say that the divinity school is on the wrong side.

This return to pagan religious practices, witchcraft, and occultism is woven deep within a contemporary political movement that claims itself to be Progressive and forward-focused. While this “woke” movement can often seem to reject everything that is from the past, that’s not quite true. They have a rejection of the things that make up Christendom—a rejection of Christ. They thus reject the foundational pillars that hold up our civilization, but it’s not the case that what they’re seeking is “advancement” exactly. They are more than willing to resurrect old heresies and dead superstitions. They claim to be exotic and progressive but herald the sterile and the extinct. The issue is that a person is always a religious creature; he has a soul. Attempts to abandon the Transcendent quickly become circular. Sure, they tell us that they reject “religion”, but they’d love to talk to you about a tarot reading or what the horoscopes of the day reveal.

Because the longing for God is deep within the human psyche, like a beacon to our Creator, those who reject the Faith fill that desire in other ways. Misguided spirituality and fervent embraces of movements that claim to offer elevation and sanctification are poisonous traps that we can judge by their fruits. Yale’s Divinity School may have rejected Christ some time ago, but it cannot and will not ignore the spiritual world. Neither should we.