QUESTION:

Should Christians Use Tarot Cards?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

If you think this topic is off the wall, at least it’s not off the news.

Tarot for Christians is promoted by the May cover story in The Christian Century, a venerable independent magazine that helps define what’s trendy and acceptable for “Mainline” and liberal Protestant readers.

The article’s author is the monthly’s own Associate Editor Jessica Mesman, who also co-founded the Sick Pilgrim blog aimed at “people who questioned EVERYTHING.” Her self-described social circle consists of fellow “lapsed Catholics” along with “exvangelicals, and other ‘deconstructing’ Christians” who seek to fill the vacuum left by their prior religious “narrative threads.”

For the uninitiated: Tarot cards consist of a deck numbering 78, with 22 to symbolize “Major Arcana” or life events, and 56 “Minor Arcana” that cover everyday occurrences.

Some devotees may claim the practice is rooted in ancient Egyptian magic. But conventional history says Tarot originated as an entertaining card game in 15th century Italy that later merged into the occult movement’s quest for liberating answers through access to hidden wisdom. Tarot was newly popularized as a “New Age” spiritual practice in America’s 1960s counterculture and the “Neo-Pagan” movement.

A Tarot card reader, whether a paid professional or the individual, turns over Tarot cards and reflects by intuition on what the images say. Often this is divination or “fortune telling,” believed to provide information and guidance about the future. But as with Christian writers like Brittany Muller, Mesman’s own practice reflects on the cards’ images as “a tool for self-directed spiritual contemplation,” rather like Enneagrams or the Myers-Briggs self-assessment questionnaire.

“There doesn’t have to be any magic involved — not in the sense of manipulation of supernatural power,” she explains.