Fear, Superstition, and the Saint Who Played Video Games

We are a video game family. All four of us. My daughter has dressed as Zelda for Halloween two years running and could tell you more about the lore of Hyrule than most adults could tell you about their favorite novel. My son games. My wife games. I game. It is one of the things we do together, and it is a legitimate source of joy and imagination in our household.

Over the years we have encountered other Christian families who find this troubling. Some reject video games entirely as a waste of time - a useless hobby with no redeeming value. Others are more specific. We've met families who object to a game like Zelda because its mythology includes goddesses. The concern isn't that the gameplay is violent or that the story is poorly written. The concern is that a child interacting with fictional goddesses is doing something spiritually dangerous.

I want to take that concern seriously for a moment, because I think it reveals something important about how certain corners of American Christianity relate to culture. And I think the Catholic tradition has the resources to respond - not with dismissal, but with genuine discernment.

The Content and the Thing Itself

If the objection to a game like Zelda is truly about content - the presence of mythological figures - then consistency would require us to reject most of Western civilization. Homer's Odyssey is saturated with Greek gods. Virgil's Aeneid is a poem about a man guided by divine fate and harassed by Juno. Dante places pagan figures throughout the Divine Comedy. Renaissance churches are decorated with images drawn from classical mythology. The Western intellectual tradition, including the Catholic intellectual tradition, has never treated the mere depiction of non-Christian religious ideas as inherently contaminating.

So what is actually going on when a family shields their child from a game with goddesses in it?

I think the real objection is not about content at all. It is a superstition - a belief that interacting with the material supernaturally affects the person in some way, that playing a game with mythological elements opens a spiritual door. This is not a claim grounded in Catholic theology. The Catechism defines superstition as a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices it imposes, warning that it can affect the worship we offer the true God when we attribute an almost magical importance to certain practices apart from their proper spiritual disposition (CCC 2111).

While it may feel like prudence or discernment, to treat a video game as a potential vector for spiritual harm is superstition.

None of this means that all cultural content is neutral. It isn't. Games that venerate gratuitous violence, sexual exploitation, or predatory addictive design deserve genuine moral scrutiny - still not because they open spiritual doors, but because they can form habits and dispositions that work against virtue. Parents have a real duty to evaluate what their children engage with. And even then it's from a duty to protect the formation of a young conscience, not necessarily because the content is inherently evil. Schindler's List is a violent movie with truly disturbing images, but that does not mean it does not have something valuable to offer to a well formed conscience. Video games are simply another medium that can offer similarly uncomfortable but valuable stories.

The Second Vatican Council acknowledged that it is sometimes difficult to harmonize culture with Christian teaching, and that these difficulties demand thoughtful engagement rather than either blanket acceptance or blanket rejection (Gaudium et Spes 62). The point is not that discernment is unnecessary. The point is that what often passes for discernment in these circles is not discernment at all. It is fear masquerading as wisdom. Real discernment evaluates the actual moral content of a thing - whether it cultivates virtue or vice, whether it respects human dignity, whether it draws the heart toward or away from the good. Superstition skips all of that and reacts to surface imagery.

The Satanic Panic and Its Legacy¹

This instinct has a history, and it did real damage.

In the 1980s and 1990s a moral panic swept through American Christianity. Dungeons & Dragons and Doom were accused of promoting devil worship. Heavy metal albums were played backward in search of hidden satanic messages. Halloween became a spiritual battleground. Claims of ritual abuse circulated widely, many of them later shown to be entirely unsubstantiated. The West Memphis Three were wrongly convicted of murder in a case fueled by satanic panic hysteria largely because the accused were teenagers who listened to heavy metal and wore black.

Fear was understandable in a culture that felt like it was changing rapidly. But the panic did not stay contained within secular institutions. Religious leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, lent their authority to unsubstantiated claims. Some Catholic dioceses reportedly formed taskforces to investigate satanism. The book widely credited with launching the ritual abuse panic - Michelle Remembers - was written by a Catholic psychiatrist and reportedly promoted by some Catholic figures, including a bishop.

The result was a form of what the Church calls scandal. Not scandal in the colloquial sense of something shocking, but scandal in the theological sense: an attitude or behavior that leads another to do evil, or in this case, that leads another away from the faith entirely (CCC 2284). When young people watched the adults around them panic over board games and fantasy novels - when they could see with their own eyes and discern with common logic that the danger was imaginary - the credibility of those adults collapsed. And for many, the credibility of the faith those adults represented collapsed with it.

An entire generation of young people did not leave the Church because they encountered the occult through Dungeons & Dragons. Many of them left because the Church's response to Dungeons & Dragons made the Church look foolish. Augustine warned about exactly this in The Literal Meaning of Genesis - that nothing is more embarrassing and dangerous than a Christian talking nonsense about things the world can plainly see are not true. The Satanic Panic was Augustine's nightmare made real.

How many kids who got into D&D because they loved Tolkien, how many readers of fantasy series or fans of Metallica left or never approached the Church because of the Satanic Panic? Souls that not only need Jesus but could edify the Church with their talents and creativity.

The Pattern That Persists

The formal Satanic Panic ended, but the mentality did not. It migrated into new forms that are still shaping how Catholic families relate to culture.

In certain Catholic circles today, claims circulate that tattoos can invite demonic attachment, that yoga opens spiritual doors, that certain children's games carry occult influence. These claims are sometimes promoted in popular Catholic media by exorcist figures, diverging from the sober discernment and episcopal oversight the Church requires. The Church absolutely affirms the reality of demonic influence and the ministry of exorcism, but the official norms emphasize caution and discernment rather than attributing spiritual danger to ordinary cultural activities. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 1985 norms on exorcism emphasize episcopal oversight, caution, and the priority of sacraments and prayer over dramatic spiritual warfare narratives. The gap between those norms and what passes for spiritual warfare teaching in some popular Catholic media is significant.

The pattern is consistent: ordinary activities are treated as spiritually dangerous not on the basis of their actual moral content, but on the basis of a vague anxiety about invisible contamination. A parent who cannot distinguish between a fictional depiction of magic and an actual occult practice has not exercised discernment. They have abandoned it in favor of fear.

Examination of conscience booklets in some circles have listed activities like playing Dungeons & Dragons among the sins to confess. This is what happens when superstition is allowed to operate unchecked within institutional spaces.

This affects real families. It shapes curriculum choices, friendship boundaries, and the atmosphere of Catholic homeschool communities. Children raised in this environment learn something specific about the faith: that the world is a minefield and the Christian posture toward culture is suspicion. This is not what the Catholic tradition teaches. It is closer to the presuppositional anxiety of the worldview framework I've written about elsewhere - the assumption that everything outside a narrow set of approved materials is enemy territory.

So again, how many fans of Harry Potter, how many fans of Zelda or Hades (another game my daughter loves that involves Greek mythology) look at the Church with suspicion because they can see through the superstition?

The Saint Who Played Video Games

The Church offers us a better path.

In September 2025, Pope Leo XIV canonized Carlo Acutis - a teenager from Milan who died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of fifteen. Carlo is the first millennial saint. He loved video games. He loved coding. He loved computers and animals and the ordinary things that ordinary teenagers love.

His parents did not treat these interests as threats to his spiritual life. They did not confiscate his games or restrict his access to technology out of fear that it would lead him away from God. They nurtured him in the faith - Mass, the sacraments, prayer - and let his natural interests develop alongside that formation.

What happened was powerful but, in an incarnational framework, not surprising. Carlo used his coding skills to build a website documenting Eucharistic miracles. That project has now been displayed at thousands of parishes across five continents. His love for technology became the vehicle for his apostolate. His interests were not obstacles to holiness. They were instruments of it.

The Satanic Panic mentality looks at a teenager absorbed in video games and sees a spiritual risk. The Church looked at Carlo Acutis and saw a saint.

Grace did not replace Carlo's natural interests with holy ones. It transfigured the interests he already had. This is the incarnational logic that runs through the entire tradition: the Gospel does not make all new things. It makes all things new.

The Field Hospital

Pope Francis often described the Church as a field hospital after battle. The image is useful here because it clarifies what the Church's posture toward wounded and wandering young people should actually look like.

The Satanic Panic wounded people. Some who got caught up in it may have already been wounded. John Romero, co-creator of Doom, grew up in an abusive household. The guy who made the very game the Church demonized was himself a kid who needed a field hospital, not condemnation. The ongoing culture of spiritual anxiety in some Catholic circles continues to wound people. Young adults who were told that their hobbies were demonic, that their curiosity was dangerous, that the world outside a narrow set of approved activities was spiritually contaminated - many of them are still carrying that. Some left the faith entirely. Others stayed but carry a deep distrust of religious authority.

A field hospital does not heal patients by interrogating their hobbies. It heals them by offering what actually heals: the sacraments, genuine encounter with Christ, prayer, community, the slow and patient work of grace building on nature. The Church's real spiritual resources - the Eucharist, confession, the liturgical life, the communion of saints - are so much more powerful than fear-based gatekeeping. They do not require us to be afraid of the world in order to be faithful within it.

The Catholic tradition has never taught that holiness requires cultural isolation. The Church Fathers read pagan philosophy and found truth in it. The Jesuits entered foreign cultures and discovered the seeds of the Word already present. Vatican II affirmed in Nostra Aetate that the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other traditions. The instinct to wall ourselves off from anything unfamiliar is not the Catholic instinct. This instinct resembles the fortress mentality that emerged in some Protestant fundamentalist circles in the twentieth century.

Formation, Not Fear

The question for Catholic parents is not whether a hobby looks spiritually safe on the surface. It is whether we are forming our children with the confidence that grace builds on nature, or whether we are forming them with the anxiety that the world is a minefield.

The tradition gives us the resources for the former. We have the sacraments. We have the liturgy. We have natural law and the conviction that reason can discover truth wherever it appears. We have a long history of engaging culture with confidence rather than retreating from it in fear. And we have the tools for genuine discernment - a well-formed conscience, the guidance of the Church's moral teaching, and the patience to evaluate things on their actual merits rather than on the basis of surface-level anxiety.

Formation includes teaching our children to think carefully about what they consume - not from a posture of fear, but from the settled confidence of people who know what is true and can recognize what is good. That is a very different thing from handing them a list of approved activities and teaching them to be afraid of everything else.

And we have the saints. Including one who played video games, built websites, attended daily Mass, and loved the Eucharist with an intensity that put most adults to shame. Carlo Acutis did not become holy in spite of his interests. He became holy through a life of grace that included them.

Our children do not need to be shielded from the world. They need to be formed in the faith deeply enough that they can engage the world with the confidence and joy of people who know that all of creation belongs to God - and that He is making all things new.

1. While specific historical details vary, the pattern of fear over substance led to scandal, as defined by the Church.