Author and popular Mars Hill Church pastor Mark Driscoll has made his feelings on The Twilight Saga clear. He is warning Christians to not treat the hit series as harmless entertainment, and explains that it has actually inspired real-life demonic behavior.
In a blog entry titled “A Father’s Fright of Twilight,” Driscoll writes, “Twilight is for teenage girls what porn is to teenage boys: sick, twisted, evil, dangerous, deceptive, and popular.”
Millions of fans lined up to see the final installment, Breaking Dawn Part 2, which brought in $141.3 million dollars in its debut weekend, scoring the eighth biggest opening weekend of all time.
But these moviegoers did not just consist of teenage girls. As Driscoll said, “Tragically, many will be driven by their parents, including some cougar moms encouraging and joining their daughters’ obsession with handsome young males.”
Driscoll and his family will not be joining the fans of the vampire series.
“I have ranted on this garbage-tastic phenomenon before” he writes,” and find the whole genre profoundly troubling. The popularity of supernatural soap operas has inspired some real-life demonic trends. Overreaction? Tell that to the kids biting, cutting, drinking blood—sometimes while having sex—and sinking deeper into the occult.”
The pastor shared several news stories about young people acting out in vampire-like ways.
“Teenagers obsessed with theTwilight vampire saga, or those simply fascinated with fangs, reportedly have been biting each other—hard—and then licking or sucking the blood,” he quoted NBC News. “‘These are kids who think they are real vampires,’ said Dr. Orly Avitzur. […] ‘Having that thick, warm copper-tasting blood in my mouth is the best thing I can think of!’ wrote a teenager identified as ‘GothicGirl10’ this year. ‘Sometimes my boyfriend lets me feed off him. I let him feed off me as well.’”
Driscoll also quoted part of an ABC News story, in which a 15-year-old girl “said a boyfriend tried to pressure her to allow herself to be bitten. ‘He said, “I love you and that’s the way I want to show you,”’ she said. ‘I didn’t give in because it was kind of idiotic.’ She said some of her classmates, mimicking on-screen vampires, even cut their skin so they can taste one another’s blood. ‘That means you’re stuck with them, they have your blood inside of them and you have their blood and so you’re closer to each other,’ she said.”
In another story, Driscoll discusses a documentary the UK’s Channel 4 produced about the growing vampire subculture, which features a group of teens in Texas who consider themselves to be real vampires (and werewolves). “When I drink someone’s blood, I feel like I own them in a sense. Like they’re mine,” one explained.
“Please pray for these kids. If you know them, speak with them lovingly, honestly, biblically, and quickly. Satan is real, clever, and a deceiver who ‘disguises himself as an angel of light’ (2 Cor. 11:14),” Driscoll says. “He’s not going to come at us with a pitchfork and horns. More likely, he’ll attempt to lure people towards darkness with methods like ‘harmless’ entertainment, possibly in the form of bad acting and melodrama.”
Driscoll, who has a teenage daughter, explains his devastation at reading the most popular pages that come up in a search for “teen vampire.”
“There, girls the same age of my 15-year-old daughter are talking about ‘awakening,’ which is their word for converting to paganism (like the Christian word ‘born again’). In a perverted twist on Communion, their sacraments include the giving of your own blood by becoming a ‘donor.’ This is entirely pagan. These storylines offer eternality without God and salvation; in the place of Jesus’ shed blood, girls and boys shed their own blood to be awakened to their own salvation of a new spiritual way of life filled with sex and occult behavior.”
Although Driscoll said he and his wife do not shelter their daughter from these sorts of things, they “do not treat things like movies, books, and TV shows as harmless entertainment, but rather a potential threat to her well-being to be aware of so she can walk in wisdom by God’s grace.”
He explained that he is particularly concerned for Christian parents “who are naively allowing this filth into their children’s lives, buying these books and driving kids to see these movies.”
He ended the article stating, “To such parents, ‘It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God’ (Phil. 1:9–11).”
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