Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Go and learn what this means: Lawful evil, chaotic good and B.A.D.D. theology

Go and learn what this means: Lawful evil, chaotic good and B.A.D.D. theology

Last updated on: April 8, 2014 at 7:12 pm by Fred Clark

Go and learn what this means: Lawful evil, chaotic good and B.A.D.D. theology 2014-04-08T19:12:03-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

At io9, Annalee Newitz has written a fun look back at “How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons“:

Thirty years ago, a war raged between the dorks who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the conservative parent groups who believed that gaming was debauched at best and Satanic at worst. Lives were ruined. People died. And now that war is over. I still can’t believe we won.

Newitz’s account details one tangential battle of the Satanic Panic that arose in the 1980s — a moral panic that resulted in students being expelled from schools, young people being bullied by their peers or institutionalized by their parents, and dozens of innocent people spending years in prison for crimes that never even occurred.

The astonishing thing, as Newitz says, is that today, a few decades later, “D&D-influenced stories” are a noncontroversial part of mainstream American pop culture. That’s not what anyone would have predicted back during the Reagan years, when Satanic baby-killer politics first arose, bringing with it a whole host of demonizing delusions — a diabolical conspiracy of black-robed ritual abusers, fears of backward-masking messages in rock music, the presumption of a suicide epidemic among RPG enthusiasts. If you remember the 1980s, it’s jarring to step back today and realize how much of that has simply faded away and lost its power. The same folks who were able to bully D&D to the sidelines in the 1980s found themselves steamrolled when they later tried the same tactics against Harry Potter and his fans.

Think of that moment when President George W. Bush joked with Ozzy Osbourne at the White House Correspondents Dinner. When Bush’s father was president, Ozzy was a favorite bogeyman of the moral panic — a stock character inserted into some of the most outrageous urban legends spread by the ascendent anti-Satanists of the righteous right. A few years later and Ozzy had become a beloved celebrity, embraced even by the conservative establishment as a quirky, harmless sit-com dad figure.

The politics of righteous opposition to Satanic baby-killers still dominates, but much of what initially fueled its fire now seems hopelessly weird and, as Newitz says, “shabby.” She links to this once-influential pamphlet from the notoriously dishonest anti-fun group B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons), noting how today it seems as dated as an artifact from the Salem witch trials.

James McGrath highlights a terrific comment to Newitz’s post, in which shadowling repurposes a classic joke from John Rogers: “It was never a fair fight between fundamentalist Christianity and D&D. One was a dangerous system full of dark mysticism and threats to warp a young mind beyond repair, and the other was a tabletop RPG.”

Back in the 1980s I was part of both of those worlds. I was a young fundamentalist Christian and a big fan of tabletop RPGs. The anti-Dungeons & Dragons hysteria meant that it was easier for us to play other games — like the cheaper imitation, “Tunnels & Trolls,” and then, later, Middle-Earth Role Playing. (That last one was set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, which made it easier to defend in our evangelical subculture because it was like having C.S. Lewis in our corner.)

The moral panic of the anti-D&D crusaders was sheer nonsense, but those fundie moral crusaders weren’t wrong to fear the threat that such games posed to their ideology. Fundamentalist ideology is a fragile thing, after all, so almost anything other than itself is correctly viewed as a subversive threat.

But while the anti-RPG forces were preoccupied with the supposed “Satanic” dark sorceries they claimed were involved in the game, they overlooked one way in which D&D actually was a subversive threat to the white evangelical ideology I was raised in.

That threat had nothing to do with monsters or magic. It had to do with “alignment” — the short-hand system for categorizing the moral outlook of the character you were playing.

Some of those “bothered” by D&D noticed this, worrying that the game allowed us to play evil characters, but they didn’t pay attention to the really interesting aspect of D&D’s alignment categories. Those categories didn’t just distinguish between Good Guys and Bad Guys, but also between what it called order and chaos. Thus every character wasn’t just good, evil or neutral, but also lawful, chaotic or neutral. If you’re unfamiliar with that scheme, this illustration using characters from Game of Thrones (sadly separated from the anonymous Internet genius who produced it*) gives an idea of the options suggested by its nine categories.

One can quibble with the terminology of D&D’s scheme, and with whether its simplicity — a useful feature for the mechanics of the game — is overly simplistic. But these categories can also be evocative and insightful when considered in contexts other than the game. Consider, for example, the cast of characters presented in the Woody Guthrie song “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Guthrie casts Floyd as a modern-day Robin Hood — a classic “chaotic good” hero challenging the lawful evil fountain-pen wielding bankers as he eludes the lawful neutral G-men sent by the neutral evil J. Edgar Hoover.

Think what that second dimension of D&D’s alignment meant for my friends and I, as kids who grew up steeped in the ideology of white evangelicalism and fundamentalist Christianity. That ideology made no distinction between “lawful” and “good.” It allowed for no such distinction: To be good meant to follow the rules; to follow the rules meant to be good.

But now we were confronted with a new possibility, a new vocabulary that allowed us to articulate something we had suspected was true all along. “Go and learn what this means: Lawful evil. Lawful neutral. Chaotic good.” To be good might mean something more than following the rules. To be good might mean something separate from following the rules. And it was possible to follow the rules without being good.

It says something about the sorry state of biblical understanding among biblical “inerrantists” that we were left to learn this from Gary Gygax rather than from Galatians, Isaiah, Amos or the Gospels. But once we learned it — once we came to see the possibility of it — then the whole ideology we’d been taught came into question.

The business of “alignment” was also useful for gauging gamers themselves. Assigning and choosing alignment for characters was part of the mechanics of the game. It belonged to our world, in other words — to the world of dice and pencils and graph paper and not to the world of the characters themselves. Gamers who didn’t make that distinction — who played their characters as though those characters themselves were aware of their alignments, their levels, armor class, etc. — tended to be less fun to play with. They tended either to be less imaginative or, even worse, to be the sort of player who was always trying to game the game — to manipulate the mechanics in a way that made the whole thing more about scoring points than about slaying dragons or solving quests.

Those point-scoring gamers of the game weren’t technically cheaters, but they could ruin the game just as surely as any cheater could. They knew the rules better than anyone at TSR. They studied those rules, seeking loopholes to be exploited for any advantage, twisting the game into some kind of lawyerly exercise. Playing with them meant sitting around discussing the rules — which is to say it meant not playing at all.

Remind you of anyone?

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

* Thank you EndOfTheWorld for allowing us to give credit where credit is due. The chart is by Christopher Bird, who’s done lots of these under the tag “D&D Explains Everything.” Brilliant.

Previous Post

April 8, 2014

From their place on high to the dirty ground

Next Post

April 9, 2014 Smart people saying smart things

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

According to Paul, what is the "root of all kinds of evil"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

The love of money Love of learning Fear of God Worry