Can Christians Use Tarot Cards for Spiritual Exercises?
Having established that it’s wrong for Christians to use tarot cards for fortune-telling, that still leaves the question of whether Christians can use the cards to complement their spiritual activities.
This question takes us back to Waite commissioning Smith to illustrate a tarot deck. Waite would have seen the tarot as a tool for exercises helping him connect with God: he was a practicing Roman Catholic who discouraged people from black magic. In his view, the cards were symbols of hidden spiritual truths that Christians could use. However, Waite was also involved in many secret societies, often combining Judeo-Christian imagery with pagan imagery and odd ideas. His ideas about the spiritual world were perhaps not as consistently Christian as he believed.
First, we must ask what the point of adding tarot cards to our spiritual exercises is. Christianity has a series of activities the Bible commands that help us spiritually grow (praying, reading Scripture, fasting, worship, fellowship with other believers, communion). Richard Foster explains in his classic work Celebration of Discipline that these activities are not regulations but healthy habits that increase God’s grace in our lives.
Admittedly, Foster does not cover every spiritual exercise Christians have used throughout history. However, exploring Christian history shows that the exercises that have survived (such as lectio divina, a Scripture meditation technique) are variations on the biblical spiritual disciplines.
So, the problem becomes that tarot cards do not fit within the classic Christian spiritual disciplines or the most useful variations on those disciplines. It does not add anything that older, more reputable spiritual exercises without the troublesome history can’t give us.
There is also a strong Christian tradition exploring the idea that general revelation means Christians can affirm what is true in other religions or beliefs. Augustine wrote in his Confessions that Christians are free to “plunder the Egyptians” for ideas that fit the gospel. Francis Schaeffer wrote various works about how if all truth is God’s truth, Christians can enjoy and learn from cultural items not made by Christians.
In his novel The Greater Trumps, C.S. Lewis’s friend Charles Williams uses fantasy to explore that idea. The story follows people having chaotic spiritual experiences when the original tarot card deck ends up in their neighborhood. The Christian characters, Sybil and Nancy, restore order by unlocking the spiritual forces that the cards symbolize. What has dubious spiritual credentials becomes a pathway to truth because all truth is God’s truth.
Williams’ example is fictional, but raises a good point we should consider: can Christians use tarot cards for benign purposes?
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