The following is an excerpt from the book Spirit of the Rainforest by Mark Andrew Ritchie.

As a missionary working with the Yanomamö, I am constantly reminded that when it comes to spiritual matters, I am not the expert.

Bautista was an ex-witchdoctor. He accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ many years ago when my parents first started working with his tribe back in the early 1950s. Although still a young man when they arrived to his village, he was a witchdoctor of considerable fame.

He had already attained to the highest level known as “ijiluwalewä, or “child-eater,”because he could attack other villages in the spirit world stealing the souls of a child there, causing the child to die. These souls were given to the many cannibal spirits who were his accomplices in this “murder.” The soul would then be eaten by these demon cannibal spirits. Although having attained the highest he could go, by his own admission, he was being overwhelmed by the bondage he was under even before he heard about the saving power of the gospel, so once he clearly understood that Christ was the only way to be freed from this bondage, he accepted Christ’s claim on his life and his life has never been the same.

One of the times I was reminded of his expertise in spiritual matters was a couple of years ago. We had been in the jungle many long weeks with no mail from home when the plane landed bringing us a package. I was excited as I took it home. “Look Hon, a package from the one of our churches!”

I gave her the package and she opened it up; she, as excited as I was. Enclosed was a book.

Now that in itself was a big enough disappointment because I wanted some “real mail” but when I saw the cover, I was even more disappointed, it was a book on the pokeman cartoon characters. I am old school on cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and their friends) and really don’t get into any of the new ones, especially ones that look as ugly as these did. Then we noticed there was also a letter enclosed with the book and we read it together.

“Dear Mike,” it said, and went on to tell how the church was having a discussion about pokemon, with the church divided about this “toy.” So they were sending this book of all the pokeman characters to me asking me to have Bautista look at it and see what he thought about the characters.

Well, that was more interesting than just having a book of ugly cartoons for the boys, but to be honest, this was pretty low priority for me. We are extremely busy in the jungle and I did not see any sense in this book. But one day while I was talking with Bautista, Keila remembered the book and ran upstairs to get it. She handed the book to me.

Opening the book at random, showing him a picture I asked. “What do you think of this?” He looked at it, and said, “Oh, I know this one.” He suddenly had my attention!

He went on, “Oh, this is a nasty little demon. It is always underfoot, bites, scratches, screeches and what not.” I looked at the page, and on the list of attributes, the book said, “bites, scratches, screeches, claws…” and I forget what else, but it was as if Bautista was reading the page, and he does not read or speak one word of English. He made a believer out of me.

I figured that the first one could have been just a lucky guess, so I flipped the page to another picture and asked him about that one. Again, he told me exactly what it’s attributes were. He did that over and over.

There were some he did not recognize, and he said. “There are so many demons, it is impossible for any one person to know them all.”

This was huge! I ran upstairs and got our youngest son, who did happen to like the pokeman cartoons (his aunt sent him VHS tapes of them). When he got downstairs, I had Bautista flip through the book again, explaining to my son what he knew about these ugly little pictures.

Well, he made a believer out of Stephen! He went back upstairs and came back down with his prized tape and while we watched, destroyed it. Bautista looked on with curiosity, not really understanding what Stephen had just done. I quickly brought him up to speed and thanked him for helping to open our eyes.

Bautista added, “Tell the people from your churches, that if there are things that make them feel uncomfortable, it is probably not good. God’s Spirit will speak to them about what is right and wrong.”

6557416
My parents did have a pretty stern "no Pokémon rule", but it had nothing to do with evolution and demons, and everything to do with the fact that the show had forced unfunny comedy (or at least, the 4kids dub did) and the show made the fights between the monsters very reminiscent to Japanese cockfighting, which they believed was cruel to animals, both of which were problems that Pokémon Go has fixed (if there are no dumb characters, there will be no dumb humor or dumb reasons for fighting).

It is such a shame that so many believers are resulting to witch-doctors, conspiracy theories, demonology, and "prayer magic" or whatever it is that the Foursquare churchs practice to solve problems that could easily be solved by studying the subjects, analysis of the facts, logical reasoning, knowing what the Bible actually says, prayer, and faith. What this family did is sorta-kinda-maybe innocent enough, but the fact they took this with no irony and treated his opinion as expertise reflects a far greater problem within modern American Christianity. We have strayed dangerously far from the pure and ethics-based teaching of Jesus as people treat babbling in "prayer speech" as a primary goal of Christianity. In their war against the semi-imaginary enemy of the occult, Christians are resorting to methods that could ironically very well bring demonic influence into their faith.

All of this being said, this is a fascinating anthropological tidbit, and it opens up a bit of insight into the fasincationg traditions of the indigenous people of South America.

6557417
... you did see the part where it was stated this was a former witch doctor who had denounced witchcraft entirely in favor of Christianity, right?

6557422
I did, and I partly edited my comment to reflect this.

But they literally believed that Pokemon are demons and got their son to destroy a tape because they literally believed them to be demons, from the opinion of a man who came from a culture rife with superstitions.

Don't get me wrong, there are some Pokemon mediums that are either flat-out stupid or are just not suitable for the overly young audiences who get them, and thus maybe it was still good for that little boy, especially because he chose to destroy the tape himself, but he shouldn't have done that because of a "demon hunt'.

I have seen too many Protestant churches fall into this trap, focusing more on hunting demons and conspiracy theories, forgetting the more important factors of making ourselves better people. People who fall into this trap often still give into sexual immorality, or try to syncretize Christianity with other beliefs (just not the occult), or mistreat people, or just never talk about the ideas that the Bible addresses. They allow fear of demons as a distraction from embettering themselves as people.

They are conflating the demons in the Bible with the 'demons' his culture taught. I know much about the Yanomamö, and if I recall correctly, I even wrote a paper on them. They were, and in some cases still are, one of the most primitive and disease-ridden cultures of all. Such conditions frequently lead to infant mortality and child mortality, and unable to explain what happens, they assume it's the spirits. There are few words in the English language for what they are, so Anthropologists just call them "demons". These self-styled Protestant demon-hunters assumed that his spirits were real and the same as the fallen Angels of the Bible, without realizing that although this witch-doctor is a Christian, he is still superstitious and has a lot to learn about the world around him.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to completely purge his sense of magic from his world, but I would take what he says with a grain of salt. A very large one.

6557426
Don't you think it's a rather convenient coincidence that he was able to identify a tonne of pokemon precisely by behavior, attitude and purpose without being able to read/speak English and without previous exposure to the franchise by only looking at the images? I take a lot of stuff with a grain of salt, but that seems far too precise to brush off as "superstition".

As far as your assertion of Christians falling into "the trap", I don't entirely disagree. Except that you seem to think that we should ignore this sort of thing entirely. In any competition, it's strategically advantageous to know how the enemy works and how to work around them. And I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "semi-imaginary" in regards to the "enemy of the occult", given how the Bible repeatedly shows that Demons do have power to manipulate the physical world.

6557461

And I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "semi-imaginary" in regards to the "enemy of the occult"

I think because some Christians tend to believe that occultic groups are more widespread and a bigger threat than they really are. In reality, they are not nearly as widespread and we tend to give them too much credit. There are other religions/spiritual movements that are much bigger threats, like radical Islam. That's a much more real threat.

6557465
Ah, in that case I agree entirely. But I think almost all threats of such nature should be treated with near equal dedication.

6557461
He was able to identify the demons they remind him of in his culture because they looked like them by coincidence, because the Pokemon are modeled after very broad groups of animals rather than specific species. There are rodents and snakes in the Amazon basin as well as Japan, so of course there were going to be some coincidental similiarities. He actually didn't identify the names and powers of the Pokemon, as far as I know, and I wouldn't be the least surprised if he got them wrong. The father was clearly so biased against the Pokemon and found them overwhelming and irritating, which I don't blame him for, but it means he didn't understand what was up. He assumed that the shaman wasn't just confusing them for creatures in his mythology, because he was already biased against them.

At any rate, I seriously doubt the fallen legions of Satan are usually going to take such absolutely familiar forms. The cherubim in the Bible was described under impossible terms, and the demons possessed bodies.

As 6557465 said, many Protestants are giving the occult too much credit. They are not nearly intimidated enough by the syncretism between Evangelical Christianity and Islam, but it's happening right now. And don't get me started on Islam-induced violence! And then there's how watered-down and secularized Christianity has become, even, including, and sometimes especially the ones who are obsessed with defeating the occult. Many of these seem keen on sexual promiscuity and venomously harming other people. I think that focusing too much on what defines the enemy and not enough on what defines ourselves stunts the spiritual growth of so many.