SEAN FRANKLING
Staff Writer
HEN CHILDREN’S and youth coordinator Elizabeth Achimah accepted an offer from a parishioner to run a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game at her parish, Toronto’s St. Aidan’s in the Beach, it turned out to be a draw for neighbourhood youth from outside the church. Several of the new kids’ parents expressed uncertainty when meeting Achimah for the first time—but not about their children playing D&D.
“Most of the parents were like, ‘We don’t really want anything to do with the church, but we’re thrilled that you’re doing a D&D group, so we’ll send our kids there,’” she says. Achimah assured them that the group was not for preaching or recruitment, she adds, just for fun.
One year later, some of the 10 players have—of their own accord—started to come to other social engagements at the parish, some even asking questions about faith.
To anyone familiar with the history of D&D’s place in culture, those parents’ attitude is a reversal from what would have been common 30 or 40 years ago, when some groups stoked a moral panic with claims that the game promoted the occult. Once decried as evil—or at least severely dorky—the world’s best-known role-playing game has seen a boom in the 2020s with a 33 per cent jump in sales in 2020 and sustained interest for years afterward.
It has not missed Christian communities, reaching Anglicans like former Council of General Synod (CoGS) member Kim Chadsey (first character: a Hill Dwarf Cleric); current CoGS member Noah Skinner (Elven Rogue); even the author of this column (Minotaur Barbarian); and youth, adults and clergy at parishes like St. Aidan’s. The Anglicans the Journal interviewed for this story described the game as a bonding exercise, a means of outreach and of encountering eternal truths in unfamiliar contexts.
D&D is a narrative game in which a referee tells a story and other players make choices and overcome obstacles in that story by rolling 20-sided dice with bonuses representing the skills of their chosen characters. Beat the challenge’s difficulty, you succeed; roll lower, you fail. Typical stories might see characters exploring dangerous locations (say, dungeons) and fighting dangerous monsters (dragons, even). It may be played once or for a continuous “campaign” over multiple sessions.
The game has not always been considered a wholesome activity, explains Alex Gagné, a museum assistant at the Canadian War Museum and author of a 2024 paper on D&D and moral panic in Canada. D&D’s arrival in culture coincided with the 1980s Satanic panic, based on since-debunked accounts of occult groups kidnapping and tormenting children. Proponents alleged devil worshippers were sneaking messages into popular culture.
The panic would target any new media, Gagné says, especially anything with a fantasy flavour. This created a buzz of controversy around D&D, though it contains little more of the occult than J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels and depicts supernatural evil as an enemy to defeat.
While the panic found a home among fundamentalist Christian groups in the U.S., Gagné says, he found no evidence of any Canadian church perpetuating the scare. When he played, his own parents’ fears evaporated when they found it “too boring to even watch,” he says with a laugh.
Achimah, meanwhile, describes the game at St. Aidan’s as a place where the young players have made friends, built confidence and leadership skills and practiced teamwork in a safe environment. One player, who described having trouble making friends before coming to the group, memorably saved her allies with an ability that blocked an enemy from harming the players, Achimah says.
“Everybody clapped for her and she felt so special,” she says. “It’s amazing that this game brings people together. Everyone is important at the table.” She credits D&D with helping build trust among the youth and between their families and the church.
Skinner, who started playing with his father as a teen, reports a similar effect.
“It builds this sense of trust and security with other people,” he says. “There’s some adventurous bonding value in that.” He says it also offers an opportunity to encounter ethical challenges and experiment with how the morals of his faith life apply to them.
The Rev. Aaron Orear of St. Alban the Martyr, in Glen Williams, Ont. says providing such opportunities is a critical role fantasy can play in anyone’s life. He runs a YouTube channel called The Dungeon Minister where he chronicles a game he runs for his sons, one of whom now also runs a game at his parish.
When Orear started the channel, he found some D&D fan viewers had painful associations with church, often grounded in hearing religious people call their hobby evil during the Satanic panic. The channel became an avenue to repair some of these relationships, he says.
“It can’t hurt their relationship with a life of faith to see a priest playing this game with his children,” Orear says. “I can maybe assure them whatever the panic was, [it] has long since died out.”
Orear believes fantasy like the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis offers its audiences a way to encounter familiar truths in unfamiliar settings. D&D also invites them to try on the mantles of characters who show bravery in confronting and overcoming evil, asking big questions about life and death, he says.
He tells a story of one player whose character laid down his life for his friends, facing a 30-foot snake alone so their characters could escape.
“It gives you these chances to [explore] heroism and nobility,” he says. “It’s [a need] deep-baked into humans because we are creatures of intelligence and imagination … We try things out in the realm of storytelling.”
D&D players have a lot of room to put their own personalities into the games they run. The story in Orear’s homemade campaign contains strong Christian themes, he says, though not all do. But playing games of fantasy always offers the chance to explore questions
beyond our material lives, he says.
“Fantasy can be a vehicle for communicating something true and real and eternal … because it gets in behind the shield,” he says. “It can get past your critical filter.”
