Anglicans find opportunities for outreach at the D&D table
When children 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); and youth, adults and clergy at parishes like St. Aidan’s.
For the sake of transparency, I should note as the author of this story that I myself have been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was about 15 years old (Minotaur Barbarian, if you must know). It started with me ribbing my high school friend Zenon Teodorczyk for playing such a nerdy game and very quickly became a lifelong hobby, complete with lifelong friendships. I’m still playing with several groups today despite some initial cautioning from my own mother who wasn’t sure at the time I should be “getting involved with all that.” She’s since grown less worried about there being any occult connotations, but I doubt she thinks it’s any less lame.
Working for the Journal, I found myself having a surprising number of conversations with Anglicans who played the game, too, both in my local parish and in national leadership. That got me wondering about a common theme. What value are these people of faith all finding in a game of fantasy?
The Anglicans I interviewed for this story described the game as a bonding exercise, a means of outreach and a way of encountering eternal truths in unfamiliar contexts.
Created by devout Jehovah’s Witness Gary Gygax and his design partner David Arneson in the 1970s, D&D is a narrative game in which a referee tells a story and other players make choices, playing the roles of characters within that story. Characters overcome obstacles in the story by rolling 20-sided dice with bonuses representing their skills and abilities. 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 emergence into public awareness 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. The Anglican Church of Canada’s former archivist, Laurel Parson, likewise confirmed to the Journal she could find no reference to concerns about the game in the General Synod Archives.
When Gagné played as a teenager himself, his own parents’ fears evaporated when they found D&D “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.
And though the answers to those questions may be familiar ones, encountering them in an unexpected context can have a profound effect, he says. He compares it to an experience he had watching the 2005 adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in the theatre. When Aslan gives himself up to be killed and rises again, Orear says, the moment had him weeping in his seat, even though as a priest, he’d studied the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection for much of his adult life.
“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.”
