I’d like to clarify something right off the bat: I have no interest in guarding dungeons. I have no desire to hang around a rocky tomb filled with foul-smelling troglodytes and enough deadly traps (in this line of work referred to as “workplace hazards”) to make an OSHA agent shudder from miles away. Standing in a bone-littered murder palace with my 1d4 dagger and -1 leather armor while waiting for a crack team of three to six felony home invaders to storm in and take my life (and then whatever else I happen to have on my person) does not rank high on my to-do list.

Nor do I have any interest in defending actual dragons, because serving as a bodyguard for a monster prone to chowing down on bodies is a good way to wind up as a humanoid snack (or, at best, a victim of collateral damage from the fight with previously mentioned felony home invaders; boss battles are much less thrilling when the boss is actually your boss).

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to spend the rest of this article describing what D&D is, and what it definitely isn’t.

First of all, D&D is old. Gamers have been sitting around tables rolling dice and arguing over whose turn it is to bring chips (hint: it’s never the dungeon master’s turn) since 1974. That’s not as old as mythic storytelling or organized religion, but it’s long enough ago that the flagship product of TSR (and, later, one of the flagship products of Wizards of the Coast) has experienced a sizable history of controversy—much of which dates back to the beginning of the game.

The largest and most notorious controversy to plague D&D is sometimes referred to as the “Satanic Panic” by the game's fans, and the elements of this controversy that continue to persist in certain parts of the country form my primary motivation for writing this article.

I suppose the Satanic Panic got its start when a troubled kid who played D&D (but had much more serious issues) ran away from home. When a private investigator went to his house, checked his room for clues, and found drawings of monsters and demons and stuff, he came to the conclusion that the K-12 student was involved in witchcraft, and thus the association between occult practices and a game that mostly amounts to some guys sitting around a table and arguing about the market value of a Bigfoot pelt was born.

In my experience, the maximum extent to which most D&D players exhibit signs of superstition involves yelling at another player for borrowing their twenty-sided die and then “wasting” one of its 20s, as if perfect rolls are a limited resource that can only be renewed by getting crappy rolls. However, as a conservative (mostly) Christian (always) who loves games and studies stories as a trade, I have some pretty serious objections to the treatment that D&D has received, and in some cases continues to receive, at the hands of the evangelical community.

Let’s get something straight: D&D is a game about telling fantasy stories collaboratively. Oftentimes these stories do involve demons, devils, and—yes—even gods. But it’s important to remember that the act of telling stories in which these certainly non-Christian figures serve as major (or, perhaps more often, minor) players is not an unchristian act. JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, two utterly brilliant men and storytellers who happened to be devout Christians, also told stories with such characters.

But when we read (SPOILERS) Tolkien’s tale of the Balrog dragging Gandalf down into the deep earth, or the infernal machinations of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters’s eponymous character, we aren’t cheering for the demon or devil in either case. We know they’re the bad guys, and we’re rooting against them. Tolkien and Lewis told fantasy stories, but they used the stories, characters, and worlds under their control to make important statements about mankind, history, and—yes—even Christianity.

D&D is just a vehicle for telling stories in a genre that, when first revitalized or reimagined by these two remarkable men in the earlier half of the twentieth century, was a very spiritually-minded art form. Even the gods of D&D, which do exist in many of the game’s published worlds, tend to put a heavy emphasis on the “small ‘g.’” Generally more reminiscent of Ancient Greek or Norse deities than the all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God of Judeo-Christianity, these figures can be petty, evil, or subject to the forces of change, death, and even replacement.

I don’t see the fact that there’s a character in my current story who worships a deity other than my God as a threat to my faith, because there’s simply no grounds for comparison in power, majesty, or historicity. It’s just an aspect of mythic storytelling: fictional characters, just like real people, must find something in the world to worship. The worlds of D&D just aren’t worlds in which Christ came to die for the fate of mankind.

If we look at Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, even that devout Catholic wove a realm filled with immortal and powerful souls, one of which (Eru Ilúvatar, if you want me to be nerdy about this) was indeed responsible for the genesis of the world. This did not reduce Tolkien’s faith, nor did it supplant it. If anything, Tolkien’s faith had an influence on his creation of Middle Earth.

In many ways, the tales of Tolkien’s fantasy universe are not dissimilar to the stories in the Bible. Both feature flawed heroes, strange monsters, clashing armies, dangerous migrations, and powerful acts of the supernatural variety: just like the very best Dungeons & Dragons campaigns.

To Tolkien, however, it was not the fantastic story that was real, but the real story that was fantastic. The Bible was his truth; not the tales that he himself told.

Don't get me wrong: we should not concern ourselves too much with drawing parallels between religion and fantasy in the mind of this great man. Sometimes, stories are merely stories, told for the joy of creation (or Creation) itself.

That’s what D&D is to me: a story shared with others not through a typewriter and a printing press, but though words spoken aloud, and—sometimes—dice rolled against the hard wood of a well-worn table.

But for what I hope to be the final nail in the coffin of the Satanic Panic, we need look no further than the creators of Dungeons & Dragons themselves: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. These two men weren’t occultists: they were history nerds who loved reenacting the world’s great battles on the tops of tables, and had a respect for the moralizing tales of Tolkien, Lewis, and Arthurian legend.

They were also conservative Christians.

Granted, Gygax might have gone a little off the beaten path when the Jehovah’s Witnesses kicked him out and he retired to his mansion to get hooked on crack cocaine, but that’s just how some people react to unwarranted rejection by their religious body.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if that happened to a gamer you know?