Is It a Sin to… Play D&D?

“Is It a Sin to…?” is a new, ongoing series where we dig into questions about sin and nerd culture and try to land on the best conclusion we can.

If you grew up in church, there’s a decent chance someone warned you about Dungeons & Dragons at some point. Maybe a youth pastor, maybe a worried aunt. It’s one of those questions that keeps resurfacing decades later, and honestly, there’s no tidy answer waiting for you. It really comes down to which Christian tradition you’re part of, and how you personally think about fiction, magic, and imagination. Let’s walk through where this whole debate came from and how it plays out today.

Where the Panic Started

This all traces back to the early 1980s, a period people now call the Satanic Panic. Part of what kicked it off was the disappearance of a Michigan State student named James Dallas Egbert III in 1979, which got wrongly tied to a game of D&D played in the campus steam tunnels. Add in a made for TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and a book called The Devil’s Web by a woman named Patricia Pulling, and suddenly the game had a reputation as a gateway to witchcraft, the occult, even suicide. Pulling had lost her son and blamed the game for it, and she went on to found an advocacy group against it. But when researchers and law enforcement actually looked into these claims, they didn’t hold up. Studies from that era, including some done through the CDC, found no real link between playing D&D and violence or suicide risk.

Still, the association stuck around in a lot of conservative Christian circles, and every so often it resurfaces, even though most of the original panic has faded from mainstream culture.

Why Some Christians Are Still Wary

The concerns people raise today usually fall into a few buckets. The most common one is about the magic itself. Some Christians look at passages like Deuteronomy 18, which warn against witchcraft and divination, and figure that spirit extends to games where you’re pretending to cast spells, even if it’s all make believe. Others point to specific content from early editions of the game, like rulebooks that leaned pretty hard into demons and dark imagery, and feel like that crosses a line from telling a good versus evil story into glamorizing evil itself.

There’s also a subtler worry about roleplaying in general. If you’re really immersing yourself in a character, especially one who’s a sorcerer or worships some fictional dark god, does that open a door you’d rather keep closed? And then there’s the more everyday concern that isn’t really about D&D specifically: any hobby, whether it’s this or video games or fantasy football, can eat up time you’d rather be spending on your faith, your family, or your responsibilities if you’re not careful about balance.

The Case for “It’s Just a Game”

On the other side, plenty of Christians, including a lot of pastors, don’t see anything sinful here at all. Their thinking usually starts with a pretty simple distinction: pretending to cast a spell in a story is not the same thing as actually practicing witchcraft. The biblical warnings are about real divination and sorcery, not about imaginative storytelling. And if you buy that argument for D&D, it’s worth noticing it’s the same argument a lot of Christians already make peace with when it comes to The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, or even Harry Potter.

They’ll also point out that the Bible itself is full of vivid, symbolic, even fantastical storytelling, from Jesus’s parables to the wild imagery in Revelation. From this angle, imagination isn’t something to fear, it’s part of how we’re wired, and a game is just a tool. What you do with it is what matters. A D&D campaign can be about greed and darkness, sure, but it can just as easily be about courage, sacrifice, and loyalty, depending on what story the group at the table actually wants to tell. People also bring up the real upsides: it builds problem solving skills, it gets you practicing empathy by playing someone very different from yourself, and it tends to build genuine friendships around a shared story. Some churches have leaned into this completely and run D&D nights as an actual outreach program.

So What Do the Denominations Actually Say?

There’s no single Christian verdict here. Some evangelical and fundamentalist voices, especially the ones shaped by that original 1980s scare, still tell people to steer clear, mostly because of the spellcasting and demonic content. The Catholic Church has never issued any formal condemnation of the game, and you’ll find priests and bishops on both sides of the issue, generally treating it as a personal judgment call rather than something settled by doctrine. A lot of mainline Protestant churches, and a growing number of evangelicals too, just treat it as neutral entertainment, and some use it intentionally as a way to connect with young people.

Where That Leaves You

At the end of the day, there’s no universal Christian answer to whether D&D is a sin. It really hinges on how you read certain Old Testament passages, how you feel about fiction and imagination more broadly, and honestly, what’s actually happening at your specific table. For a lot of Christians, it’s just harmless storytelling with friends. For others, either the content or the amount of time sunk into it raises real concerns worth taking seriously. If this is something you’re actually wrestling with, it’s probably worth a conversation with a pastor or mentor who knows you and your convictions, rather than trying to find one universal rule that settles it for everyone.

Even with all of that said, though, we can’t honestly say that playing D&D is sinful in and of itself. The game is a neutral tool, and its moral weight comes from how it’s played and what it’s used for, not from something inherent in dice, character sheets, or fantasy storytelling.

For more information about D&D, check out our entire Dungeons & Dragons Resource List. 

Got your own “Is It a Sin to…?” question about nerd culture? Send it to radiomatt@lovethynerd.com and it might be featured in a future installment of the series.