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Evangelicalism's emergence as a cultural force has, to an unprecedented degree, placed the concept of the battle between good and evil on the public agenda. Once concerns with evil entered the public imagination, evangelicals could no longer control how people chose to respond to the evil that many agreed existed. It was not only the responses that could not be controlled, however.

While evangelicals have long recognized the potential for evangelism in film, filmmakers have similarly seen the entertainment possibilities in the stories ofevangelicalism's dark side. Thus, while evangelicals and other conservative Christians may feel that stories and images of supernatural battles between good and evil in some sense belong to them, they cannot control how these stories will be used, and reconfigured, once they enter the realm of the media and particularly the entertainment media.

Stories of the end times may have been popularized recently with the rise of evangelicalism, but the ideas go back to the roots of Christianity. While conservative religion has employed the narratives of the end times in the context of updated images and story lines, the images most often used in popular cultural representations of the end times—notably, those of demons, hell, and the afterlife—date to medieval depictions such as that of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562).

At that point in history, religious scholars were devoted to explanations of the supernatural realm that they believed was very much a reality. As scientific knowledge increased in the age of the Enlightenment, however, cosmological definitions fell out of favor in both formal theology and in religious artwork. The fictional depictions of demons and hell found in popular culture therefore visually refer to the point in history when the "truth" of supernatural beings was very much a part of Christian orthodoxy.

Yet as Max Weber argued, with modernity the world became "disenchanted": people no longer viewed the world as a place where spirits and forces freely roamed. The unexplained mysteries that were once ascribed to the supernatural realm had increasingly come to be the subjects of scientific debunking. Supernatural wonders were transformed into vehicles of amusement, repackaged as entertainment for the skeptical yet curious urban public of the nineteenth century.

Some instances of the contemporary borrowing and reconfiguring of religious elements in popular culture are more obvious than others. One recent example of this appears in a popular computer game, Diablo II. When this game first hit the stores in July 2000, it sold 184,000 copies in a single day and sold more than a million by the end of its first month. On the Web page devoted to this game, the following origin myth is offered:

Since the beginning of time, the forces of Order and Chaos have been engaged in an eternal struggle to decide the fate of all creation. That struggle has now come to the Mortal Realm … and neither Man, Demon, nor Angel will be left unscathed.

In Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, you will return to follow the path of Baal, the last of the Prime Evils, into the Barbarian Highlands of the North. Traveling with hordes of demonic minions, Baal intends to corrupt the powerful Worldstone, which protects the whole of the mortal plane from the forces of Hell. You will face a new series of quests and challenges to prevent the vile minions of the underworld from destroying the world of sanctuary.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47