Can a Christian Read Tarot? An Honest Look at the Question the Church Has Avoided

This is the most uncomfortable question I am asked. I will not duck it. I will answer it the way my grandmother answered it whenever a Protestant pastor came to her door — which happened more than once in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1970s.

Her answer, I will paraphrase, was: “Padre, please come in. Have a glass of water. Let me show you what I do.”

Then she would lay down three cards, point at the King James Bible at her elbow, and read the past gate to him. She did this with more than one minister over the decades. None of them ever came back to ask her to stop.

This post is the careful version of that conversation. If you are a faithful Christian wrestling with whether this is allowed for you, please read all the way through before deciding.

The standard objection, stated honestly

The most common Christian objection to tarot is Deuteronomy 18:10–12:

“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.”

And Leviticus 19:31:

“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.”

I take these passages seriously. They are scripture. The people who quote them to me are not wrong to read them carefully.

What I want to say next, I want to say carefully too.

What scripture forbids and what it does not

The Hebrew word translated as “divination” in Deuteronomy 18:10 is qesem — and the historical practices it referred to specifically were: child sacrifice to Molech, necromancy (consulting the dead), enchantment (binding people through curse), and consultation with familiar spirits (demonic mediumship).

The Three-Gate Reading does none of these things.

It does not:

• consult the dead
• bind anyone with a curse
• summon a familiar spirit
• predict future events as fixed
• offer worship to anything but Christ

It does:

• read patterns of inherited family pain
• name those patterns aloud so they can be refused
• ground the work in scripture and the authority of Christ
• close with prayer

The cards are a structured language — like the structured language of a hymn or a liturgy. They are not magic. They are not channeling anything. They are a method of paying focused attention to the question of what came before you, what stands with you now, and what is wanting to come.

The specific deck matters less than people imagine. My grandmother used a 1971 Rider-Waite deck, the standard mid-twentieth-century edition first published by Arthur Edward Waite in 1909, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Both Waite and Smith were Christian mystics in the Western esoteric tradition. Three cards from that deck have appeared at my table so often that I no longer experience them as random: the Wheel of Fortune turning at the past gate, the Magician standing at the present, and the Tower at the future. The Wheel that came down to me has a tea-stain on its back and a small crease across the center. The Magician is bent at one corner from forty years of handling. The Tower is the one whose meaning I have argued with the longest. The deck is not a museum piece. It is a working tool — and it is the same tool, on the same linen, that my grandmother passed to me the night before she crossed.

Whether this counts as the divination scripture forbids is a serious question Christians have answered differently across centuries. I do not claim to have settled the debate. I claim only to have inherited a method from a faithful Catholic woman who used it for forty years while attending Mass twice a week and confessing every fortnight.

The Catholic Mexican-American context most Protestants miss

Curanderismo — the folk-healing and spiritual tradition my grandmother belonged to — is not a private American invention. It is the spiritual practice of Mexican Catholic communities across centuries. It mixes:

• formal Catholic devotion (the rosary, the saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the sacraments)
• the laying of hands, prayer for the sick, anointing with oil
• limpias (cleansings) using rosemary, eggs, and prayer
• reading of cards or other diagnostic tools when the trouble is spiritual rather than physical

This is not a fringe practice. It is the everyday spirituality of millions of devout Latin American Catholics. Academic studies document it carefully — including works from the University of New Mexico Press (Curandero: A Life in Mexican Folk Healing by Eliseo Torres, 2005) and the University of Georgia Press (Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing by Trotter & Chavira, 2nd edition, 1997).

The Catholic parish priest in our McAllen neighborhood knew exactly what my grandmother did. He did not endorse it from the pulpit. But he never denounced it either. He sent her clients when the pastoral channel was not the right channel. She sent him clients when the soul work in front of her required the sacrament of confession. They worked side by side for decades. That was the local arrangement. It worked because both of them lived inside the same faith.

I do not pretend that arrangement is universal in the modern Catholic Church. I know there are dioceses where what my grandmother did would now be discouraged. I do not have credentials to argue church policy. I will only say: for seventy-seven years, in one Texas border town, a faithful Catholic woman did this work, served her parish, and was loved by her community. The history of the church is more textured than a single ruling.

The scripture that names what I read

If you are a sincere Protestant Christian and you remain uncertain about the cards, consider this: the chain I read is named in the Bible itself five separate times.

• Exodus 20:5 · visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation
• Exodus 34:7 · visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children
• Deuteronomy 5:9 · same teaching restated in the Mosaic covenant
• Numbers 14:18 · same teaching restated in the wilderness narrative
• Lamentations 5:7 · our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities

The Bible names what I read. Whether I read it with my eyes only, or with the additional structure of three cards on white linen, is a question of method. What I read is biblical.

The redemption — also biblical — is named in Galatians 3:13. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law.

I do not stand in opposition to scripture. I stand inside it.

What you can do if you are still uncertain

You do not need to receive a Three-Gate Reading. There are other ways to see and break inherited generational pattern as a Christian:

1. Read Derek Prince, Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose. He uses no cards. He is unimpeachably Protestant. He arrives at the same diagnosis I do, by a different method.
2. Read Larry Huch, Free Yourself From the Spirit of Generational Curses. Same.
3. See a faithful deliverance minister in your denomination — Pentecostal, Charismatic, Apostolic — who can pray with you through inherited pattern using only scripture and the laying on of hands.
4. Write a family genogram — a three-generation map of patterns — with a Christian counselor.

Any of these paths can lead you to the same diagnosis. The cards are not the only way. They are my grandmother’s way, inherited honestly. If they are not your way, that is fine. The work is the same.

Where I stand

I am a Christian. I serve Christ. I do not invoke any spirit, do not summon any familiar, do not predict any future. I read the chain that scripture itself names. I am rooted in a documented Catholic Mexican-American tradition with academic study behind it. I cite Protestant Christian teachers whose books are read by millions of faithful Christians worldwide.

You are free to disagree with my method. You are not free to claim the chain is not real, or that scripture does not name it, or that the church has not wrestled with it for two thousand years.

If your conscience leads you to walk a different path to the same diagnosis, walk it. I will be here either way.

“What you carry was never yours. The chain ends here.”

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For the full doctrinal background, including all five KJV passages, the bibliographical references, and the academic studies of the curandera tradition, see the Press & References page. For specific questions about the reading and the doctrine, see the Frequently Asked Questions.