There are roughly 150 trained exorcists serving Catholic dioceses in the United States, up from about two dozen fifteen years ago, and they cannot keep pace with the requests coming in. In March, representatives of the International Association of Exorcists asked Pope Leo XIV to make sure every diocese on earth has at least one priest trained for the work, citing a spreading problem they traced to occult sects, esotericism, and Satanism. Demand is outrunning supply, and the men doing the work say the trend line is going the wrong direction.
All of this is happening in a country where a majority of adults, if you hand them a survey, will tell you the devil is a metaphor.
The worldly view is that Americans have simply gotten more superstitious, that the horror movies won and the rest is TikTok. The truth is that these are not two competing facts. They are one fact, observed from two angles. Are horror movies, video games, TikTok, or drugs contributing to the acceptance of demonic influence? Yes. That’s because they are not replacements for the supernatural. They are tools of the adversary.
Our civilization did not stop believing in the supernatural. We renamed it and gave it excuses. Then, we stopped believing in the only One capable of protecting it from the rest of the supernatural. The house was not fortified. It was emptied. And empty houses do not stay empty.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Reconcile
Let’s start with the disenchantment. The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released its American Worldview Inventory 2026 in June, asking fourteen questions about human nature and the supernatural. On twelve of them, most Americans landed somewhere other than the biblical position. Nine in ten now run on syncretism, which is the polite academic word for building your own religion out of whatever parts were lying around.
Now hold that next to the second set of numbers. Barna’s research on spiritual openness finds the overwhelming majority of American adults believe in, or are open to, a spiritual dimension beyond the material one. The Springtide Research Institute found that more than half of Americans between 13 and 25 practice tarot or fortune-telling, and that a striking share of them do it daily. Astrology apps have real subscriber counts. Witchcraft content on social platforms has real view counts. Nobody is spending money on nothing.
So which is it? Is this a secular age or a spiritually saturated one? The answer is that the question is badly posed. Secularization never meant the end of belief in unseen powers. It meant the end of a specific claim on those powers, the Christian claim, which alone insisted that the unseen realm contains beings who hate you and that you have no business negotiating with them on your own. Strip that claim out and you have not produced a room full of hard-headed materialists. You have produced a room full of people with an appetite for the transcendent, no map, and no adult supervision.
Barna has documented the incoherence with almost comic precision. Among Christians who say Satan is merely a symbol of evil, about half turn around and agree that a person can be under the control or influence of spiritual forces such as demons. Read that twice. No devil, but demons. Which is roughly like insisting there is no such thing as an army while conceding that the shelling has been heavy lately.
What the Men Doing the Work Actually Say
Here is where most commentary on this subject goes off a cliff, and where the reporting is more useful than the commentary. The Catholic Church, which has more institutional experience with this than any body on earth, holds that the overwhelming majority of people who come asking for an exorcism are suffering from mental illness, not possession. Priests are required to exhaust ordinary explanations first. Training is mandatory. Authorization is required. The restraint is not a hedge against embarrassment. It is the discipline that makes the residual cases worth taking seriously at all.
That restraint should be adopted wholesale by anyone writing about this. A claim that cannot be tested is a claim that cannot be defended, and the fastest way to make the demonic unbelievable is to see it in every headline and every opponent. Scripture commands the opposite reflex. Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God. Testing is the instruction. Not assuming, and not dismissing.
Italian priests reporting a surge in requests after the lockdown years described people who, in the words of one, feel that their lives are no longer in their own hands. Some of that is despair. Some of it is untreated illness. Some of it is the predictable harvest of years spent consuming material designed to degrade the conscience. And some fraction, the priests insist, is none of those things.
The Vacancy Was the Point
Christ described the mechanism directly, and He described it as a house.
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
Notice what the house is not. It is not filthy. It is not derelict. It is swept and garnished, which is to say tidy, presentable, improved. That is the modern West in one image. We cleaned the place up. We threw out the superstitions and the guilt and the hellfire preaching and the embarrassing old catechisms. We congratulated ourselves on the renovation. What we did not do was move anyone in.
An unoccupied house in a good neighborhood does not stay unoccupied. It gets squatters. The tarot deck, the manifesting seminar, the ayahuasca retreat, the spirit guide with a monetized channel, these are not eccentric hobbies that happened to fill a cultural gap. They are tenants. And they moved into a structure that had been deliberately stripped of every lock.
The Church Handed Over the Keys
The uncomfortable part is that the emptying was not primarily the work of atheists. Secularists were never in a position to remove the devil from Christian preaching. Christian preachers did that.
A generation of pulpits decided that a personal adversary was an obstacle to seekers, that spiritual warfare was an embarrassment better left to charismatic fringes, and that the gospel would market more smoothly if the stakes were emotional rather than cosmic. The result is congregations who have been told they are loved but never told they are hunted. When something happens to them that a therapist cannot name, they do not call their pastor, because they know from experience that their pastor has no category for it. They call a Catholic exorcist, or a psychic, or nobody.
Paul explained why the unbelief itself is not neutral ground. The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them. 2 Corinthians 4:4
A blindness that convenient is not an accident of intellectual history. Persuading a man that you do not exist is not a retreat. It is a superior operating position, and any competent adversary would prefer it to a set of horns and a pitchfork.
Discernment Is Not Paranoia
None of this licenses the game everyone wants to play, which is assigning possession to politicians we dislike. That move feels powerful and accomplishes nothing. It replaces argument with accusation, it cannot be falsified, and it insults the seriousness of a doctrine that the Church treats with clinical care. If a Vatican-trained exorcist will not render that verdict without months of examination, a columnist should not render it in a paragraph.
What the evidence does support is more modest and more useful. There is an intelligence at work in the world that predates our politics, that was already operating when John wrote that the spirit of antichrist was even then in the world, and that has never required anyone’s belief in order to function. It works through appetite, through ideology, through the ordinary machinery of institutions and incentives. It rarely announces itself, because announcing itself would forfeit the advantage.
So the question was never whether we are surrounded. Scripture answered that a long time ago, and the men who handle these cases professionally are reporting a workload consistent with the answer. The question is whether a people who spent sixty years congratulating themselves on outgrowing the devil are going to notice who took the lease. The rent is coming due either way.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
