The Devil Thrives in a Society That Dismisses the Demonic With Worldly Diagnoses

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.