Demons!

People have always believed in dark forces—“demons,” hence Carl Sagan’s famous words from “The Demon-Haunted World.” A friend who did substitute teaching in inner St Louis 25 years ago after college told a funny story about a Black fellow teacher who told him, “Them demons and shit—they’s REAL!” For me, these believers have been few and far between, despite being a life-long enjoyer of stuff like The Exorcist, Hellblazer and Swamp Thing comics, and other occult fantasy… but for me they are just stories, divided from my reality by a hard wall of metaphor and imagination.

Last week The Atlantic published an interesting article about the widespread belief in demons via  churches in the New Apostolic Reformation. From the examples the reporter found, it sounds like their beliefs have spread to many places, including people of power such as Tucker Carlson (claimed on air to have been attacked by a demon in his sleep), and their language has spread for years in the MAGA/QAnon set, where people frequently call Democrats “DemoNcrats” and invoke supernatural language to explain nonsense beliefs. Their tall tales about Hillary Clinton eating the faces of children and harvesting adrenochrome for witchy applications become almost easier to believe if you add demons to the equation. My personal feeling is that it’s a form of urban legends filtered through a worldwide-web-sized game of “telephone” where anything outlandish has proven to become monetizable clickbait. Add in a poorly educated populace (“We love the uneducated!”) with a high rate of mental illness, and you get cultivated lunacy almost on a state-sanctioned level.

The Atlantic’s Stephanie McCrummen focused largely on a church in Maryville, Tennessee, but it’s a widespread movement forwarding Christian supremacy, integration of church and state (they want the levers of power, see Project 2025), and supernatural battles in the here-and-now. In other words, its people are living in a fantasy battleground much like Tom Hanks in Mazes & Monsters. In other words, they crave and praise a mental illness that glorifies their brand of delusion. Apparently the church in Maryville, TN, was run by a couple who had gone to conferences here in Springfield, Missouri, among other places. When they brought in whatever troubled souls, they would talk to them about their problems and plop down very sloppy diagnoses of demonology, such as the former White Supremacist with anger issues having problems with the demons Odin and Thor. People with sex addiction were afflicted by Lilith or Jezebel, etc. So, they were basically googling up some of the most generic metaphorical literary references and pretending that all of history’s belief systems were just “demons” to serve their McMenu of Jesus’s adversaries.

This reminded me that I met one! A few years ago, the Chinese restaurant in the development where I work changed owners. The new couple had been there about a week when they invited me for lunch. I had helped them fix a few things in the restaurant, and the previous owner had counted on my handyman work on many occasions, so they wanted me on their side. Many a leak or stuck alarm had been remedied there, and then paid for with a plate of General Chicken.

The new owners had just moved up from Arkansas. They were as nice as could be. Vietnamese couple in their twenties, with a 6-year-old boy and an infant girl. I was worried that they were biting off more than they could chew, but for the first several months they had daily help from the old owners. I also noticed that the traditional Asian artwork had come down from the walls to be replaced by Christian-themed stuff—framed Bible proverbs and such. Uh oh.

The wife cooked us a fantastic lunch while the husband watched their little girl. Just a few bites into the food, the man asked if I go to church. I said No, but my wife does… I go on occasion. This is my way of riding the fence so I don’t get pushed or judged too hard, religiously speaking. I’ve been a non-believer since elementary school, and can’t even access any former fascination with metaphysical debate. I feel like I’ve heard it all. But, I was about to get quite a storytelling delight from this guy—something straight out of the milieu of John Constantine.

D. told me with utmost earnestness that he had been dying just two years earlier, and was close to death. He had been with a woman who turned out to be a witch, and she put a demon in him. He didn’t know how she summoned this demon or where it came from, but it was destroying his body like a cancer. I kept a straight face, or tried, and asked him a few questions here and there. I think I asked, “Did you have a cancer diagnosis?” because of course I wanted to know if any of this actually happened. Had he actually been fatally ill? But I don’t think he answered in that way. He nimbly kept the talk within his belief system. He said he’d tried Buddhism and/or something else, but he just got worse. He was dying—until he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior, and then his body was rapidly healed, and his life became beautiful, and he could see the truth of everything. Something like that.

All I can say is, their food went from great to lousy as their business fell off. I don’t know if his religiosity drove people away, of if it was just the inflation of the post-covid economy, but their business hours contracted, and then they went to using cheaper pre-made chicken nuggets in their meals. Their cook from the previous administration wasn’t there anymore, leaving only the blessings of The Lord to run the kitchen, and that wasn’t fucking cutting it. They went out of business earlier this year, which was a shame. How much can we blame the New Apostolic Reformation? I don’t know, but fuck ‘em.