Demon Haunted World
- Mike Dickey
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe"
Trying to hustle some work out the door this morning before P and I head down to Williamsport, PA, for a quick getaway to see Todd Rundgren in concert. P has today and tomorrow off, and this morning she was still in bed after 8. So was I, reading the paper because I didn't want to slip off and leave her to wake up by herself.
Which made for a late start.
What was I reading in bed, you ask? The below gift-linked article in this month's Atlantic, about the New Apostolic Reformation, the mostly white, ignorant, demon-obsessed nondenominational movement sweeping the nation.
Surprise! They're also heavily MAGA, and J.D. Vance and friends suffuse their public statements with the language of the NAR movement, a dog whistle to a group of folks who see themselves as locked in endless spiritual warfare with no-kidding demons who are battling for control of humanity. The demons even have names! But not many--Odin and Osiris seem to show up a lot, as well as a descriptively monikered devil named "Python", leaving one with the impression that a handful of dark beings are working literally hundreds of thousands of jobs each, trying to hook poor Billy Clyde in Hattiesburg and Charlene in Butte on pornography, or some such.
It's all beyond silly, but a threat all the same. As the essay observes,
In a more immediate sense, invoking demons can be a means of dehumanizing and delegitimizing political enemies, which has often been a precursor to actual warfare and political violence. “It’s a very useful way to get around the Christian imperative to love your enemy,” Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, told me. “For the most part, that is the ironclad command. So how do you get Christians to hate their enemies? Or to hate them even if they love them? Demons are easy to hate. They are irredeemable objects of hatred.”
Put another way, if you're not with them you're probably a demon or demon-possessed, and the Golden Rule therefore doesn't apply to you. And these people have guns to go with all that certitude.
All pretty depressing, this walk backwards we're taking as a country. But objective reality is starting to push back, with alliances shattered and wars lost and the economy on the precipice of a huge crash. We're going to get to live the consequences when a democracy becomes overrun by the superstitious and the stupid, like a really bad national yeast infection. Hard facts on the ground will eventually prevail, and the country will get past this, but we'll never be the same and never get back what was lost.
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