Christians Sleepwalking Into The Occult

And: Billboard Chris Fights In An Australian Court For Free Speech

Well, this is something. Yesterday in Nashville I was hanging with a youngish (late 30s) Evangelical friend, and we were talking about Living In Wonder. I don’t think he has read the book, because he asked me what I thought about using ayahuasca. “Spiritually very dangerous,” I told him. “All psychedelics leave you wide open to spiritual experiences that could go very, very wrong.”

He mentioned Shawn Ryan, the well-known Nashville podcaster, who was healed of extreme PTSD (from military combat) by using psychedelics, and who testifies that the psychedelic experience brought him to Christ. Well, yes, that can happen, I told my interlocutor. I mentioned how trying LSD in my freshman year of college, in 1986, banished my depression and incipient alcoholism, and moved me farther along the road to faith. I went to the campus bookstore the next day, after coming down, and bought books about Christianity.

Said I to my friend: “I’ve never talked about that publicly over the years, because I don’t want people to think that it’s okay to do that stuff. Fact is, I got lucky — very lucky. I opened the doors of perception, and God came through it. But anything could have. I talk about doing it in my book, because I wanted readers to know that I wasn’t warning them off of psychedelics from a position of ignorance.”

Then my friend said that he knows lots of church folks in Nashville and elsewhere (he travels a lot for business) who are all-in on psychedelics. He mentioned some West Coast Evangelicals he knows who go to Latin America for ayahuasca weekends all the time. He mentioned suburban Evangelical women he knows — I think he meant here in Nashville — who are all into microdosing mushrooms and other psychedelics. He’s a straight-laced guy, and is befuddled by all this.

Then he told me that the soft-occult is rampant in church circles around here. “Soft occult” is my term, not his. He said that so many Christians he knows — mostly women — are into astrology, crystals, tarot cards, things like that. The more he talked, the more I sat gape-mouthed.

This conversation was on my mind last night when I went out to far-exurban Nashville to speak to a group of small-town Republicans, all Christians, who had been instrumental in helping us launch fundraising for the LNBL movie. I brought it up with a Catholic I met, who is about the same age (late 30s, from the look of it) as my Evangelical friend from earlier. Oh yeah, he said, that stuff is definitely present in Christian circles.

Wait … what?!

Then I spoke to a young man in his late twenties, a Christian. I asked him about it. “Definitely,” he said, then gave examples.

An Evangelical woman I talked to said that several churches in the Nashville area have had witches come into the services and attempt to hex them. In some cases, the pastors recognized who they were and why they were there, and confronted them with strong prayer — which made the witches react in a quite hostile way (I got the impression she was talking about something she had seen at her own church, but I could be wrong.) She agreed with the claims of my earlier interlocutors that there are so many Christians — women, especially — walking blindly into the arms of the occult, but it is also the case that churches around here are under open attack by aggressive occultists.

Well, I tweeted something about all this late last night, and heard from a New York City friend, a Christian convert, who was once an occultist. She told of a group of Evangelical women who took their husbands and kids to this workout class based on astrology. She sent me a screenshot of the group chat among the women, saying what an awesome thing the class was. “Y’all, she was incredible! Run, don’t walk, to sign up for the next one!” said one of the women who participated.

These are normie suburban Evangelical women. I heard about Evangelicals yesterday, from Evangelicals, but I doubt not for one second that Catholics, and even Orthodox, are also mixed up in this. (In fact, I can’t remember if the Catholic I talked to last night was telling me about fellow Catholics he knows involved in it, or Evangelical friends). The farther I get away from the launch of Living In Wonder, the more I find myself recalling in public discourse this event, from the book’s narrative:

At a 2022 conference in Oxford, I met Daniel Kim, then twenty-seven, an Anglican seminarian who left a lucrative career working as a creative in the London advertising world to study for the priesthood. Daniel told me that in his job at a high-powered firm, there were no atheists—but that, as far as he could tell, he was the only Christian in the office. The rest were all into the occult to some degree or another.

“When I was there, there was a big focus on astrology and occult-slash-Wiccan stuff, but not in the way we would think of it—you know, dark and bloody,” he said. “It was more like”—he shifted into a naive tone of voice—“‘Oh yeah, satanism is just a connection with nature, and about the fullest expression of our humanity.’ There was a high level of anthropocentric enchantment. Belief in the human spirit, belief that the human horizon can be overcome.”

The idea that the greatest challenge to Christianity is from atheism is an idea whose time has long passed, Kim said. Now the world of neo-paganism and the occult has opened wide. Young people today, some of them influenced by radical feminism, think of both atheism and Christianity as left-brained, patriarchal ways of thinking. Turning to nature religion and darker forms of the occult is, for them, an approach to connecting with a more intuitive and organic way of relating to the world.

I told Daniel Kim that these people are not entirely wrong to seek re-enchantment; it’s just that they are looking in the wrong places—in spiritually dangerous places. He agreed and said that the new openness in his generation to spiritual experience poses challenges but also offers opportunities. I asked him what the most important thing is to know about re-enchanting his generation.

“People can see through inauthenticity in a millisecond,” Kim said, snapping his fingers. “People are tired of the cool and the relevant. Because we get that everywhere.”

The evangelical ordinand learned from market research as an advertising professional a lesson that he planned to take into his church ministry: the idea that churches should downplay the numinous and the mystical for the sake of making Christianity relevant and accessible to seekers is a mistake.

“It’s not what people want anymore. It doesn’t work,” Kim said. “Actually, in some ways, young people right now want to be confronted by something, want to be provoked, want to be compelled by something different.”

What to make of all this? Well, for one, it’s confirmation of a core Living In Wonder thesis: that the world is re-enchanting right before our eyes, and the churches are not ready for it. Younger Christians (including early middle age ones) are eager to have numinous experiences, and many of them have not been prepared spiritually to refuse this soft-occult stuff. In all my years worshiping as Catholic and Orthodox, I can’t recall a single homily that ever mentioned spiritual warfare as a normal part of life. I know that this is a big thing for Pentecostals (God bless them!), but I wonder what it’s like for Evangelicals. Probably the same thing. We just don’t want to deal with that stuff in America. It’s too superstitious, too primitive, too absurd, or what have you.

Yet it is real. I am convinced that many Christians who dismiss this stuff do so because they cannot bear to think that it exists, that it is a real danger to them. The Evangelical friend whose ayahuasca question started the conversation told me about missionaries that would stay with his family when he was a kid (his father was a pastor), and the stories they would tell about encountering the diabolical every day, simply as part of daily life in Third World places.

Let me share with you this lengthy passage from Living In Wonder about a Catholic exorcist who lives in Rome. I am going to make today’s newsletter free to all, because I want people who are dabbling in this stuff as part of their Christian practice to understand that they are playing with fire:

For a Catholic view, I traveled to Rome to meet with a priest I will call Don Cipriano. Most exorcists do not want their names made public, he says, because it gives Satanists a line of attack. He is an academic and a scholar of demonology who also has experience in deliverance ministry. He grew up in a rural part of a country in which folk spirituality was strong. Though raised a practicing Catholic, he was spiritually gifted from childhood. “Almost like a natural witch,” he muses.

He sensed a strong call to the priesthood from the age of eight.

“By sixteen or seventeen, I clearly had crossed over enough into that world so that I woke up one night and saw the light bulb on the landing outside my bedroom getting brighter and brighter, until it exploded,” the priest says.

“In the darkness, hovering in the air outside my bedroom door, were two glowing red eyes. I remember being terrified. I looked up to the crucifix on the wall, and at that moment my bedroom door slammed shut. The next morning, there was scattered glass on the landing where the bulb had exploded. I never forgot this.”

Until he entered seminary two decades later, after a successful business career, Don Cipriano had wondered why God allowed that to happen. At last he concluded that his guardian angel had slammed the door shut and that God had actually been in his bedroom, protecting him.

“I wonder sometimes whether many young men who manifest a calling to the priesthood have a satanically terrifying experience as a youngster or a teenager, to scare them off of doing work that will involve them taking on the devil as a priest,” he says. “I know priests who make deals with God. They’re saying, like, ‘If the devil leaves me alone, Lord, I’ll leave him alone.’ But the early church didn’t work like that.”

Just before he left home to go to the university, an inexplicable demonic scream tore through his family’s rural house. Years later, when he entered seminary, “it was clear that not all was well spiritually. There were manifestations in my room at night.”

One quiet Friday evening, the seminary’s spiritual director, who was involved in exorcism ministry, sat down with Don Cipriano and asked how he was. “I feel strange,” the seminarian told him.

“He just picked up a crucifix, held it in front of me, and said something like ‘I command you to reveal yourself!’” recalls the priest. “I went nuts! I was screaming at him in a language that I now call the demonic tongue, because I recognize it. I don’t remember very much. I remember him saying to the demon, ‘You are a liar and have been a liar from the beginning!’”

The suffering seminarian was taken to the care of a group of local Catholics who prayed over him all weekend long. The demonic manifestations kept coming. Don Cipriano said he had been cursed by ancestral occult activity (derived specifically from a great-grandfather) and by other events that now led him to believe he was “demonically oppressed, maybe bordering on obsession from time to time.”

“I got back to the seminary from that prayer weekend,” he remembers. “There was a nun in the seminary, and she said, ‘You look like a walking corpse.’” True—but he was alive, and he had discovered through that ordeal an important part of his priestly vocation.

“As I approached ordination, I sensed that the Lord was calling me to be a spiritual warrior,” he says. “I don’t mean that in a macho or gung-ho sense, but just the fact that I know the demon, and the demon knows me. I know I sin. I know I fall. I know that I could stray perilously back toward his territory. And so I chose as my ordination verse for my prayer card ‘Blessed be the Lord my God, who trains my hands for battle, who puts my fingers to war.’”

After his ordination, Cipriano went to Rome to study patristics and then later to one of the world’s great universities for his doctorate. His work in the patristics field has focused on the role of spiritual warfare in the early church.

“These were centuries where the demons just overran the human race, and then Christians arrived to push the demons back,” he says. “Tertullian says in his Apology that more people converted to Christianity in Carthage because Christians were able to deliver them from the demonic.”

This is what accounts for the unprecedented demand for exorcism ministry today in the post-Christian West—and why Don Cipriano has joined the battle. “There is no such thing as a vacuum in human nature. As Christianity retreats, the evil things creep back,” he says.

When we spoke, the priest, ordained only six years, had not yet been involved in a full-blown ritual exorcism. His work to that point had been limited to minor exorcisms called “deliverances.” Demons had left those people over whom he had prayed.

“And then I’ve had the more extraordinary experiences of physical manifestations,” he says. “The noises, and the smell of rotting flesh. That’s the worst. It will only come when you’re asleep. You’ll wake up to this sweet, cloying smell of rot. It’s nauseating, and you’re terrified. You’ll jump out of bed. More terrifying that, two seconds later, it’s gone. You get back into bed and, forty-five minutes later, it happens again. That can be frightening.

“The devil frightens me. I mean, he’s a fallen angel. I’m not gung ho and stupid about these things. I know he’s ultimately only allowed to operate within the boundaries that the Lord has set, but as a human being, I’m frightened of this supernatural intelligence far beyond our capacities.”

Given the abundance of testimonies about people who come to ruin by dabbling in the occult and being drawn toward union with the satanic, why do people go down this path? How can anybody really believe things will turn out well for them?

“He presents himself as the angel of light. Beautiful. Glorious. Proud. All the things you want in your life, he can grant you,” explains the priest.

He tells me of a dream he had while he was still in the grips of the demonic. He was in a church, standing in the choir loft, eyeing Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the congregation below.

“And there was a man standing behind her in a charcoal-gray suit, black shirt, tie, I think, as well. Black curly hair as well. Very pale ivory skin. And he was whispering in Mother Teresa’s ear. Whatever he was saying to her was upsetting to her.”

In the dream, Cipriano ran down the spiral staircase to help the nun and ran into the man standing at the bottom waiting for him, smiling. Cipriano says he has never seen a more beautiful being in all his life.

“I said, ‘You’re Lucifer.’ And he smiled at me,” recalls the priest. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the sun rise over the ocean, when it just breaks, and it’s so luminous? There was a blaze of glory like that behind his head, shining rays of gold.”

There was an explosion of light, and the devil disappeared. Later, Cipriano shared this dream with an exorcist.

“He told me, ‘You’ve learned an important lesson. Most people embrace the archangel, and when the coin flips, and they see the fact of the beast, it’s too late. They’re already in his grip.’

“The thing you must remember about occult rituals is that the fallen angels will answer,” Don Cipriano continues. “You can’t force God to talk to you from the tabernacle, because he’s sovereign. But you can force the fallen ones to talk to you—and they will.”

Don Cipriano says that when he walks the streets of Rome, he prays deliverance prayers constantly, because, like my friend Nathan in New York, he knows that all around him a great spiritual battle is underway. And he also knows that contemporary Christians, both ordained and laity, have become insensitive to this stark reality.

“I read a lot of Tolkien as a teenager,” he says. “The church is a little bit like the kingdom of Gondor. There were watchtowers on the borders of Mordor. We got sloppy. People slept. Evil things crept back. And then suddenly, one night, they came and took the watchtower Minas Ithil and turned it into Minas Morgul.”

We talked about how in ages past the life and practice of the church conveyed the reality of the transcendent, of the numinous—both heavenly realities and infernal ones. The loss of a palpable sense of the sacred has only helped the cause of the Evil One, the priest says. In his words I heard an echo of Father Nectarios’s complaint that Orthodoxy in the United States is neglecting a vital ministry, even as the shadow of evil spreads.

That said, Don Cipriano strongly believes that Christians should not preoccupy themselves with thoughts of the demonic. At the same time, though, Christians in the world today are far too lax about spiritual warfare. Spending time reading what the church fathers had to say about contending with demons would restore a proper sense of spiritual reality to us, he believes. Any re-enchantment that does not incorporate a healthy fear of the shadow side of the spirit world is a lie.

Here is another account from my book. This young man fell into the occult from a class in self-hypnosis offered in his Catholic high school!

Joseph Magnus Frangipani has always been a seeker, but he has not always been careful about the search. False signs and wonders deceived him for many difficult years, leading him deep into literal and metaphorical exile before he found the truth in a wondrous way.

As a teenager, he left behind the bland, West Coast suburban Catholicism of his youth in search of deeper religious experiences. In high school, a class in self-hypnosis led him to meditation, which in turn opened all kinds of spiritual doors to Eastern religions.

Yet the more deeply he went down these paths, the more spiritually troubled he became. He saw so many friends and strangers desperate to shake off the burden of themselves, to have it dissolved in the void. Frangipani filled his life with different Hindu, Buddhist, and animist rituals, dabbled with divination through tarot cards, and embraced shamanism.

I didn’t include this passage in the book, for space considerations, but it’s from the interview I did with Frangipani:

I grew a reputation for reading the tarot, an occult method of divination. I taught yoga and instructed groups through guided meditations and chanting in sage deserts. We experimented with astral projection – guided out-of-body experiences through the bardos described in the Tibetan books. I carried not only underlined copies of the Bhagavad Gita, but of the Upanishads and sutras of the buddhas everywhere I went. Every one of these pursuits was a swim stroke away from the holy mountain of Christ. Drop water on stone long enough and you'll whittle it away. Swabbing orange paste across my forehead, I rang bells offering fruit and fire while worshipping Krishna, wandering barefoot the streets of Eugene, Portland, Seattle and finally Rishikesh, Haridwar and Dharamsala in north India.

Back to the text of Living In Wonder:

Eventually, Frangipani had a vision that summoned him to India.

“I went to India in search of the Source,” he told me. “I had been summoning different beings through yoga meditation, but I realized after the vision that I was done in America. I wanted to go to a place where they had levitating monks and bleeding statues, to see if it was all real. I broke up with my girlfriend, got rid of everything, and bought a one-way ticket to India, just me and my backpack.”

Frangipani made his way to the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharmshala, in northeastern India. But even that didn’t work. Buddhism satisfied him intellectually, but it did not satisfy his heart. He reckoned that he needed to go to the source of the sacred river Ganges: the Himalayan town of Gangotri. Wandering in the mountains nearby, the young pilgrim eventually found a cave with a little wooden door on it, and a latch.

“There was a wooden table with one of the legs broken off, sitting at an angle, and a musty, disgusting pillow,” he said. “I thought, me being me, that’s perfect. . . . I remember thinking that whatever Moses had, whatever Mohammad had, whatever Buddha had, I want that. I want to poke myself through the spiritual ozone layer. If it’s accessible to anyone, it’s accessible to me.”

Standing before a cave on the top of the world, having given away everything he owned and abandoned everyone back home, Frangipani realized that he was the Prodigal Son. He had forsaken his inheritance and was now poor, alone, and lost. He felt like a fraud. Frangipani wept. Not knowing what else to do at that moment, he entered the cave and began praying a mantra given to him by a Hindu priest. He did his best to link the words with his breath and the rhythms of his heart.

“As I breathed in, I said the mantra, and when I breathed out, I said the Jesus Prayer,” he told me. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

How did he know the Jesus Prayer? He had once worked at a bookstore in Oregon, where he came across a famous nineteenth-century Russian devotional book, The Way of a Pilgrim, built around the Jesus Prayer. He read it, and now, in his Himalayan cave, the words appeared out of the mist of his memory.

“The way I explain it is that the Lord had placed a seed in my heart, and the tears I had in front of the cave and all the snakeskins I shed of things I thought were true that weren’t—they watered the seed,” he said.

As the weary American pilgrim prayed, he had a vision:

Then I saw Christ in the cave, in the darkness, in the same way that when you look at a candle and close your eyes, you still see it in your mind’s eye. That’s the closest I could describe it. I really don’t have the words. I knew instantly that this was God, who was also a man who was born and lived at a specific time in history, had died, was resurrected, and who is now everywhere, but chooses to emerge whenever he wants to. All these false ideas that I had had in my head for eleven years—because, remember, I left Catholicism through a high school class on self-hypnosis—fell out of my ears, so to speak.

Through Christ, I saw that what I had been doing was a sin. It wasn’t like I had violated a legalistic ordinance or something but that I was running away from God. Intellectually I still have the scars of it, but I realized that it was a grave sin. And I knew this was my Maker. It was impossible to be alone. I had struggled with loneliness, and when I left the cave, it was impossible to be lonely because I knew that Our Lord was always present. Whether I see him now or not, I know he is here.

Frangipani finally fell asleep. The next morning, he opened the cave’s door and two wolflike dogs stood there. Scared of dogs, he shut the door and said the Jesus Prayer.

“I opened it, and they were farther away. Every time I would close the door and pray the Jesus Prayer, they moved farther away,” he said. “Finally, they were far enough away that I was able to grab my bag and run away back to the ashram.”

He made his way back down to New Delhi, bought a Bible, and started to read it. Eventually he returned to the United States calling himself a Christian.

One day, Frangipani accepted a friend’s invitation to go see an Orthodox church with him. Why not? the seeker thought. He had tried everything else. None of the Christian churches he had visited since his return gave him the same feeling of communion that he had in the Himalayan cave.

Then he walked into the Serbian parish in Eugene, Oregon, with his friend—and his jaw dropped.

“It looked like the cave!” he said. “There were the lampadas [small icon lamps] hanging over the icons. I thought, ‘That’s the Holy Spirit! They’re hanging at the level of the heart of everybody. That’s the illumined heart! That man in the icon, that Christ—that’s who I saw in the cave!’”

Frangipani described his first-ever Divine Liturgy as “like having gold shaved into my ears. Those hymns were the music of the soul.”

He is now an ordained deacon in the Orthodox Church, serving a parish in Washington state. At the end of our conversation, I said that his long, strange search for enchantment ended with a miraculous vision in a cave on the roof of the world, but that he had actually found plenty of false enchantment, or dark enchantment, on his way to the light.

Said Frangipani, “Yeah, if you set out to find it”—vivid spiritual experience for its own sake—“it will come to you, but the fruits will be very bad.”

Yet as the old Christian faith framework breaks down, more and more Americans—especially younger ones—are seeking exactly that, in subversive places. They are opening themselves up to dark enchantment, a real phenomenon, one that kills the soul. In this spiritual warfare raging around us, both visibly and invisibly, there is no neutral ground. You must take a side and commit.

You must take a side and commit. There it is. There is no middle ground. You can’t fiddle around with astrology-based fitness classes, crystals, tarot, and what have you, and still be onside with God. About psychedelics, I don’t want to say that there is never any genuinely therapeutic use for them; Shawn Ryan says psychedelic use delivered him from PTSD torment, and brought him to religious faith. I absolutely believe that is possible — because I experienced a far lesser version of the same thing. Yet I would say for the vast majority of people who are drawn to experimenting with these substances, there is no good reason to put themselves in that kind of spiritual peril. Again: you open those doors, you have no idea what’s going to come through, and no control over it.

(As I’m writing this, I just got a text from a friend asking me to pray for their little Christian school. She said the kids are performing a play this week based on the Narnia stories, and the spiritual attacks have been intense — like nothing they’ve ever seen. Fire alarm going off last night in the climactic scene. Actor playing Aslan getting a nosebleed in his death scene. Strange injuries suffered by the kids during this run, things that have never happened before. Hmm.)

I’ll end with this: I did not realize how serious this infiltration of soft occultism into Christian circles was until I started talking to people around here. Granted, one doesn’t want to draw definite conclusions based on a few anecdotes, but I feel confident that I got schooled last night about the spiritual realities of Christian life in the United States. Many churches are not preparing their people to deal with and reject these serious spiritual threats. Nor are many churches recognizing that the hunger for the mysterious, the numinous, is a normal part of human life, and that to deny it to people in a legitimate Christian form is to send these hungry people elsewhere looking for bread.

Folks, the spiritual warfare is only going to intensify in the years to come. We all need a “strong god” to resist it — by which I mean, a strong, spiritually aware and robust relationship with the true God. We need to be part of a religious community that understands this stuff, and takes it seriously. I’m not saying you should leave your parish if they don’t — I’d say most churches, of all kinds, do not — but you should find a group of like-minded Christian friends for support, and you should educate yourself, and take it seriously, even if none of your Christian friends do.

Here is “Jonah” from Living In Wonder — an academic who grew up Christian in the suburbs, but ended up profoundly enmeshed in the occult. He is now a Christian.

I asked Jonah to recall key turning points in which he made fateful decisions that led him down the dark path. He said in retrospect that it was “just being continually seduced by ideologies that felt like the completely natural conclusion of the last one.”

He considers his normie American evangelical upbringing to have been “deeply tragic, considering how unequipped the authority figures in my life were to shield me from the increasingly demonic spiritual and intellectual paths to which I became enslaved.

“Plenty of these authority figures recognized the reality of the demonic but they brought a knife to a gun fight in their attempt to stave off such influences,” he says. “Some had simply no answers, or wholly unsatisfying ones, for my myriad youthful theological curiosities. Theology as presented within the evangelical world all seemed so arbitrary. Mostly, it was emotional experiences of worship that were cast as the foundation of the faith. So, when those dried up for me, my conservative faith seemed untenable.”

He adds:

During his years as an occultist, Jonah and his co-religionists never viewed Christian churches as meaningful opponents. They were all convinced that what they were seeing and living was going to be the fate of all humanity, eventually.

“Ecumenism and emphasis on spiritual experience would consume all religions and slowly acclimate everyone to more blatant emphases on magic, entity contact, and the divinization of the human,” he says. “Probably almost no one, aside from me and like-minded occultists, had the stomach to witness the devilish, sinister appearance of the human being dissolved into nonhuman natural and technological intelligences. But that was fine—the point was that most humanity would sleepwalk into their fate.”

Perhaps the most important ally they had on their side was pop culture. “Countless films, television shows, songs, and books provide implicit versions of our worldview, or at least planted a seed that would make people an easier mark for manipulation,” he says. “We felt like we were winning.

“The Christian churches didn’t feel like a threat,” Jonah emphasizes. “They had no idea of the countless ways the whole world was primed to destroy their defenses and melt them into the demonic religion of the twin principles of superhumanism and anti-humanism. While I was in the active service of demons, I maintained friendships with conservative Christian friends. Not one of them told me that they sensed something spiritually amiss about me.”

So what should pastors and religious leaders do to protect their flocks from the upsurge in occultism sweeping pop culture? Jonah suggests that they read up on occult subjects enough to help others spot and avoid demonic traps but not so much that they become fixated on darkness.

And, though exorcism ministry is a relatively rare calling, all religious leaders must take the demonic seriously and be prepared to confront it when it manifests. Not acting for fear of looking foolish or fear of the unknown is a failure to do one’s spiritual duty. “The demons are only getting bolder,” he says. “This is not a fight we can shy away from.”

Churchgoers have to be told that pop culture is no friend of the faithful, and need to be led not to passively consume it but to become critical observers. And pastors should have “zero tolerance for openness to the occult. If any of your parishioners show an interest in even seemingly benign esoteric or New Age spirituality—for example, astrology—warn them that they’re opening themselves to evil forces that will seek to drag them to hell.”

A Christian friend whom I trust deeply was telling me not long ago about how esotericism is infiltrating Catholic traditionalist circles — among Latin mass intellectuals who are seeking a more enchanted form of Catholicism amid the dullness and despiritualization of contemporary Catholic practice. The Enemy will try to infiltrate the churches and the lives of Christian in any and every way possible. We are all at risk. Take a look at this powerful 2023 essay in Mere Orthodoxy by the Evangelical writer Phil Cotnoir, about “the coming psychedelic moment” and the church. It is paywalled, so if you can’t read it, you can check out this comment I made in this newsletter, back when it appeared; I quote from it. Excerpt from Cotnoir:

As our culture recedes from the high-water mark of atheism and naturalistic materialism that occurred around 2010, the pent-up waters of the supernatural will continue rushing in. There are debts to pay for our blindered insistence on a metaphysics of mere material. We see this already in the rise of open paganism, the New Age movement, and the swell of interest in psychedelics and other phenomena such as UFOs. North American Christianity cannot afford to avoid these issues or dismiss them out of hand as bunk—an instinct rooted more in modernism than in the Scriptures. [emphasis mine — RD]

It’s here, and again: we are not ready. Read Living In Wonder to learn more. I lost the first publisher of the book in large part because that publisher did not want me to include in the book chapters on “false enchantment” — including the occult. Too dark, they thought. Well, I’m glad I held my ground, even though it led to the cancellation of a big contract; Zondervan, bless them, picked up the book. The book is not mostly about this — it’s mostly about godly forms of enchantment — but this aspect cannot be ignored. People are desperate for a sense of God’s presence, and for mystery. Those Christians who think we should look away from it entirely are deeply mistaken. This stuff is a clear and present danger, whether or not we want to see it.

Billboard Chris Vs. Australia

I want to end today by drawing your attention to a very important free speech case about to be heard by an Australian court, involving Billboard Chris (Elston), a Canadian campaigner against transitioning children. It vindicates J.D. Vance’s criticism about how European countries (though this is Australia) are using laws to suppress free speech. Excerpt from the Alliance Defending Freedom International’s release:

Chris Elston, a.k.a “Billboard Chris”, commented:

“My case is an example of the free speech crisis here in Australia and across the West. More and more, the public is waking up to the fact that puberty blockers are a form of child abuse. Gender ideology can only thrive under censorship – when we are deprived of shining a light on the madness.”

THE CASE: Freedom of online speech in the balance

On 28 February 2024, Elston took to “X” to share a Daily Mail article titled “Kinky secrets of UN trans expert REVEALED”.

The article, and accompanying tweet, criticised the appointment of Australian transgender activist Teddy Cook to a World Health Organization “panel of experts” set to advise on global transgender policy.

Cook complained about the post to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, who requested that “X” remove the content. The social media platform owned by free speech advocate Elon Musk initially refused, but following a subsequent formal removal order from the Commissioner, later geo-blocked the content in Australia. X has since also filed an appeal against the order at the Administrative Review Tribunal in Melbourne.

Billboard Chris, with the support of ADF International and the Australian Human Rights Law Alliance, and alongside Elon Musk’s “X”, is appealing the violation of his right to peacefully share his convictions.

The case will be heard in Melbourne for five days on the week beginning March 31st.

Members of the public are invited to support Chris’s legal case here.

Educate yourselves. Stand with Billboard Chris and ADF. It’s important. Contrary to what many knotheads believe about The Benedict Option, I do not advocate in that book or anywhere else total withdrawal from politics. My argument is simply that political action cannot be our main focus as Christians. Nevertheless, we have to stay involved, if only to protect our right to speak out and practice our faith.

OK, I am packing my bags and headed later today to Los Angeles. Peter Thiel is hosting an invitation-only screening of the first episode of the Live Not By Lies documentary series, which premieres next Tuesday (April 1) on the Angel Studios platform. Angel will roll out a new episode (of four) each Tuesday in April. It is possible, and even likely, that it will be more widely available after it has finished its Angel run, but I don’t know for how long Angel, which funded the production, will keep it exclusively on the Angel platform. I strongly encourage you to sign up for an Angel subscription, so you can see it. This is an important film series — extremely relevant to our time. If you think that having President Trump in office fighting wokeness is all we need to win the battle, well, as good as that is, you are seriously mistaken. Politics is necessary to this fight, but not remotely sufficient. This is not merely a political problem. It’s not even mostly a political problem.