That Time A Demon Mauled Tucker Carlson

And: High School J.D. Vance Loved America; The Wishfully Orthodox King Charles

Tucker Carlson has gone public with a story he told me a year or so ago: he was assaulted in his bed one night by a demon that left him bloodied, and with scars. He tells the story in this video. This is exactly what he told me last year:

This happens. It really does. A close friend of mine, a faithful Christian (and reader of this newsletter), saw the Tucker video, and said that he believes this can happen, absolutely, but is skeptical of individual cases. I responded that I think that’s about fear. Not fear of being attacked by them, necessarily, but fear that the world is a lot less controllable than one wants to believe. That we are not as buffered from the dark spirit world as we want to believe. And look, I get it. I really do. This stuff is really frightening. But just as it’s unpleasant to think that there are criminals prowling the city streets at night, that doesn’t mean that you should walk after midnight down to the Circle K to get milk, thinking you are being protected by your desire that criminals don’t exist.

In my experience, many Christians stand firmly on positions like “Christians cannot be possessed” because the alternative — a world in which one’s professed faith in Christ cannot shield them from possession — is too frightening. Typically they have had no direct experience with that dark world, and don’t know anyone who has. Spend time reading about exorcism and spiritual warfare — the books of Father Gabriel Amorth, for example, or this new one about to come out from the popular American “Exorcist Files” podcaster Father Carlos Martins — and you will see that, as the first line in my own new book says, “The world is not what you think it is.”

On Father Carlos Martins’ new book about exorcism

Spirit possession is a complicated topic. Full possession is rare; most people afflicted by evil spirits are at lesser degrees of engagement with these things — but that can still be harrowing. It is easy to understand why someone would wish to believe something like “Christians can’t be possessed.”

Christians can’t be possessed.

I’m a Christian.

Therefore, I have nothing to worry about.

Sadly, this is not true. In Living In Wonder, I tell the story of “Emma,” a New Yorker who has long been a devout, churchgoing, orthodox Catholic — yet discovered a few years ago after a suicide attempt that she was, in fact, possessed. It emerged that her grandfather back in Europe had been a high-level occultist, and had made a demonic pact that brought him wealth, though at the expense of his descendants; Emma’s father’s generation, and hers, had been devastated by things like alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, and suicide. It took years to deliver her, and the key to doing it was her exorcist’s intuition that perhaps she had not been validly baptized. He performed a conditional re-baptism, and boom, most of her demons departed, and it was easy for him to deal with those that remained.

I also tell the story of Tammy Comer, the wife of the well-known Protestant pastor John Mark Comer, who had resigned herself to intense suffering from a rare, incurable disease. Then, in 2020, a family member back in Mexico told Tammy — who is obviously a born-again Christian — that a direct female ancestor had been the victim of a curse put on her by a sorcerer. The wife of the man the ancestor had taken up with hired the sorcerer to work this evil on the first-born female of every subsequent generation.

Tammy was that female in her generation. She and John Mark found a Protestant deliverance minister, who prayed over her. As John Mark told me in 2020, shortly after it happened, he saw the effects of the curse disappear in front of his eyes. Tammy’s medical condition forced her facial muscles to spasm uncontrollably. As the pastor prayed, Tammy’s face smoothed out and became normal. Just like that. Four years on, she is still fine.

Emma was possessed; Tammy was what exorcists called “obsessed,” a term not describing Tammy’s emotional state, but rather the degree of harassment by the demons. But both of them were devout, churchgoing Christian women. Worse, they were both innocent victims of an ancestor’s direct or indirect encounter with the demonic. It rightly offends our sense of justice. Who wants to live in a world in which the sins of the fathers can be visited on the sons?

Well:

 “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:5).

“The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation” (Numbers 14:18).

“You shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them. For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, and doing mercy to thousands of those who love Me and keep My commandments” (Deuteronomy 5:9-10)

We don’t know why this is how the spiritual cosmos is constructed, but it is. I can’t tell you why decades of my own prayers against various forms of despair afflicting me didn’t do a lot of good, but twenty minutes of direct deliverance prayer over me by an exorcist five weeks ago — something I had asked for after having an intuition in prayer that this might be needed — set me free, opening the door to a freedom that has become my glorious new normal. Why did God allow me to suffer all those years, even though I was praying for my own deliverance, and only provide it through the intercession of a priest? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem fair.

But as the Catholic Diocese of Nashville exorcist Father Dan Reehil, tells Shawn Ryan in the new episode of his podcst, “Evil is not fair.” It is one thing to have a theory of how the world of the spirit works — but if that theory does not comport with field experience, then the theory has to change.

By the way, that episode is worth listening to. A lot of it is very familiar to people who know about the exorcism world, so if you are one of those people (like me), you can skip most of this. But if you are new to it, you might hunker down and listen to the whole thing. Ryan, the interviewer, asks questions like a newbie to the topic, which might be helpful to you.

I like Father Dan’s style. He lives and ministers in the South, but he’s a native Long Islander, and speaks with a tough accent. This guy doesn’t mess around. One of the things that will unsettle listeners is hearing him talk about vectors through which demons can enter into a person.

At near the 29-minute mark, Father talks about a case he had in Nashville in which a young Catholic man went with a friend late one night to buy drugs from some occultists who also dealt. The man later smoked the crack they bought, and demons entered him. Father Dan says apparently it was cursed.

I emphasize here that this is not some friend-of-a-friend story that gets passed around, or that somebody got from a Jack Chick comic. This is a story from the exorcist who confronted the demons within this young man. At around the 1:26 mark, Father speaks of a man he delivered who had become possessed via watching a YouTube tutorial teaching him how to open his “third eye.” As he watched, the young man did as the video told him to do, and the demon entered him.

Does that make sense to you? Does it seem fair that the world should work that way, such that just watching some kind of occult tutorial online, and opening oneself up to it, can lead to evil spirits seizing one’s soul? Easy as that? Well, no, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but spiritual reality doesn’t care if it makes sense to you and me.

Father Dan also emphasizes that if someone, having been liberated from demonic possession or some lesser form of oppression, does not take up a holy life, then the demons will not only return, but the person will be worse off this time. This comes from Scripture, by the way — Jesus taught this in Luke 11:24-26. And Father Dan has seen it in action in his own ministry.

Some people think that going to an exorcist or a deliverance minister is like visiting a spiritual chiropractor. They’ll give you an adjustment, and life will go on as before. Nope.

“They have to reconnect to God,” Father Dan says, around 1:44. “And this is what a lot of people don’t want to do. … Because it’s not magic. It’s relationship. [Jesus has] got the power.”

To me, perhaps the most interesting part of Father Dan’s discourse is when he says the most important lesson listeners can take from him is that the most important thing anyone can do is to prepare themselves to die well, to enter into eternity. It’s coming for all of us. How we die depends on how we live. He defines living well as putting God first in everything, and after that, the good of one’s neighbors. This way of living forms a soul into one that is ready to enter eternity and spend it forever with God.

This is how the great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky spoke to the same point, in his book Sculpting In Time:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

I quote this partially in Living In Wonder, in the Beauty chapter, to help explain Dostoevsky’s enigmatic claim that “beauty will save the world.” True beauty, made manifest in great art, serves as both a calling and a portal to God. The poet Rilke speaks to the same truth in the final line of his poem “Archaic Torso Of Apollo”: “You must change your life.”

(If you don’t know the poem, check it out. It’s about enchantment, deep down.)

Back to the demonic business. Father Dan says that for some reason, since Covid, exorcists have seen a big rise in the requests for exorcisms, and have observed that demons are harder to cast out. I have heard this from other exorcists personally. Nobody knows why.

Father Dan is a believer in the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje. He tells Shawn Ryan that the Virgin Mary tells the visionaries there that people today are “worse than the [time of the] Flood, worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.” The priest theorizes that this has a lot to do with the existence of global electronic media, which spreads sin everywhere fast, and is instantly accessible.

Interestingly, the great media scholar Marshall McLuhan, who was Catholic, had a similar insight. From Living In Wonder:

Marshall McLuhan scandalized his secular colleagues by saying that, by its very nature, global electronic media prepares the way for Antichrist—the great and fearsome false messiah Christian prophecy foretells will emerge in the last days. McLuhan taught that, in our time, “each person can instantly be tuned to a ‘new Christ’ and mistake him for the real Christ. At such times it becomes crucial to hear properly and to tune yourself to the right frequency.”

I was amazed and excited to hear Father Dan address the topic of UFOs (around the 2:25 mark). He says pretty much exactly what I’ve been thinking: that these things might be a manifestation of demonic entities that are preparing us for a Great Apostasy. Father Dan asks us to imagine how people would react is, having been formed by decades of pop culture to look to aliens from the skies coming to save us with enlightenment, the US Government declared one day that “aliens” are real, and they have a message for humanity to save us from ourselves.

How would people react if the aliens added to their message, “And by the way, there are many other ways to God than the religions that you know,” asks Father Dan?

This is exactly the right way to think about this stuff. Here is a long passage from Living In Wonder;

If you haven’t checked in on the UFO world since The X-Files went off the air, you might be startled by how deep and broad the phenomenon has become. As [religious studies scholar Diana] Pasulka discusses in her two books on the subject, 2019’s American Cosmic, and 2023’s Encounters (no relation to the Netflix show), the UFO matter involves some of the world’s top scientists, technology gurus, venture capitalists, and even intelligence services. Even though the US government has begun to release limited information from its files, there is far more evidence that UFOs are real than the general public knows. Like [Jacques] Vallée, the best-informed among this invisible college of investigators believe that these are not visitors from other planets but entities from other dimensions.

Pasulka, a practicing Catholic whose prior scholarly work focused in part on Marian apparitions in the Catholic tradition, came to UFO studies in 2012 and experienced what she calls “epistemological shock.” That is, she was stopped cold by learning what is actually known about the phenomenon, and its rapid development, into what in American Cosmic she calls “a global belief system.”

Why are UFO events linked to religion? One answer, says Pasulka, “lies in the fact that the history of religion is, among other things, a record of perceived contact with supernatural beings, many of which descend from the skies as beings of light, or on light, or amid light. This is one of the reasons scholars of religion are comfortable examining modern reports of UFO events.”

What she has found in her long and continuing journey among scientists, scholars, military officers, and UFO contactees is “a fusion of magic, or the supernatural, and the technological.” This is one powerful form enchantment is taking in a post-Christian age. A new religious narrative is coming into being in tandem with new technologies that make its realization more possible, and in a de-Christianized culture that make its claims more plausible to the masses.

Seraphim Rose saw it coming. In his 1975 book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, the priest-monk predicted a coming false religion based on shamanic spiritual experience that teaches contact with these so-called higher entities as a route to wisdom and a better life. The new religion will appeal to the post-Christian world in part because it does not require asceticism—the ancient Christian discipline of self-denial and repentance—but is instead a religion of easy therapy. It will be a religion with scientific trappings—the rise of the sci-fi film and literature genre is preparing us for that, he said—and will be a religion based on pragmatism, on “what works.” Father Seraphim, who shared Jacques Vallée’s opinion that UFOs might be merely contemporary versions of perennial spiritual phenomena, warned that UFOs were one of the signs in the skies that Jesus said would presage the end (Luke 21:11).

I read Father Seraphim’s book in 2006, after I first became Orthodox, and thought it was kind of nutty, a relic of the 1970s pop-culture craze for UFOs and the paranormal. Today, though, the cultural analysis of the California ascetic, who died in 1982, seems eerily prophetic.

Father Seraphim said that the main theme of many science-fiction works is that humankind will use technology to evolve into something higher and to dwell in a utopia. Through these narratives, said the monk, the world is being culturally and psychologically prepared to accept the coming of “aliens” who will pretend to give us the gift of enlightenment that will help us lead better lives. In truth, they will enslave us.

Put out of your mind the idea that “UFOs are demonic” is the kind of thing only rural fundamentalist preachers say. Michael Heiser, a sophisticated Bible scholar who before his 2023 death from cancer became famous for urging his fellow evangelicals, on biblical grounds, to take such things more seriously, strongly believed that UFOs were both real and of demonic origin. According to Pasulka, a subculture within the elite UFO researcher community believes this too. Jacques Vallée has had similar concerns for decades. The scientist and top ufologist concluded one of his best-known books, 1979’s Messengers of Deception, with an ominous warning to a culture that regards potential contact with these higher intelligences with hope and optimism.

“People look up to the stars in eager expectation,” Vallée wrote. “Receiving a visit from outer space sounds almost as comfortable as having a God. Yet we shouldn’t rejoice too soon. Perhaps we will get the visitors we deserve.”

Perhaps they are already here. Jonah, the scholar and ex-occultist who told his story in the previous chapter, told me that when he was deep into channeling demonic entities whom he thought at the time were ancient gods, they told him that their plan is to possess humankind by first merging us with machines. This sounded far-fetched, to say the least. How could they accomplish such a thing? Are we destined to become bionic people?

I later discovered the limits of my imagination. According to Pasulka’s research, there are technological and scientific elites who believe that these higher intelligences have established portals of contact with earthbound adepts, and that they are now establishing a mass portal through artificial intelligence. It sounds crazy, but some of the world’s smartest and most successful people—who do not think these are demonic entities—not only believe it but act on it.

At around the 2:38 mark, Father Dan talks about how for some reason, demons love electronics — something to which every exorcist I have interviewed attests; some theorize that there is something about the way they respond to electricity that attracts them. He goes on to speak about how they might work through AI.

Living In Wonder features a long interview with a man I call “Jonah,” an academic who was for a time deeply involved in occultism, before he fled to Christianity. I met him through an exorcist who had been working with him. The Jonah passages in the book talk in part about how people today get seduced into demonic evil. Jonah started his own way towards the heart of evil as a questing intellectual teenager whose suburban Evangelical pastor could not answer his questions. It didn’t happen all at once, but slowly, slowly, Jonah found himself drawn into occultism. He ended up as a worshiper of demons he thought were ancient gods, of contacting them after opening portals through the use of psychedelic drugs, and willingly being possessed by them.

This is important, from the Jonah passages of my book:

“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.”

More:

As a one-time heavy user of psychedelics, Jonah now says that these drugs “are never worth the risk because they place us in a hypervulnerable cognitive state, ripe for demonic manipulation.

“These drugs can bring you into contact with spiritual reality but in a manner rife with misinterpretation, ego inflation disguised as humility, confirmation bias, or even more openly demonic forms of deception,” he says.

It’s funny, but Living In Wonder is mostly a book about the bright side of enchantment, about how God speaks to us through beauty, through prayer, and so forth. But many podcast interviewers want to focus on the occult stuff. Allie Beth Stuckey, the Christian conservative podcaster whose interview with me dropped this week, told me before we started that her listeners and viewers are hugely interested in this phenomenon. I’m glad about that. As Father Dan said, and as exorcists I talked to tell me, spiritual warfare is coming out in the open now, and it’s only going to get much worse. Your wishful thinking and untested dogmas, my Christian friends, are not going to protect you if they do not align with reality. Prepare yourselves, not in fear, but with sobriety. As Father Dan and other exorcists, as well as Jonah, all attest, you should not spend too much time thinking about the demonic; that can give them more psychological power over you than they deserve. Nor, though, should you dismiss them entirely. They exist, whether you want them to or not, and they can insert themselves into your life even if you don’t go looking for them.

I wish reality weren’t put together like this, but we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we prefer it to be. Why did the demon attack Tucker Carlson in bed that night? He admits on camera that he does not know. We might never know, this side of eternity. But it happened, and he told me he still has the scars to prove it.

By the way, if you haven’t ordered Living In Wonder, and are wavering, let me offer you the audio version of Chapter Nine, the Miracles chapter, for free. The book is not all about dark stuff — in fact, it’s not mostly about dark stuff. Plus, you can read Chapter One for free too.

J.D. Vance, Who Loves America

In the new profile of J.D. Vance’s rise in The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells visits one of J.D.’s high school teachers:

Not every student at Middletown High School was poor—some, especially those who lived closer to the interstate, had parents who worked in Cincinnati or Dayton—but many were, and Tape tended to be circumspect when he asked students about their future. But one day, during Vance’s senior year, Tape inquired about his star student’s post-graduation plans. “And J.D. says, ‘Oh, I’m going to the Marines,’ ” Tape told me. “I was, like, ‘Oh, R.O.T.C.?’ And he went, ‘No, I’m enlisting.’ And I was stunned. Like, dude, you can write your ticket. And he says—I’ll never forget this—‘I love this country. And I talk about it a lot. But, if I don’t do anything about it, it’s just talk.’ ”

It’s a good piece, very well reported, and not entirely complimentary to Vance. It dwells on the personal and professional compromises Vance has made to fuel his political rise. There was a time in my life when I would have seen that sort of thing as prima facie evidence of corruption. But you live long enough, you realize that the real world is much messier than a young man’s stout principles can accept. The virtuous life becomes a matter of knowing when and were to draw the line. If you wish to preserve your virtue untouched by grubby humanity, you had better resign yourself to being impotent to change things. Politicians are not pastors.

The New Yorker piece is fair, I think, though critical I talked to Wallace-Wells for the piece, because he has always been fair to me. This line appears:

Rod Dreher, a socially conservative writer who was then opposed to Trump, gave it an early rave review on his blog for The American Conservative.

This is interesting. The New Yorker has rigorous fact-checkers. I spent about 20 minutes on the phone in an airport with the fact-checker for this story. I told her it wasn’t a review I gave the book that made the difference, but an interview that went mega-viral, and launched J.D. into the media stratosphere. Yet, the correction didn’t make it into the piece. No skin off my nose, but I thought that the New Yorker fact-checking process was infallible.

Funny story: in that TAC interview, I used a generic photo of a MAGA supporter who looked like a working class lady to illustrate it. Turns out the woman in real life was a rich Florida GOP donor! Never judge a book by its cover, I reckon.

The Orthodox King Charles

Britain’s future king on a regular visit to Mount Athos

Britain’s King Charles often visits Mount Athos, the Orthodox monastic republic on Greek territory. His father, Prince Philip, had been baptized Orthodox, and Charles has a lot of respect for Orthodoxy. Well, it has just emerged that in 1998, the future king wrote the following letter to a friend, whose letters recently went up for auction almost twenty years after the friend’s death. Here, from a news story about them, is one of the letters:

Well! Charles is now the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. I wonder why he doesn’t do anything to stop that woebegone ecclesial body from its ongoing self-destruction. But then, what could he do? Maybe it’s right that the British monarch doesn’t involve himself directly in church matters. Charles’s son and heir William is, by all accounts, a non-believer, or at least entirely uninterested in religion. Should Charles, as a believer, intervene as the head of the Church to reform it, what would stop William, a non-believer, from doing the same when he takes over from his father?

Anglicans, can you help me out here? What powers — theoretical and practical — does the British sovereign have over doctrine and practice in the Church of England? I am reminded of what Benedict XVI reportedly said to a visiting conservative priest, shortly after his election as pope. The priest asked Benedict why he doesn’t reform the Church away from the loony liberalism infecting so much of it. The new pope pointed to the door of his office, and said to the visitor that his (the pope’s) real-world authority doesn’t extend beyond the threshold to his office. In other words, the Roman pontiff is the supreme universal governor of the Catholic Church, but Benedict was drawing a distinction between authority and power. He had the power on paper, Benedict did, but said that in real life, he was largely impotent to govern the Church.

Anyway, I’m going to be spending the first days of the new year on Mount Athos. First time for me. I’m excited, and also nervous!

Y’all have a great weekend. I’m sending this to the whole list. You who don’t subscribe, why not try it? Six dollars per month for at least five newsletters a week. You get politics, religion, culture, culture war, and sundry woo. What’s not to like?