The Deepest War

You might not be interested in the demonic, but the demonic is interested in you

The late exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth prepares to cast a demon out of a possessed woman in this still from ‘The Devil & Father Amorth’ [Source]

A friend of mine is going through an intense and painful spiritual struggle now, one with a dark, powerful supernatural component. He is a Christian, but not a practicing one. He is being red-pilled on the true nature of the world of spirits. I told him that one thing he will have to learn is that not wanting these evil realities to be true doesn’t have any effect on the battle, other than to weaken us.

The point I’m trying to make to him is that as frightening as this stuff is, it must be faced — and that there are effective things all of us can do to protect ourselves and those we love. Even those who believe that demons exist very much want to keep them far away — and they should want this! But we don’t always get to decide these things. In the case of my friend, for reasons not yet clear to him, he has been targeted, and the attacks have been brutal. I told him that one thing he must not do is make any kind of deal with the spirits, offering to stay on his side and leave them alone if they do the same to him. Another friend of mine did that as a teenager when dark supernatural things began happening to him. Years later, he was exorcised, and he came to understand that though he didn’t fully grasp what he was doing, he had made a pact with them — and that that pact had dire spiritual consequences.

You may not be interested in the demonic, but the demonic is interested in you. Don’t ever doubt it.

I know many of you reading this (I’ve sent it to the entire list) are rolling your eyes and thinking that this is more of the crazy woo-woo stuff from Dreher. At my age, and at this point in my life, I really don’t care if people think I’m nuts. I’ve seen too much, and more to the point, the open manifestations of spiritual evil are accelerating. The time to be silent out of fear of embarrassment is past. Something is happening now, some kind of quickening. I don’t know where this is going, but I’m now hearing from, and about, people whose religious life has never had anything consciously to do with spiritual warfare, who are enduring things they never imagined they would see. It’s not parlor tricks, either; it’s things like physical assaults, destruction of once-solid relationships, inexplicably bad things happening to them, and so forth. The kinds of things that Father Gabriele Amorth, the late chief exorcist of Rome, wrote about in his memoirs.

Longtime readers and subscribers know that I believe in these things and have experience these things myself. Just this past January, when I was in Rome for Pope Benedict XVI’s funeral, I stood in my hotel room putting on my jacket when I heard a loud pop behind me. I turned at once to see the metal desk chair lying in a tangled pile on the floor. I had been sitting on it moments earlier, putting on my shoes. It was a new chair, a strong chair. Upon examination, I saw that a bolt about a third of an inch thick had been sheared in two by whatever caused the chair to collapse. Later that day, after the funeral, I was sitting in a restaurant having lunch with two journalist friends, telling them about it, when the unoccupied chair at our table flipped over backwards.

Minor stuff, for sure. An exorcist friend told me later that the enemy simply wanted to let me know that he was present, and that I was on his territory. Another friend, a faithful Catholic journalist, moved away from Rome last year because the spiritually dark atmosphere had become too much to bear. Understand me clearly: the point here is NOT that “the Catholic Church is evil”; the point is that for some reason, the spiritual warfare is intensifying in that place. Things formerly hidden are coming out into the open. Restraints are slackening all over. We are seeing things now that were once unimaginable.

In the speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation just before he was fired, Tucker Carlson said:

… it might be time to start to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching.

So, when I started at Heritage, the presumption was, and this is a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we’re having are rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes.

So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free, and people to be less oppressed or whatever. And so, we’re going to argue about tax rates. And I think higher tax gets us there. I’m a Keynesian and you disagree, you’re an Austrian or whatever, but the objective is the same.

And so, we write our papers, and they write their papers, and may the best papers win.

I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong.

And I should say at the outset, I’m an Episcopalian, so don’t take any theological advice from me because I don’t have any. I grew up in the shallowest faith tradition that’s ever been invented. It’s not even a Christian religion at this point, I say with shame. But I’m just saying this as an observer of what’s going on. There is no way to assess, say, the transgender movement with that mind-set.

Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, “I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.” I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. What? That’s nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? An androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that.

Well, what is that? Well, it’s irrational. If you say, “Well, I think abortion is always bad. Well, I think sometimes it’s necessary.”

That’s a debate I’m familiar with. But if you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice, obviously. It’s not about, oh, a teen girl gets pregnant, and what do we do about that and victims of rape. I get it. Of course, I understand that, and I have compassion for everyone involved.

But when the Treasury secretary stands up and says, “You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.” Well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually. There’s not a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. Not one. I checked. Even the Scandinavians, I’m ashamed to say. It wasn’t just the Meso-Americans, it was everybody. So that’s what that is.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

So, if you want to assess, and I’ll put it in non … And I’ll stop with this. I’ll put it in nonpolitical or rather non-specific theological terms, and just say, if you want to know what’s evil and what’s good, what are the characteristics of those?

And by the way, I think the Athenians would’ve agreed with this. This is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed-upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?

Well, I mean, good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.

And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil. That’s just true. I’m not calling for religious war. Far from it. I’m merely calling for an acknowledgement of what we’re watching, which is not one …

And I’m certainly not backing the Republican Party. I mean, ugh. I’m not making a partisan point at all. I’m just noting what’s super-obvious. Those of us who were in our mid-50s are caught in the past in the way that we think about this. One side’s like, “No, no, I’ve got this idea, and we’ve got this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.”

They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us. It’s just so obvious. It’s completely obvious.

He’s right about that. Last year, an exorcist in Rome told me, about our time, that we should not be surprised by the demonic manifesting so strongly. The spirit world cannot tolerate a vacuum. Normie Christians might prefer that the dark enchantment stay away, and leave them to their peaceful morally decent lives, but that’s not how it works. You can’t pull your covers over your head and make the monster disappear. The exorcist told me that where Christianity establishes strongholds, the demonic declines — and where Christianity declines, the demonic establishes strongholds. This, he said, is what is happening to the post-Christian West.

Take a look at what the Reformed theologian Carl Trueman writes about our time. In his First Things essay, he reacts to the blasphemous art exhibit a lesbian photographer has mounted not in some avant-garde Soho gallery, but in the European Parliament. Here is one of the images: of Jesus Christ, surrounded by gay sadomasochists. I’m sorry to put this image in your head, but you have to see this stuff to recognize its evil:

This, by the way, is the same European superstructure that is trying to punish the Hungarian government for its legal attempts to protect Hungarian children from this kind of propaganda. This is what they celebrate. As Trueman said, try to hang a passage from the Bible in that same space, and see what happens. It is clear who rules us now.

Trueman writes:

The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so.

… Nietzsche noted it takes a long time for societies to grasp the significance of the death of God. But we are surely at that point now. Our artistic class makes that very clear, and so it is time to put these artists in the dock: We get it. You hate Christianity and the Western cultures that it informed. You despise the sexual ethics that it represents. You mock the vision of humanity that it holds forth. That all you can do is resurrect religious imagery merely to knock it down again, or have someone vomit on you as part of entertainment aimed at teenagers, indicates that you actually have nothing to say at all. Those of us who lived through the punk rock era have seen it all before. So what do you now offer as a positive vision of that with which you wish to replace Christianity?

Philip Rieff coined the term deathwork to refer to those works of art that waged war on a culture by using the idioms of the sacred in order to destroy the sacred. It is tempting to accuse the E.U. of promoting just such deathwork in this exhibition of our contemporary world’s sexual fetishes. But that would be to flatter both the artist and the art. This is not a deathwork, for what it mocks is already dead. Rather, it is emblematic of the vacuum that has replaced Western culture.

I agree with him, but I would only offer a minor correction, based on the Roman exorcist’s remark: this is not really a vacuum at all, but the replacement of truth, beauty, and goodness — of holiness and of meaning — with lies, ugliness, evil, sacrilege, and nihilism.

If you have studied the world of the occult at all, you will know that for Satanists, there is something sacrosanct about innocence. To befoul the innocence of children is one of the most “sacred” things those who worship evil can do. This is why the clerical child sex abuse scandal was so diabolical — literally so. It turned God, symbolically, into a monster, and defiled the souls and bodies of innocent children. It is diabolical whenever it happens, and whoever does it, but for ordained priests of God to do these things is the ultimate evil.

And yet, we are now part of a culture that wishes to destroy the minds and bodies of children in a different way. Here is a passage from a recently cancelled Netflix children’s show called “Ridley Jones”. This is for little kids:

Here’s a short clip from a recent episode of the kids cartoon “Transformers,” in which they creators have introduced a non-binary robot. Screenshot:

Don’t let anybody tell you that they aren’t targeting the minds of children. And watch this clip of a teacher-activist from the organization LGBTeach openly saying that teachers should be colonizing the minds of captive child audiences for gender ideology. Screenshot:

It goes on and on and on, these sexual assaults on the minds of children. This is ultimately a war on reality itself. You must know this. You must get this straight in your head. It won’t stop with children. It’s not going away. We are going to be fighting this for the rest of our lives, at least.

Thankfully, there are still a lot of people who have common sense. The Machine is going to be going to work on them. Read on:

A liberal polling group is keeping quiet about the results of its survey that shows voters reject radical gender ideology, while privately hatching plans to 'educate' the public by 'rebranding puberty blockers.'

DailyMail.com gained access to an invite-only webinar of San Francisco-based Change Research, in which they unveiled new poll results that show Americans reject giving hormones and other trans drugs to children.

In the online session, lead pollster Betsy App called the results 'bad news,' saying the team would struggle to 'educate' the public about sex-reassignment for kids. She said it was time for 'rebranding puberty blockers' with a less-divisive term.

'I want to give us all a reality check,' App told the online session.

'We are facing an uphill battle when it comes to voters' fundamental beliefs about the relationship between sex and gender.'

Change Research had already declined our requests to see the poll results. They initially invited DailyMail.com to join the webinar, but then uninvited us. We attended anyway, after registering with a personal email address.

At the start of Friday's 30-minute session, the group's marketing chief Molly McInerney said they would 'not be making these results widely available' and urged attendees not to 'share these findings.'

Nevertheless, DailyMail.com is releasing the results because they're in the public interest.

More:

Winning the argument, [the pollster] said, involved changing language. 'Gender affirming care,' she said, was a 'great term that we should continue using' because it resonated with the public.

Not so for puberty blockers, she added.

'One of the key next steps is rebranding puberty blockers,' said App.

'This is a term that's not doing us any favors.'

Watch, folks: the terms are going to change in the media soon. You have been warned. This is what they do, and how they do it. Remember when “sex change surgery” became “gender confirmation surgery”? He who controls the language controls people’s perceptions of reality, though not reality itself.

Think about how fast things have gone! Only eleven years ago, the Democratic president, Barack Obama, came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Everybody knew he was fine with it, but to openly affirm it was seen as a big deal. The President of the United States, wow. That seems like a century ago. Things have accelerated so quickly that now, a rising number of Democrat-led states are passing laws that permit the government to seize children from parents unwilling to transition them sexually, and then facilitate the mutilation of these children’s minds and bodies.

The belief that the state has prior authority over children is something straight out of Communism. I’m serious: read what Alexandra Kollontai, a leading Bolshevik, wrote in 1920 about the necessity to smash traditional family norms. This in particular:

Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. … Communist society considers the social education of the rising generation to be one of the fundamental aspects of the new life. The old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the “new person”. The playgrounds, gardens, homes and other amenities where the child will spend the greater part of the day under the supervision of qualified educators will, on the other hand, offer an environment in which the child can grow up a conscious communist who recognises the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.

In the very same essay, Kollontai denies that the Communist state is trying to destroy the family, even though the entire essay proposes exactly that. Sound familiar? You must surely be tired of hearing me say it, but this is exactly why people who came to the West escaping Soviet communism say that they are now witnessing the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism. This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies: to share their warning, and their advice for how to build networks of resistance.

There are brave atheists and other secular people — I’m thinking of Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying, but there are others — who are standing firm against the new totalitarianism. But my tribe is the Christian tribe, and we Christians know that, as St. Paul put it in his letter to the Church in Ephesus:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

This is not just a metaphor; it’s literal truth. Christians who are fully aware of this also know they must avail themselves of spiritual weaponry and strategies. The battle, as St. Paul tells us, is ultimately spiritual. What we are seeing now is an extremely potent move by wealthy and powerful people, many of whom may not fully understand what they are doing, to overturn all natural order. It is strictly Luciferian. A few years back, a young man who left Aleister Crowley’s sex-magick cult told me how jarring it was to realize that all the things that they celebrated within the cult were things that were not true when Crowley first taught them in the early 20th century, but have now become entirely mainstream. A contemporary Satanic high priest has said, "What we invoke in Satan is a projection of the best in ourselves — a symbol of pride, liberty and individualism.” That’s one way to put it.

One of you readers said in the comments yesterday that you feel overwhelmed by all this bad news, and you want to be left alone to live your life. I get it. I do too. Who doesn’t? But we are not given that luxury, not in these times. What you must not do, though, is obsess over this stuff, or give it more power than it actually has. One important part of resisting it is leaning strongly into what is good, true, and beautiful — especially faith, family, and friendship. As the late Vaclav Benda taught in a political context, if you are powerless to make a difference through normal political channels, that doesn’t mean you have the right to sit quietly and complain. Start building a “parallel polis” — a small society that lives alongside the mainstream, but that tenders within it teaching, art, music, and practices that build up life, and that spread light. This is the Benedict Option. Writing yesterday in The American Conservative, Frank DeVito shows that unlike the people who are locked into a false either/or dichotomy, he really understands the Benedict Option. Excerpt:

This is not a mere abstract analysis of negative cultural trends. These are real things taking place in our own neighborhoods and towns. They involve schools and libraries supported by our tax dollars. And they directly involve our own kids. This is where Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option becomes less an option and more a necessary reality. It is not a question of whether to adopt some form of the Benedict Option, but to realize that we already live in a culture that leaves us no other choice.

This does not mean we ought to disengage, but it does mean we must opt out of quite a bit. We should fight for school boards, but we should not send our kids to schools where satanists and drag queens have a place in forming our children. We should address religious leaders about doctrinal weakness or heresy, but we should not attend woke churches and services that endanger the well-being of our families’ souls. We should continue pushing the conservative political movement to embrace bold religious positions, but we should not put too much stock in politics to come to the aid of religion in decline.

The answer to the question, “Do we engage in the political and cultural battles of the day, or do we opt out and form alternate communities?” must be “both.” We cannot cede the culture to the destructive forces at work. We must do battle at every political level, from local school districts to state capitols to Washington, D.C. But in the meantime, we need to keep our kids—and our own souls—out of the destructive culture of woke schools, woke churches, and the toxic smartphones in our pockets. We need to build communities that will form sane people who will one day, please God, continue the work of restoring a healthy, thriving Christian culture. If we have become a weak minority incapable of stopping the bad legal rulings and policy decisions plaguing us, we can keep fighting nonetheless, and sow the seeds for a future generation to rise up and win the fight.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Like the brave bands of brothers and sisters behind the Iron Curtain who resisted Communism, we have no assurance that we will live to see the defeat of the Lie, and of the one denounced by Christ as “a liar, and the Father of Lies”. But we have real hope in the assurance that the victory has already been won. Our solemn duty is to resist in our time and our place, and to suffer, if it comes to that, for the sake of the Truth, which we Christians believe became incarnate as a man. But listen, if you are not even aware of the true nature of the war we are in, your effectiveness in the battle is going to be limited, and it might even be that you are defeated before you even began to fight.

I am eager to hear from you all. Only paid subscribers can comment, though. Please consider taking out a subscription. It’s only five dollars per month, or fifty dollars per year, and you get at least five, but often more, posts per week (this one is the sixth). The comments section is pretty great too.