TABLET - Americans and Their Demons As a sense of spiritual warfare takes over the country, people of faith are reacquainting themselves with the idea that evil personified walks among us by Maggie Phillips September 12, 2025

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Americans and Their Demons

As a sense of spiritual warfare takes over the country, people of faith are reacquainting themselves with the idea that evil personified walks among us

by  Maggie Phillips

September 12, 2025

Religious Literacy in America

Tablet talks about Judaism a lot, but sometimes we like to change the subject. Maggie Phillips covers religious communities across the U.S.—from Christians to Muslims, Hindus to Baha’i, Jehovah’s Witnesses to pagans—to find out what they’re talking about. 

See all in Religious Literacy in America →︎

Icon of 'The Ladder of Divine Ascent,' 12th century, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt

Alamy Stock Photo

After the shooting at a Catholic school Mass in Minneapolis made headlines around the world, the word “demonic” was deployed in several quarters to describe the senseless horror. It’s one of those words, like “senseless” and “horror,” that people understandably reach for in the face of incomprehensible evil.

For many, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. In America, a lot of people—maybe an increasing number of people—believe in actual demons. According to a 2024 Real Clear Opinion Research poll, 70% of U.S. adults believe in hell, and roughly the same percentage believe in the devil. The most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study, which has a wider sample size and rigorous methodology, found that 55% of American adults believed in hell.

Whether or not the ranks of Americans who believe in demons has gone up in recent years, they’re definitely interested in demons. “K Pop Demon Hunters” is the most popular Netflix film of all time. The internet rumor mill is churning out theories that Labubus, the worldwide toy phenoms with the malevolent grins and the hefty price tags, are actually a stalking horse for the Mesopotamian demon in The Exorcist. Recently, RFK Jr.’s former running mate and recent Christian convert Nicole Shanahan published a lengthy post on X musing over whether Burning Man is demonic.

Four years ago, I interviewed evangelical lightning rod David French and satanic pregnancies came up. Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser at the time, had recently attracted some controversy when she prayed for “satanic pregnancies to miscarry.” French had explained in his newsletter that White was referring “not to human pregnancies and human wombs, but rather of satanic ideas and plans ‘birthed’ in the spiritual realm.” She was expressing a real belief in something that Christians call spiritual warfare, which contends that there are in fact real angels and demons fighting actual battles on the spiritual plane, battles that have visible, temporal consequences.

Whatever you believe about the power of prayer, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an act of hope.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/americans-demons-spiritual-warfare

This view is not unique to Pentecostals like White; it is also a view within the Annunciation Catholic Church and School. In fact, it’s a belief system that dates back to the beginning of Christianity, and also appears in Jewish texts immediately predating the New Testament.

There are scriptural grounds for Christians to view the world as a battleground for spiritual warfare. This imagery appears in a letter attributed to the apostle Paul, written to the early Christian community in Ephesus. Paul entreats the Ephesians to “put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the craftiness of the devil,” and reminds them that their “struggle is not with flesh and blood,” but “with the spiritual [powers] of wickedness in the heavenly realms,” the weapon against which, Paul concludes, is “the word of God.” The function of the devil, and by extension the demonic, is to lead astray, pulling the believer away from God through deceit.

The Gospel according to Matthew describes Jesus being taken to the wilderness to be tested by the devil, where Jesus chases him away with the word of the scriptures. This episode and its setting in the wilderness inspired a monastic movement and an accompanying genre of spiritual struggle against evil spirits grew with the monastic movement of the third and fourth centuries. In this literature, demons are often personifications of human passions, such as anger, pride, listlessness or despair—all meant to pull the ascetic away from his devotion to God.

But the conception of the demonic is not exclusively internal—a reflection of our own passions. It comes in different forms. Hence, Christian literature emphasizes the shifty nature of demons, designed to deceive the believer. Drawing again on Paul’s letters, where he exhorts against the deceitfulness of false apostles, reminding the Corinthians that “Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light,” the early monastic literature warns that demons “are treacherous, and are ready to change themselves into all forms and assume all appearances.” They even “recall the words of Scripture,” and “feign the speech of holy men, that by their similarity they may deceive.” And to what end? “That they may carry off the simple to despair.”

This is not to say that the Church didn’t believe that these were supernatural beings. The late Pope Francis, for all his characterizations as a postmodern squish, spoke frequently during his papacy about the devil, and the danger of denying his existence. The pope, who did not own a television, cast an especially wary eye on modern technology, saying that it provided “countless means to give an opportunity to the devil.”

Just months before his death, the late pontiff spoke once more on this theme, lamenting that “at a cultural level, it is held that [the devil] simply does not exist,” and instead is viewed as a “metaphor.” The late pontiff added that “superstition” offers a gateway for the devil to enter people’s lives in a world “teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritualism, astrologers, sellers of spells and amulets, and unfortunately with real satanic sects.”

It is doubtful Francis was aware of the brisk business self-described witches do shilling spells, manifestations, and curses on Etsy. Some Mariners fans attribute the team’s recent losing-streak reversal to the so-called “Etsy witches.” But the phenomenon isn’t always wholesome. Just two days before Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah, Jezebel ran an article detailing how one of their writers solicited the services of a witch via the online makers market to put a curse on Kirk that would “make everyone hate him.”

It is not hard to understand why believing Christians might look at this story and the confusing and very online mélange of influences on the Minneapolis shooter and conclude that something diabolical was at work. The devil’s endgame, Pope Francis often emphasized, is to separate us from God, leading us to despair. Although she did not name it, internet spelunker Katherine Dee diagnosed a “deeper pathology” in our culture after the Minneapolis church shooting. She called it “a darkness that stalks joy,” an “inability to let anything remain unexploited,” including—especially—innocence.

Francis was hardly the first pope of the modern era to take the demonic seriously. The previous Pope Leo, the 13th one from whom the current 14th took his name, introduced the St. Michael Prayer in the late 19th century, and requested its recitation after Mass. This very popular Catholic prayer asks the archangel Michael for “protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil,” and to “cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

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The practice of saying the prayer at the end of Mass fell off for a bit in the 20th century, but at some point in my adult life, I noticed it coming back. I wrote about the prayer for Tablet during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. St. Michael’s Lent, a medieval practice of fasting and penance leading up to his feast day on Sept. 29, has also been making a comeback.

In fact, our current demonic cultural moment has a decidedly retro feel. It recalls the 1970s, when the controversial Vatican II-skeptic and ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin wrote extensively about exorcisms and the demonic, claiming to be an exorcist himself. Martin rose to celebrity with his 1975 book Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans, just a few years after the blockbuster success of The Exorcist in theaters.

His book was released the same year as the Stephen King book Salem’s Lot, in which the priest Father Callahan mourns the Catholic Church’s pivot away from waging war against evil and toward addressing material social ills. Callahan yearns for the black-and-white of a battle against Satan yet is reluctantly forced into the conclusion that there was no true all-caps evil in the world, just lower-case evils. What he misses is that the grand evil he’s been looking for, which takes the shape of a vampire, has actually been exploiting man’s smaller problems to a strategic end: the material and ultimately spiritual destruction of an entire town. At the peak of 1970s malaise and the crisis of confidence, readers ate it up. Salem’s Lot was a bestseller.

Harking back to this demonically inspired decade, HBO released a Salem’s Lot reboot just last year.The 2020s even has its own celebrity exorcists. Father Chad Ripperger, who authored a book of “deliverance prayers” in the spiritual warfare tradition has been popular in traditionalist and a few mainstream Catholic circles for some time. Like Martin, he has attracted criticism from some within his own faith, as well as defenders. In 2023, Business Insider ran a piece from a Catholic priest and trained exorcist describing his experiences with the supernatural.

The priest, Father Vincent Lampert, explains that an exorcist’s belief in the demonic does not make it their default assumption. People who come to him for exorcisms must first have undergone both psychiatric and medical evaluations. An intake questionnaire follows. Father Callahan would probably scoff at such bureaucratic banality but, Lampert explains, “I’m trained to be a skeptic.” He writes that true demonic possession is real but rare. It is perhaps an indicator of the uptick in interest in the demonic that Lampert’s local news station recently aired a story reporting that someone has found it remunerative to impersonate Lampert, charging money for exorcisms and selling rosaries and holy water online.

Chasing demons in the 21st century is by no means exclusive to Catholic priests. Take former NYPD cop Chris DeFlorio, for example. After retiring from the force, DeFlorio and his wife, a former paramedic, became full-time “demonologists,” leaning on the works of Martin, Ripperger, and others.

Since even the clergy are trained to remain skeptical, it isn’t difficult to see why nonbelievers might dismiss those who attribute bad things to invisible demons as overly credulous. For secular skeptics, heaven and earth contain nothing beyond the wonders that have been dreamed of in our public health apparatus and research universities. But science and technology continue to present us with fresh ethical and moral challenges—AI friendships, fetal genetic optimization that feels awfully close to eugenics for some, how to address widespread pediatric chronic disease—not to mention the faithful four horsemen: plague, famine, war, and death. As institutional trust crumbles and a siloed media landscape populated by grifters and charlatans makes it harder to know what’s true, the sudden emergence of a credible blueprint for a stable future seems unlikely.

What the scoffers and the cynical exploiters miss is the unspoken hope, even in such a fragmented and uncertain world, that often underlies a belief in demons. People who are worried about demons usually also believe that they can be defeated. After all, more Americans believe in angels and heaven than the devil and hell.

This is what makes Jen Psaki and Gavin Newsom so tin-eared when they mock the “thoughts and prayers” crowd mere hours after a mass shooting. Just moments after children were killed at prayer, their defeatism implicitly placed them on the side of the shooter who had scrawled “Where is your God?” on a gun magazine—not the side of the believers who at least yearn for something more hopeful.

Speaking in the aftermath of the Annunciation School shooting, Twin Cities Archbishop Bernard Hebda referenced an African proverb: “When you pray, move your feet.” As the church bell rang, Hebda reminded everyone that this was an action-oriented call to prayer. “We have to recognize that it’s through prayer and through that prayer of the feet, through that action, that we can indeed make a difference. That has to be the source of our hope.”

Christianity didn’t just establish monasteries where people cloistered themselves away, devoting the rest of their lives to constant prayer for the salvation of the world. It also established hospitals and schools. St. Benedict, who wrote the rule followed by monastic religious communities all over the world right up until today, had as his motto Ora et Labora—prayer and work. As the saying goes, after all, idle hands are the devil’s plaything.

The partisan talking points that have emerged after the recent horrors in Minnesota and Utah make it clear that we have our work cut out for us. As for where prayer fits into this project, the skeptics can dismiss it and the doubters can scoff at the demons it’s meant to combat. The faithful will continue sending their entreaties into the heavens. But whatever you believe about the power of prayer, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an act of hope, especially amid a culture of growing darkness and spoiled innocence. We disregard the hope that undergirds that belief at our peril.