It’s Not Always Demons - Christians and Charismatics, Think Again

Dialogue with the theologian Trent Horn

They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. But among some Christians, he’s accomplished another great trick. He’s convinced them that he and his demonic minions are around every corner. Now, scripture speaks of your adversary, the devil who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So it’s foolish to act like the devil doesn’t exist. However, Christians can develop unhealthy behaviors and even put themselves in spiritual danger if they start to obsess over the demonic and see it in things where it’s not present. So in today’s episode, I have a simple point I want to get across alongside my friend and colleague Jimmy Aiken. It’s not always demons. What prompted this episode was a friend of mine who sent me images of a handbook from a deliverance ministry that contained a long list of activities associated with the demonic.

Now, some of the items on the list definitely put you in danger of demons like devil worship. Others like abortion could have a connection to the demonic, but even if they didn’t in a particular case, these are still bad things, but some of these activities were neither demonic nor bad. They included things like deja vu. Have we covered this topic before? Or martial arts like karate, judo, and juujitsu. Now, there may be a few gyms that promote eastern ancestor worship, but there’s nothing demonic about learning martial arts in general. I even have a T-shirt with Jesus putting the devil in a choke hold that says, Jesus always has your back. My colleague Jimmy Aiken co-hosts a popular podcast called Jimmy Aiken’s Mysterious World. I’ve had him on the show before to discuss all kinds of weird stuff because these oddities also fascinate me. So I thought it’d be helpful to interview him in this episode to flesh out our message that it’s not always demons. Jimmy, what are your general thoughts on over attributing things we observe to demonic forces?

Jimmy:

Howdy, Trent. Very happy to be with you today. The basic answer is that we need to find balance on the question of demons, just like we need to find balance on every other question, demons are real and we don’t want to minimize their activity in the world, but we also don’t want to maximize it. We don’t want to attribute more to them than they actually can claim credit for. In fact, historically in Christian theology, the devil is just one of the three sources of sin. The classical sources of sin are reckoned as the world meaning the bad example. Other people set the flesh, meaning our own interior disorder, desires and then the devil. And so if you attributed every single sin that everybody commits directly to the devil, you’re really giving him too much credit. And the same thing is true about other phenomena. In episode 180 8 of Jimmy Aiken’s Mysterious World, I took a look at the question of whether it’s always demons, and I concluded that we should not leap to the demon hypothesis to explain something without evidence.

Now, if you got evidence for a demon being involved, then you need to pay attention to that evidence. But you can’t just rationally leap to this hypothesis as an explanation unless you really do have evidence of a demon. And to make the point of how serious this is, I actually started the episode with like six or seven instances where people and mostly small children were killed during at-Home Exorcisms. Now, these were not professionally done exorcisms, but there are people out there who are so afraid of demons that if their 2-year-old is acting up as two year olds or want to do, they will say, oh, my 2-year-old must have a demon, and what we need to do is hold my child underwater under hot water until the demon leaves. And that’s resulted in a bunch of deaths. In fact, all of the deaths that I cited in this episode had been just within a two year period.

So this is something that is a real danger to human life. The people falsely thinking that demons are involved in trying to take steps to deal with it. Also, as I point out in the episode, if you attributed everything you don’t understand to demons, that would’ve blocked the development of science because what science does, including medicine, because what science does is it looks at unknown phenomena and it tries to find explanations for ’em. And if you just attribute everything you don’t know to a demon and say, oh, well we can’t have anything to do with this, then you’re not going to be doing science. You’re not going to be doing medicine. And that’s going to have a direct cost in human lives too, because as medicine is developed and science is developed, we’ve been able to help people survive in a way that we weren’t able to before.

I’d much rather have modern medicine than say the medicine that they had 2000 years ago. So we really need to be careful before we just say something’s a demon. It’s reckless. And frankly, it makes Christians look paranoid when people propose demons as an explanation for something without having actual evidence. Now, like I said, if you’ve got real evidence that a demon is involved, by all means, you need to pay attention to it. But we need to be balanced on this question and not just reflexively leap to the demon hypothesis just because something is unknown or scary.

Trent:

Let me go through a few other examples of where Catholics rush to judgment when it comes to the demonic. First. Jimmy, I know you’ve thought about aliens and unidentified flying objects or UFOs for quite a while. Could aliens exist or are unexplained reports about aliens and UFOs? Are these just demons?

Jimmy:

So these days you have quite a number of Christians both in the Protestant community and in the Catholic community who have been saying things like aliens are just demons or UFOs are just demons. Well, you need evidence if you want to claim that. Now, in terms of the Catholic take on things, the Catholic church does not have a problem with the idea that there might be life elsewhere in the universe or that it might be intelligent life or even that it might visit here. Those are all open questions and people have proposed arguments regarding those questions. Personally, if I had to guess, I’d feel pretty confident there’s probably life of some form elsewhere in the universe. If I had to guess, I’d probably guess that at least some of that life is intelligent because God made an enormously huge universe and it’s hard to imagine that he would’ve made something so big with no life in it and no other creatures to appreciate what he’s done.

Are they coming here? Well, I’ve looked at a lot of evidence. I’m not yet convinced, but I’m open. I have looked at the question of what the implications would be if it turns out that there’s intelligent life in the universe. That’s episode 55 of Jimmy Aikens mysterious world where you can go and listen to that. It’s at mysterious fm slash five five When it comes to the idea that residual FO reports. Now, these are ones where you’ve looked into natural causes and none of the natural explanations fit what people are seeing. And natural causes include things like hoaxes and stuff. So we’re not talking about hoaxes, we’re not talking about misidentification of terrestrial phenomena or secret government technology. But if you’re looking at genuinely anomalous UFOs, the idea that they’re all just aliens is not well supported by the evidence. Now, could some of them be alien?

I mean, could some of ’em be demons? Well, sure, some of ’em could be demons. That’s a possibility. But as always, you need evidence if you want to propose a demon in a particular case. You can’t just assume that. Now, some in the Catholic community have tried to argue, for example, that the catechism of the Catholic church requires that only humans are made in the image of God, and therefore there can’t be anywhere else in the universe, any other intelligent creatures that are also made in the image of God. But frankly, they’re misreading the catechism. If you look at the very next sentence after the one that talks about how among all visible creatures, only man has the image of God, it clarifies that it’s talking about creatures here on earth. So it’s not really addressing anything else anywhere else in the universe. So people who make this argument are unfortunately, they’re misreading the catechism.

Now, some folks will try to argue that all UFOs of the truly anomalous kind must be demons are in the Protestant community, and they try to argue based on a variety of different factors because they’re not quoting the catechism of the Catholic church. And I’ve looked into those arguments. That’s in episode 2 81 of Jimmy Aikens Mysterious World, which is at mysterious fm slash 2 8 1. So people can check that out, but frankly, their arguments are not conclusive, and frankly, a lot of their arguments are not even impressive. One of the things that I would say is it’s possible that some UFOs are demons, but you need actual evidence of demonic activity in a particular case. You cannot just assume it. People

Trent:

Also sometimes claim to have seen ghosts and spirits. Is it possible to encounter the ghost of a deceased human being or are the sightings that we can’t explain? Are these just the work of demons?

Jimmy:

So once again, demons are a possibility in various apparitions as these are known. We often associate the term apparition in the Catholic community with apparitions of saints, but it also applies to any kind of appearance. That’s what an apparition means, an appearance of a spirit. It could be a human spirit, it could be an angelic spirit, it could be a demonic spirit. And as we’re told in scripture, the devil does impersonate an angel of light. So it’s possible you could have an apparition of the devil or one of his minions, but you need evidence to propose that what we read in scripture is not that we are to assume that any apparition of a spirit is a demon. We’re told instead to test the spirits. This is one John four. We’re supposed to test them and find out whether they’re being truthful or not. So we’re not supposed to run away from spirits.

We’re not supposed to refuse to talk to them. We’re supposed to test them. And if you get evidence that you’re talking to a demon, well then you want to sever contact. But it may not be a demon. It may be a genuine good angel, it might be a saint. Or in the classic traditional Catholic understanding, it might be a ghost. It might be the soul of a human being who is in purgatory. Very frequently you’ll hear about apparitions who will ask for forgiveness for things they did during life, or they’ll ask for prayers or they’ll be trying to close up, tie up some loose ends from their life that they had. And there’s nothing inconsistent with the Christian faith. Now, of course, in looking at any ghost encounter or proposed ghost encounter, we need to also think about natural explanations because there are a lot of natural explanations that could apply in various apparitional situations.

There could be hoaxes, there could be misidentification of natural phenomena like your water pipes are banging because they’ve got air bubbles in them, and you think that’s a spirit when really it’s just your plumbing system and there’s people’s imagination and things like that. So we always need to look for natural explanations, and frankly, we need to look for them first because natural phenomena are more common than supernatural phenomena. So we always want to look to the natural first and see if that will explain a report. But if it doesn’t explain a report, then okay, we have a rational basis for saying we are genuinely dealing with the spirit here. And the next question is what kind of spirit is it? And you got to test it to find out the answer to that. You don’t run away from it, you don’t refuse to talk to it. You do the testing that scripture says we need to do. If you’d like an example of a really interesting historical ghost encounter that happened in a Catholic context, I’d refer you to the wizard clip, which was an early Revolutionary War era, period apparition here in the United States of an apparent spirit in purgatory. I did an episode of Mysterious World on it, it’s episode one 15, and you can find it by going to mysterious fm slash 1 1 15.

Trent:

On the list I showed you all earlier, there were some items that some of my listeners may associate with the demonic. These include role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons or fantasy novels like Harry Potter and even heavy metal music. In a previous audio episode of my podcast, which I’ll link to below, I show that many of these claims are unfounded. For example, some people claim Harry Potter is demonic because it contains real spells and names of demons, but the names in the book are just riffs on mythology or common English names. The claim that the spells in Harry Potter are real, come from a news article claiming that a woman in Spain tried to cast one of the spells in Harry Potter and burned her house down, but she didn’t magically burn down her house. She tried to boil a concoction on her stove and it caught fire. Now, when it comes to heavy metal music, some of it may be bad or even demonic, but just as the existence of demonic music doesn’t mean all music is bad.

The existence of demonic heavy metal music doesn’t make all heavy metal music bad. In fact, there’s a very popular Christian heavy metal band called Striper who had an album called To Hell with the Devil. And when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons, this is just a fantasy game. Any game can become dangerous if you add dangerous elements to it, but this particular game doesn’t have those elements. As a part of it, I worry that if Catholics see the demonic in everything, then they’re going to turn into a caricature that was previously reserved for Protestant fundamentalists like Jack Chick whose comic on Dungeons and Dragons describes the game way Debbie thought playing Dungeons and Dragons was fun until it destroyed her friend. Jimmy, how should Christians draw the line between fantasy play and literature and activities that are demonic?

Jimmy:

So it got a funny story about Harry Potter because I’m an apologist. I needed to read the first Harry Potter book because there are all these claims about, oh, this is demonic, and it’s got real demonic spells in it and real names of demons. So I read the first book, and frankly I wasn’t impressed. I don’t think it’s well written, but it did not have real demonic spells in it or real names of demons or anything like that. That’s just not true. At the time, I was substituted as a Latin tutor for some homeschool students, and I went to class one night and I took a spell from Harry Potter. It was an eyeglass repair spell that one of the characters uses, and it was basically Oculus repair to, and that was supposed to repair your eyeglasses. And so I assigned the students parse this for me, tell me what Latin words are in use here and what forms they’re taking and so forth.

And they started thinking about it because Oculus OSE sounds Latin, and they started working on it and they realized they couldn’t parse it. And I said, that’s right. You can’t parse this. This is not only not a real spell, it’s not even real Latin. So JK Rowland did not use real spells or even real Latin, she just made stuff up. It sounded kind of Latin, but it wasn’t. Now in terms of figuring out where the line is in fantasy play and fantasy literature versus the demonic, I would say that the basic criterion is, well, are you invoking demons or not? Are you calling on spirits, especially demonic spirits? If you’re not invoking demons, then you’re not invoking demons. And so you don’t got to be paranoid about what’s going to happen with demons. If I read this book or what’s going to happen with demons if I play this game, is there a hypothetical possibility that a demon might randomly encounter you and do something?

Well, sure, but that’s something that’s part of all life. You could be going to the supermarket and a demon might randomly encounter you and randomly try doing something. But we have God’s protection and we don’t need to be paranoid about such things. The bottom line, if you’re not invoking demons, then you’re not invoking demons and don’t worry about it. Trust God. Say you’re St. Michael Prayer and move on in life. I’d also point out that as many people have pointed out that there are works of Christian fantasy literature like JR Tolkien’s, Lord of the Rings, or Cs Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and we don’t want to write off those and say, oh, this is demonic. And we similarly shouldn’t write off other works of fantasy as demonic just because there works of fantasy. There’s in as always, unless you have evidence of a demon, you don’t got evidence of a demon. And most of the time in these situations you don’t.

Trent:

One argument I’ve heard online is that these supposedly harmless activities are demonic because certain exorcists have asked demons about them during exorcisms, and the demons say they use these supposedly harmless activities to possess people. Now, right off the bat, I’m skeptical we can trust anything a demon tells us, but I’ve been told that exorcists can say a certain prayer that forces demons to tell the truth. Jimmy, is that true?

Jimmy:

No, that is not true. There is no such prayer. It is not in either of the rites of exorcism. It’s not in the 1614 rite of exorcism. It’s not in the 1998 rite of exorcism. And if there were such prayer, it ought to be there. There ought to be some prayer in there that says, I compel you by the power of Jesus Christ to tell me the truth. And there is no such prayer. One of the most popular recent exorcists, and he sometimes has a bigger reputation than people attribute a little too much to him than they ought. But one of the most popular recent exorcists is Gabriel Amorth. He passed on a few years ago, but he wrote a number of books. And in his books, he acknowledges that demons lie even about their own names. They will claim to be someone that they’re not.

They’ll claim to be one demon or even a living human soul, deceased human soul. And they’ll lie about that. He says they’ll also lie about the date that they’re going to leave. And those are among the questions that the 1614 Rite even recommends asking. Now, the 1614 Rite has a strictly limited number of questions, and they include things like, what’s the demon’s name and when will they leave? But Amir acknowledges that they’ll lie about those things. They will lie about their name, they will lie about the date they’re going to leave and stuff like that. Even the 1614 right itself acknowledges that they can lie about their names. And it says, do not pay attention. Don’t ask anything but these certain basic questions and don’t pay attention to anything they say on any other subject because there are a bunch of lying liars who lie.

And even on the questions that it does talk about asking, it acknowledges they can lie on those. So there is not some magical compulsion that God puts them under to tell the truth. They were liars from the beginning, as Jesus said, and so you just can’t trust what they say. Interestingly, the 1998 right makes no provision for asking demons any questions at all. It’s just get ’em out. Don’t bother talking with them. Just get them out. Say the prayers, free the possessed person, and don’t worry about what demons would say about stuff. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of recent exorcists who I’ve seen reporting information that demons allegedly said during an exorcism as if it’s true. I was watching one Exorcist who’s very popular reporting an insight about the Virgin Mary that he said a demon had told him, and he was reporting it as if it was true.

It’s like, dude, this guy is working for the father of lies. Don’t believe anything. It says, if you think that you’ve got a valid insight about the Virgin Mary, great, but verified on independent grounds, don’t go presenting it to a popular audience because a demon told you. In fact, there’s a historical danger that not a lot of folks know about that comes up when priests start listening to what demons say. We have all these magical textbooks from the Middle Ages, emirs and stuff like that, that contain spells and things like that, and writes for summoning demons, which was considered a form of necromancy. Well, okay, what language? Those books are written in Latin, and you know who spoke Latin priests and people often don’t realize it, but if you study the history of this area, the people who were using those magical textbooks were priests.

This was part of what’s known in scholarship as the clerical ne romantic underground. And the way it started was with priests doing exorcisms on people, and they started hearing this occult knowledge, hidden knowledge from the demons in the course of the exorcisms. And they thought, this is really cool. I’m getting this occult knowledge, and this is stage one necromancy. Neri involves getting a revelation in Greek man from someone who’s not living necros, and that included demons. So if you look at the classic medieval definitions of necromancy, like Thomas Aquinas’s definition and so forth, or isador of Seville’s definition in his etymologies, Neman includes talking to demons. And this is stage one of that where you’re talking to what you know is a demon and you’re accepting information that it gives you as if it’s true. So that’s stage one. But then some of the priests got the idea it would be even better if nobody had to get possessed, if I could sum it up a demon and no one gets possessed, but I use the power of God to sum it up a demon and compel it to tell me the truth.

I can still get the occult knowledge, the hidden knowledge I want, and no one gets possessed, and it’s going to glorify God because I’m using the power of Jesus Christ to compel evil, to do good, and it’ll be great. And this was an argument that was seriously being advanced. So this is stage two clerical Neri, Nancy, we’ve moved beyond just the possessions to now we’re actually summoning the demons to get the hidden knowledge out of them. And people would argue that this glorifies God and therefore it’s a good thing to do. No. Okay, St. Thomas Aquinas argued, no, these guys are not truthful. You cannot make them tell you the truth. This is not glorifying God. You don’t want to have anything to do with these creatures. So don’t do this. And frankly, I’m on St. Thomas Aquinas’s side, but stage two wasn’t where this ended.

Because demons have the ability to affect things in the world. They can cause illnesses, they can cause people to die. Even some of these clerical Neri answers got the idea. I’ve summed up this demon to give me this hidden knowledge. Maybe I can get it to do a few other things for me, like get me a promotion or smite my enemies or influence my bishop, or stuff like that. And so this is stage three clerical Neri. Well, that’s one of the things that led to the 1614 rite of exorcism because previous to 1614, the church did not have, the Latin church did not have a single consolidated, right? There were a whole bunch of different rights that were composed by different people. In fact, you didn’t even have to be a priest to do an exorcism. You could just be a holy person. But eventually the church clamped down on this, and one of the reasons for that was to shut down the clerical romantic underground. But today we see it re-emerging because we see pop culture exorcists reporting information that they apparently got from a demon in an exorcism. And that’s stage one clerical necromancy, and I haven’t done it yet, but I’m going to be doing a future episode of Mysterious World about that.

Trent:

Finally, I want to caution viewers about inordinate curiosity regarding demons in the demonic. We shouldn’t pretend demons don’t exist, but I worry that just as some people use the good of seeking prayers as an excuse for gossip, other people use the good of opposing the demonic as an excuse to indulge unhealthy curiosity about demons. I’m especially concerned about this because on some Christian channels, the most popular videos they host are the ones about demons and the demonic. So I really want to thank Jimmy Aiken for coming on the show today. Jimmy, where can people go to learn more about your take on demons as well as other strange and mysterious parts of our world?

All should think and glorify God more than the demon