Source: Huffington Post
By Bruce Wilson; Writes on religion and politics
Are Americans becoming less religious? While church affiliation is probably declining, don’t expect the atheist revolution anytime soon:
Over one half (63 percent, to be exact) of young Americans 18-29 years old now believe in the notion that invisible, non-corporeal entities called “demons” can take partial or total control of human beings, revealed an October 2012 Public Policy Polling survey that also showed this belief isn’t declining among the American population generally; it’s growing.
Throughout last year, triumphal atheists and secularists had celebrated (and many of the religiously-inclined bemoaned) a 2012 survey, from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which showed an increase, especially among young adults, in the number of Americans who declared no specific religious affiliation: a chunk of the population now up to almost 20 percent according to the survey. These Americans were dubbed the “nones.”
The Pew survey finding was interpreted by some observers (who missed the fine print) as indicating that Americans are becoming less religious. But the survey didn’t necessarily indicate that — it simply showed that Americans, young Americans especially, are dropping out of organized religion.
Here’s where it gets interesting: the Pew survey also showed that a whopping 85 percent of those “nones,” Americans with no specific religious affiliation — who comprise almost twenty percent of the overall population — nonetheless had spiritual or supernatural beliefs and, as the October 2012 Public Policy Polling survey (link to PDF of survey results) revealed, that included belief in the reality of demons.
In the lead-up to the 2012 election liberal media pounced on the PPP survey’s revelation that 68 percent of Republicans evinced belief in demon possession. The finding was ridiculed as scandalous and characteristic of an alleged Republican Party disconnect from reality.
Now, PPP was among the top five polling firms in terms of accuracy in forecasting the 2012 election results, so there is good reason to take the survey finding seriously.
But critics of the GOP who used the survey to attack Republicans typically missed or ignored the fact that PPP’s survey also showed that 49 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independent voters believed in demon possession too. In other words, a majority of Americans surveyed believed in demon possession.
And, PPP’s survey revealed another astonishing fact; belief in demon possession seems to be growing.
While only 44% of Americans over 65 years of age surveyed by PPP believed in demon possession, 57% of Americans 47-65 did and, among the youngest group surveyed, Americans 18-29, 63% believed in demon possession. The demographic trend line seems obvious.
Just to make things perfectly clear, the Public Policy Polling survey was “Halloween-centric” — also polling beliefs about ghosts and haunted houses. So it was unlikely that respondents thought the survey’s question about demons, “Do you think it’s possible for people to become possessed by demons, or not?,” was asking about symbolic or figurative demons.
The PPP survey was asking respondents whether or not people could literally be possessed by evil spirits, in the style of actress Linda Blair, from the 1973 horror filmThe Exorcist.
We’ve been here before, of course:
During the 14th Century, in Germany, the populations of entire Jewish towns were massacred for an alleged Jewish role in spreading plague and, more generally, partnering with the devil. The massacres didn’t stop the plague.
And consider the Salem Witch Trials: in that notorious episode of mass-hysteria, from 1692-1693 in Puritan New England hundreds of people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hung. One, Giles Corey, was pressed to death by stones.
It’s reported that around the same time, in North Andover, Massachusetts — the true epicenter of the witch craze — at least one dog was tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft.
Don’t such fevers of irrationality lie safely in the past ?
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many fundamentalists and conservative charismatic evangelicals came to the conclusion that the tumult of the 1960s and all that came with it — the Civil Rights Movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, the women’s liberation movement, the incipient gay rights movement, the hippie counterculture and rock music, the rise in crime that began almost exactly when the Beatles set foot on America’s shores in 1964, civil unrest and riots in America’s cities, and all the other challenges to orthodoxy — stemmed from a underlying metaphysical cause:
Satan.
Underneath of the tumult was, literally, a spiritual invasion. During the 1960s, a wave of invading demons had gained a beachhead on America’s shores like the Allied troops storming France’s Normandy beaches in 1944, and by the 1970s they were taking possession of individuals in massive numbers and even seizing whole geographic areas.
Wrote Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee in his 1973 book Invasion of Demons: The Battle Between God and Satan in Our Time,
“It is an invasion of demons, and is being spread like wildfire through the occult practices sweeping America in a satanic revival with demons for evangelists.”
Hagee was no cultural outlier. By the 1990s his books were selling in the millions and his sermons went out on evangelical broadcast networks with global reach. In 2008, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain aggressively sought his political endorsement.
By the 1980s, “satanic panic” burst out from evangelical subculture into the secular mainstream amidst allegations that a vast, shadowy conspiracy of satan worshipers was preying on America’s children. Beginning in 1982 in California’s Kern County, based on a wave of legal cases sent dozens of men and women, accused of inflicting satanic ritual sexual abuse on children
Now, in our thoroughly modern era according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation –a nonprofit which fights for the freedom-of-worship and freedom-of-belief rights of United States military personnel– literature associating Jews with the devil is being distributed by military chaplains, on United States military bases and naval ships.
And witchcraft ? Consider: as of when she was picked by presidential candidate John McCain, 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was a personal friend to not one but two professed witch hunters, apostles in a charismatic movement now sweeping global Christianity, whose leaders promote the need to fight witches and battle “territorial demons” believes to influence cities, and even whole geographic regions.
The notion that demonic forces, and people associated with them, are behind both personal tragedies and collective societal misfortune is not one that humanity, or at least America, has left behind.
But don’t take that from me.
Any given day of the week, one can find televangelists proclaiming that this school massacre wasn’t due to mental illness and easy access to assault weapons and high capacity magazines; and that destructive hurricane wasn’t potentiated by global warming. No, such misfortunes stem from God’s wrath at gay marriage and a lack of prayer in public schools.
Aren’t those fringe beliefs ? Not really. Not any more.
The outgoing Chair of the House Science Committee thinks global warming is a massive hoax perpetrated by scientists, to get funding, and claims humans can’t influence the weather, stating in 2011, “I don’t think we can control what God controls.”
A current Science Committee member thinks humans and dinosaurs cohabited the Earth and declares the Big Bang, evolution, and the science of embryology to be “lies straight from the pit of hell.”
Additional Reading
Exorcism: Is the Bible to Blame?
Categories: Americas, Exorcist, Religion & Science, Religion and Science