Tucker’s not crazy. He’s right. And Christians mocking him need to know both their bible and their history just a little bit better. The truth with surprise you.
JD Hall, Insight to Incite, Aug 19, 2026
Tucker Carlson thinks there may be something supernatural hiding in the history of the atomic bomb. Eric Metaxas thinks that idea is so insane that Christians should pray for Tucker’s sanity. When I first investigated this claim years ago, I found a trail running through ancient accounts of forbidden knowledge, some of the strangest corners of twentieth-century science, occult literature, ritual magic, and the men who gave humanity the ability to destroy itself. By the time I reached the end of the rabbit hole, Tucker’s theory was no longer the strangest part of the story.
For centuries, committed Christians have lamented the retreat of the supernatural from Western thought. The Enlightenment was rough on the faithful who insisted that Scripture’s supernatural claims were literal and described actual events, rather than primitive metaphors awaiting reinterpretation by more sophisticated men. By the late nineteenth century, Darwinism, German higher criticism, and an increasingly naturalistic academy had made biblical supernaturalism out of vogue, something educated Christians were expected to explain away, apologize for, or at least keep discreetly tucked beneath their pews. Some Christians even concurred and joined the other team.
After the Scopes Trial in 1925, when skepticism became a spectacle, H. L. Mencken and the national press helped transform the fundamentalist into a stock American character: rural, backward, gullible, frightened of science, and stubbornly attached to a universe populated by things modern men knew better than to believe. They did not have to disprove angels, demons, miracles, revelation, or divine intervention. It was easier just to put spectacles on the skeptic, overalls on the Christian, and let the audience know which one was supposed to be stupid. Many of the alleged Christians lined up with the skeptics and made fun of us, too, insisting it was possible to believe the main thrust of the Bible while rejecting or reinterpreting the parts that made the world supernatural. The Socinians, the followers of Fausto Socini, did this in the 1500s. Bio Logos, with Tim Keller and Francis Collins, did this in the 21st Century.
Evangelicals have complained about this arrangement ever since. We built seminaries and colleges to prove that supernaturalists could read books. We produced philosophers to demonstrate that belief in God was intellectually defensible, scientists to argue that materialism was not synonymous with science, and apologists by the thousands to assure nervous Christians that Harvard had not somehow disproved the resurrection while nobody was looking. Entire evangelical institutions were constructed around the conviction that the modern intellectual establishment had arbitrarily ruled the supernatural out of bounds before the debate even started.
Then something strange happened. Somewhere along the way, the culture started believing the world was supernatural again. And not as a fringe belief, but mainstream. Institutional Christianity has declined dramatically since the Enlightenment, but oddly enough, it didn’t create the materialist society the Christians themselves warned it would. Secularization de-Christianized society, but it didn’t secularize it. Pew now finds that 81% of Americans believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, 65% believe spirits or unseen spiritual forces exist, and only 17% say the natural world is all there is. Even among the religiously unaffiliated, 63% say something spiritual exists beyond nature.
How can that be explained? How did Christianity crumble, while supernaturalism did not?
The internet largely destroyed the old intellectual bottleneck. In 1975, if Harvard, Time, the networks, major publishers, and the scientific establishment treated something as crackpot material, most people treated it as such, despite having their supernatural experiences to talk about it; they didn’t talk about it. Now, somebody can spend three hours listening to a credentialed physicist discuss consciousness, a biblical scholar discuss the Watchers, a military pilot discuss UAPs, or a physician discuss near-death experiences without a newspaper editor standing between him and the subject explaining which conclusions respectable people are allowed to entertain. We live in a supernatural world. Intellectual snobbery couldn’t hide that forever.
Americans are now neck-deep in the supernatural. They believe in ghosts, hauntings, angels, demons, near-death experiences, spiritual warfare, extraterrestrial intelligences, psychic phenomena, simulation theories, interdimensional beings, and things in the sky that the federal government has spent the last several years assuring Congress it cannot adequately explain. Podcasts discussing ancient civilizations and nonhuman intelligence draw huge audiences. Joe Rogan can spend three hours discussing whether consciousness survives death, and instead of laughing him off the air, millions of people lean closer to the speaker. For this reason, I’ve been begging churches to speak more about supernaturality, and especially about the devil.
Heck, we live in a day when government officials, under oath, to the U.S. Congress, said that extraterrestrial beings of superior intelligence who are ‘not of this earth’ exist, and no one batted an eye. Like, aliens are a thing now, apparently. Everybody was like, “Anyway, what’s for supper?”
The old materialist sneer has lost much of its power because the people it was supposed to impress have stopped being impressed. Now, denying the supernatural out of turn is just as likely to earn condemnations for small-mindedness as believing in it just a decade ago. It is increasingly the supposedly “unsophisticated public” willing to ask metaphysical questions, while the church remains quiet for fear of being thought weird by a society that no longer thinks it. Cowardice has consequences, and one of them is irrelevance, which is what the church has largely become. Now society is eager to hear about supernaturality, but the church isn’t the first place they turn, because they’ve never even heard us talk about it because we’ve been suppressing the supernatural parts for fear of being thought weird.
Now, society is weird without us.
You would think evangelical Christians would be delighted by the surge in supernatural belief. After spending generations complaining that Western naturalism had closed people’s minds to the supernatural, we finally have a culture increasingly willing to entertain the possibility that reality contains intelligent beings besides ourselves. This should be the easiest evangelistic layup Christianity has received in a century.
Instead, some members of the Evangelical Intelligentsia seem determined to put their self-enforced irrelevance on parade. Angels may announce the birth of Christ, demons may speak through men in Galilee, Satan may enter Judas, principalities and powers may operate behind earthly kingdoms, and demonic spirits may gather kings together for war in the Bible. But suggest that malevolent spiritual intelligences might have maintained an interest in human civilization long enough to influence people today, and suddenly respectable Christians become very concerned about your mental health.
Which brings us, finally, to Eric Metaxas and Tucker Carlson.
TUCKER HAS LOST HIS MIND
Eric Metaxas thinks Tucker Carlson has lost his mind. He appears quite sincere about it, too, soliciting prayers on his X account for Tucker, that the Lord might deliver him from the insanity of believing supernatural things. He believes that nuclear technology may have come to mankind through demonic agency, an idea Metaxas regards as so obviously insane that it apparently requires prayer and public mockery.
On May 29, Tucker sat down for nearly two hours with Father Stephen De Young, an Orthodox priest and biblical scholar with a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies, to discuss Genesis 6, the Nephilim, demons, the ancient world, and the persistent historic belief that spiritual beings have transmitted knowledge to mankind. One segment was devoted specifically to the question, “Was Technology Given to Us by Demons?”
Tucker wasn’t claiming that Beelzebub personally drew the schematics for Fat Man. De Young explained a supernatural worldview held by ancient Christians in both Testaments, in which spiritual beings sometimes revealed knowledge before mankind was prepared to possess it. He began with Eden, when the serpent offered Adam and Eve a shortcut to knowledge, promising something desirable before God intended them to have it, and the gift ends in destruction.
Then Tucker said, “But nuclear technology definitely didn’t come from the demonic,” and De Young immediately understood where he was going, and then DeYoung went there, too. He alleged that nuclear knowledge was “revealed to man” and immediately turned toward destruction. Then De Young brought up Nagasaki, explaining that before the bomb fell, it was the great center of Japanese Christianity, with the Urakami district containing the country’s largest Catholic community. Tucker said he had been fixated on that fact for a while.
By the way, I wrote about it here and posited that it likely was a demonic intervention that changed the target at the last minute to the center of Christianity in Asia and with no good explanation for it. A nuke goes down the literal chimney pipe of the Christian church in Japan, and Satan wasn’t involved somehow? I wrote..
“I’m not saying it was a conspiracy. I’m saying of course it happened that way. When men flirt with demonic power to create weapons that tear open the fabric of creation, it should surprise no one when the first target is the church.”
That’s the conversation Eric Metaxas has decided is evidence that Tucker Carlson has lost his mind and moved to crazy town. But which part of it is incompatible with Christianity, again? I didn’t catch it.
Christianity teaches that demons are real, intelligent personal beings. They speak, reason, deceive, teach, tempt, possess knowledge, communicate ideas, influence human beings, and seek their destruction. Paul warns explicitly about “doctrines of devils,” which is attributing false teaching to demons. Daniel describes supernatural princes operating behind earthly kingdoms. Revelation describes demonic spirits going directly to “the kings of the earth and of the whole world” for the specific purpose of gathering them to war, which is why I often refer to “war demons.” I’m not just being dramatic or name-calling. I’m dead serious, which is why I wrote, The Ancient War Demons Were Real: Do They Control the NeoCon Establishment?
There is something distinctly post-Enlightenment about believing every one of those things right up until the invention of indoor plumbing. Satan can tempt Christ personally in the wilderness, demons can recognize Jesus before his disciples do, enter human beings and animals, communicate theology, influence rulers, and participate in the affairs of nations, provided they have the good manners to stop doing all of this once electricity was invented.
For modern Christians, angels are something for Christmas cards, demons remain useful for sermons, and “principalities and powers” get converted into government bureaucracies.
Before I proceed to the fun parts of this article, I don’t intend to prove that demons invented the atomic bomb. I intend to investigate whether Tucker’s suspicion is mock-worthy for another alleged Christian. Is it insane, as Metaxas suggests? Because I’ve found Metaxas saying other things are demonic, including “antisemitism,” which he labels as demonic while simultaneously refusing to define it, UAP phenomena, Islam, transgenderism, literal witchcraft, Democrat politics, and poor treatment of Erika Kirk. All of those are demonic, according to Metaxas. But believing demons helped make the A-bomb is “utterly stupid” and mentally ill
OPPENHEIMER AND THE OCCULT
Tucker’s theory becomes harder to laugh at once you start looking at the people who actually developed atomic technologies. Robert Oppenheimer was deeply interested in mysticism and the Occult, and Isidor Rabi, his friend and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said Oppenheimer sometimes turned “away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.” Historian James Hijiya went further, arguing that the Bhagavad Gitaprovided Oppenheimer with inspiration he may actually have needed to lead Los Alamos. He was a man who looked outside of himself, and outside of science, to the metaphysical for direction in his research and development. The inventor of the atomic bomb looking to metaphysics for direction is mind-blowing, in and of itself.
Oppenheimer’s fascination with this kind of Occultic material went back to Harvard. There, he became obsessed with the French poet Charles Baudelaire and fell in with a small group of friends who met to repeat lines from one of Baudelaire’s poems, almost as a liturgy for their group. The poem was Les Litanies de Satan, “The Litanies of Satan,” and their refrain was a prayer: “O Satan, have pity on my long misery.” It gets stranger when you read the poem, because Baudelaire praises Satan as a source of knowledge, connects him to the Tree of Knowledge, and calls him the “lamp of inventors.” Yeah, nothing weird about that at all, right?
Oppenheimer arrived at Harvard in 1922 as a brilliant and deeply strange young man with interests far beyond physics. He read literature, philosophy, religion, languages, and poetry, and became especially interested in Charles Baudelaire. In his poems, Satan is a constant focus, frequently functioning as the embodiment of rebellion, suffering, pride, temptation, and fallen humanity. He was fixated on Occultic imagery, often inverting it, to make Satan the good guy.
Baudelaire didn’t just use Satan as a literary device, to be clear. He addresses Satan directly, praises him as the most knowledgeable and beautiful of angels, calls him the “Prince of Exile,” and asks him repeatedly for pity. Satan comforts the miserable, teaches society’s outcasts, and serves as the adoptive father of those expelled from Eden. At the end, Baudelaire offers Satan “glory and praise” and asks that his soul someday rest near him beneath the Tree of Knowledge.
As I mentioned above, among Satan’s titles, Baudelaire calls him the “lamp of inventors.” The future father of the atomic bomb was repeating a Satanic litany that associated the Devil with new inventions, illumination, and the same forbidden Tree of Knowledge that first offered mankind knowledge it was not supposed to possess. Maybe that was nothing more than the pretentious amusement of brilliant Harvard nerds. In 1963, four years before his death, The Christian Century asked him to name ten books that had done the most to shape his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life.” Oppenheimer gave her Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.
Along with The Litanies of Satan, the rest of Les Fleurs du Mal does not exactly improve the optics, because its pages are crowded with demons, damnation, vampires, possession, death, blasphemy, and rebellion against God. In “Destruction,” a demon continually accompanies the speaker and fills his mind with wicked desire. “Abel and Cain” turns sympathy toward Cain and ends with the race of Cain rising against God, while “The Denial of Saint Peter” treats Peter’s betrayal of Christ with approval rather than shame. Is this normal?
In 1933, Oppenheimer began studying Sanskrit under Arthur Ryder at Berkeley so he could read Hindu texts, particularly the Bhagavad Gita. This was serious study, learned Sanskrit just to read it the same way a Bible student learns Greek to study the Bible, and gave copies to friends, quoted it throughout his life, and called it “one of the most beautiful philosophical works” he knew. More importantly, he used it. The Gita centers on Arjuna, a warrior who recoils from the killing required of him, and Krishna’s instruction that he must perform his duty without attachment to its consequences. Historian James Hijiya argues that Oppenheimer carried this philosophy into Los Alamos, where he faced his own question of responsibility for the killing his weapon would do, saying, “Without the inspiration of the Gita, Oppenheimer might not have been able or willing to direct Los Alamos.”
On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer watched the first atomic bomb turn the New Mexico desert into daylight, and spoke the words of the Hindu demon god, Krishna, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Was he quoting the demon, or was the demon actually speaking and taking credit for his work? Either way, weird.
Oh, and the code word Oppenheimer gave the explosion test site, which would soon be crumpled up, vaporized, and utterly destroyed by the bomb…was Trinity. The atomic bomb’s first victim.
BUT CAN DEMONS INVENT THINGS?
Christian theology certainly leaves room for nonhuman intelligence. Angels speak, teach, warn, interpret visions, execute judgment, and possess knowledge human beings do not. Most Christians think in terms of a dichotomy, of angels and demons. Demons, they suppose, are fallen angels. Fallen angels, in theory, are still angels. Demons – whether fallen angels or not – recognize Jesus before the crowds do, know who the apostles are, understand their own coming judgment and, according to Paul, can even teach doctrine. Scripture presents them as intelligent, ancient and hostile.
Nor would the idea that forbidden knowledge can cross the boundary between the spiritual and human worlds have sounded foreign to ancient readers of Scripture. Genesis 6 describes the “sons of God” descending to women immediately before the appearance of the Nephilim and the catastrophic corruption that ends in the Flood. The biblical text itself is terse, but the ancient Jewish interpretation preserved in 1 Enoch fills in the horrifying details. The Watchers do not merely take women. They teach mankind things.
But we don’t need the non-canonical Book of Enoch to show us this, because this older supernatural world is visible throughout the Old Testament, too. The Hebrew word elohim does not refer exclusively to Yahweh, although Yahweh alone is the Most High and Creator. Scripture uses the term for inhabitants of the spiritual realm, and repeatedly depicts a heavenly council around God. Psalm 82 places God “in the congregation of the mighty” where He judges “among the gods.” Psalm 89 describes an assembly of the holy ones and asks who among the “sons of the mighty” can be compared to Yahweh. Deuteronomy 32 likewise describes the nations being divided according to the “sons of God,” indicating that different regions are subject to different celestial beings. These are not angels; these are higher and stronger and wiser than angels, but lesser than God. Paul appears to describe the same unseen hierarchy when he speaks of “principalities,” “powers,” “rulers of the darkness of this world,” and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” The biblical universe is populated by intelligent spiritual powers, some obedient to God and some rebellious against Him, operating behind and sometimes within the affairs of men. They have a degree of authority and power, subject to God, but greater than angels and men.
The unseen realm of Scripture is much more diverse than what modern Christians imagine. There are the elohim, the council of gods. There are angels. There are also diverse kinds of angels: some with six wings, some with four, and some with two. Some angels have different functions than others and, ostensibly, different rank and power. Some celestial creatures, whether categorized as angels or not, look like what we would call monsters, with a nearly unimaginable, hard-to-describe appearance that the Biblical authors struggle to explain.
According to the book of Enoch, an elohim named Azazel teaches men to make swords, knives, shields, and armor. Other Watchers teach enchantments, astrology, signs of the earth and signs of the heavens. Whatever one makes of Enoch as a noncanonical text, its importance here is difficult to dismiss because Jude explicitly quotes it, and both Jude and 2 Peter describe angels who sinned, abandoned their proper place by making hybrid earth babies, and were subsequently imprisoned for judgment. The ancient Jewish world surrounding the New Testament knew the tradition well. Modern Christians just don’t discuss it much.
Another theory, from the late Dr. Michael Heiser, is that demons are not fallen angels but dead Nephilim. Being half celestial and half mortal, their bodies have died, but the spirits have nowhere to go, because Heaven and hell are both inhabitants for souls, and being only part human, they don’t have one. Demons are, this theory says, essentially ghosts – disembodied spirits- of Nephilim. They possess and afflict men, taking their bodies to commit and enjoy sins of the flesh.
As mentioned above, it’s not that a demon flew to Los Alamos carrying blueprints for Fat Man. The older and more Biblical idea is that spiritual beings – whether elohim, angels, or demons – can communicate knowledge, and that some knowledge may be given to mankind for destructive purposes by intelligences that do not particularly like mankind.
THE DEVIL BUILDS A ROCKET
Another feature of the atomic age is that it arrived unbelievably fast. Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938. Roosevelt approved production of an atomic bomb in January 1942, Los Alamos was established the following year for the express purpose of building one, and on July 16, 1945, the thing worked. Humanity went from discovering that uranium atoms could be split to detonating an atomic weapon in the desert in about six and a half years. Los Alamos went from laboratory to working bomb in roughly twenty months.
None of that proves supernatural involvement, but the speed was astonishing. What had been obscure nuclear physics at the end of 1938 became a weapon capable of destroying a city before the decade was over. This is why many people have suggested the tech came from aliens or was reverse-engineered from technology discovered in the Roswell crash. Human beings look at sudden leaps in technology, and it’s hard not to wonder whether somebody gave us a push.
And if that sounds outrageous, meet Jack Parsons. John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons was a pioneer of American rocketry. His work helped establish rocket propulsion in the United States, and he was part of the Caltech rocket group from which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory emerged. He also helped establish Aerojet, which became a major American rocket and missile manufacturer. You see, the atomic bomb was only the beginning of its weaponization. Once mankind possessed nuclear weapons, the next great technological problem was figuring out how to throw them across continents.