The Church Should Talk Way More About Demons (Everybody Else Already Is)

JD Hall, 8/29/25

We were told for three hundred years that the supernatural had been explained away. The Enlightenment promised that rationalism would kill angels and demons, that science would chase away myths, and that the modern world would live by reason alone. Yet here we are, in the twenty-first century, and the language of demons has returned with force. Not in pulpits, not in seminaries, but in the streets, the headlines, and the mouths of ordinary people who cannot explain evil any other way. The world is waking up to something Christians should have known all along. The unseen realm is not gone. It never left.

The Minneapolis shooter is the latest example. Within hours of the carnage, classmates, commentators, and politicians reached for words that the Enlightenment had supposedly erased. They did not only say “troubled young man” or “mental health crisis.” They called him demonic. One classmate remembered him praising Hitler as a boy and described him as demonic even then. Pundits wrote that demons had taken hold of the city. A White House spokeswoman shared a post that said demonic forces were at work. None of these people are known as theologians. None of them were preaching revival. Yet when faced with blood on the streets, they instinctively reached for supernatural language. It was not just wicked or insane. It was demonic.

This is not an isolated case. After every mass killing in recent years, a pattern emerges. Ordinary people and even hardened secular journalists reach for categories of evil that go beyond psychology. They use words like possessed. They describe killers as soulless, not simply broken. It is as if the old Enlightenment vocabulary of rational causes cannot carry the weight anymore. You can say someone was bullied. You can say they were depressed. You can say they were radicalized online. But when you see them smiling while killing or writing “six million more” on a weapon, the word demonic rises up uninvited. The secular world is confessing that something darker is at play.

Beyond the violence, there is a wider cultural fascination with the supernatural. Hollywood cannot stop making movies about demons and exorcisms. The Conjuring series, films about possession, and endless television shows about paranormal investigation dominate popular culture. Ghost hunting has become a mainstream pastime. WitchTok, a corner of TikTok devoted to spells and sorcery, has millions of followers. Astrology has returned to fashion. Young professionals who would scoff at Genesis will proudly announce their star sign and plan their lives around planetary alignments. Psychedelic drugs are marketed not only as therapies but as spiritual gateways. Influencers like Aaron Rodgers and Joe Rogan talk about ayahuasca as a doorway to enlightenment. The very practices Christians once denounced as sorcery are being embraced by people who claim to be modern and rational.

This shift is profound. For centuries, secular intellectuals insisted that belief in spirits was childish, that demons were myths, and that the material world was all there is. Yet the people who grew up with that education are now turning to tarot, crystals, psychedelics, and occult symbols. They are no longer pretending to be rationalists. They are openly searching for power, mystery, and transcendence. They believe the material alone is not enough. They are confessing that the supernatural is real. They may not say it in creeds. They may not tie it to Scripture. But they are saying it when they light candles for spells, when they buy sage to cleanse a house, or when they declare a murderer demonic.

It is not only pop culture. Intellectuals are drifting the same way. Serious journalists publish essays asking why so many young people believe in astrology. Historians admit that occult movements shaped politics far more than they once conceded. Even scientists admit that consciousness is a mystery that cannot be reduced to chemicals. The ground is shifting. What was once mocked as medieval is now creeping back into modern discourse. The world is becoming pagan again.

A PARADIGM SHIFT ON THE SUPERNATURAL

And while the world re-enchants itself, the church yawns. Evangelicals who should be leading this conversation are too busy arguing about trivialities. Scholars parse Greek verbs as if knowing the tense of a participle could save a soul. Denominations squabble over committee reports. Pastors fill pulpits with therapy tips disguised as sermons. Meanwhile, the culture around them is rediscovering the language of demons. The world is looking for explanations, and the church is silent or embarrassed. We pretend that demons are not real because we do not want to be thought of as foolish. We downplay the supernatural because we want respectability. The irony is that even unbelievers are less embarrassed than we are. They are calling things demonic while we are calling them complicated.

The Minneapolis shooting is a parable of this shift. The crime itself was not new. The horror was familiar. But the language used to describe it was striking. In the very heart of secular America, people reached for spiritual vocabulary. They spoke in categories that Scripture has always provided. They confessed, without meaning to, that the world is darker than rationalism can admit. That is not an accident. It is evidence that the human conscience, when pressed, cannot ignore the reality of evil spirits. It is evidence that the Enlightenment dream is collapsing.

This is why Christians must pay attention. We are living in an age where the supernatural is no longer hidden in the corners. It is on the front page. It is on social media. It is in the language of children, politicians, and commentators. The world is more open to the supernatural now than it has been in centuries. And yet instead of proclaiming the truth, we argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a needle. We waste time in intramural squabbles while the field is open for harvest. The culture is already confessing demons. What it needs is for someone to confess Christ.

When Paul preached in Athens, he began by pointing to their altar to the unknown god. He used their confession of ignorance as a springboard to proclaim the truth. That is the moment we are in now. The world has built new altars. They call mass murderers demonic. They call voices in the dark spirits. They call psychedelic visions enlightenment. These are confessions of ignorance, yes, but they are also invitations. They are the culture’s way of saying that the unseen realm is undeniable. Evangelicals should not laugh, sneer, or retreat. We should be ready to say, “Yes, there are demons. Yes, the unseen is real. And yes, there is one who has power over it all.”

The culture of darkness is rising. That is not bad news for the church. It is the opportunity of a lifetime. The secular age is collapsing under the weight of its own lies. People are ready to believe in spirits again. They are ready to see the world as enchanted. What they need is for Christians to stop wasting time and step into the moment. The church must proclaim that while demons are real, Christ is greater. The world is already admitting the first half. It is time for us to preach the second.

The world is waking up to demons, but Christians should never have been asleep to begin with. Scripture does not treat the supernatural as an optional belief or a metaphor for mental illness. It presents the realm of angels and demons as the backdrop of all history. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible describes a world alive with spirits, battles, and powers. The tragedy is not that secular culture has forgotten. The tragedy is that the church has grown embarrassed by its own book.

DEMONS IN THE MINISTRY OF JESUS

Open the Gospels and you do not have to wait long to see Jesus confront demons. Mark’s first chapter shows him casting out an unclean spirit in a synagogue. The people marveled, not because he preached with authority only, but because even the spirits obeyed him. Again and again Christ was interrupted by shrieking demoniacs, twisted bodies, and voices crying out his name. The Son of God treated these encounters as real. He did not diagnose them as hysteria. He did not refer them to counseling. He rebuked them, commanded them, and cast them out.

If you subtract the supernatural from the ministry of Jesus, you do not have a moral teacher. You have a fraud. To be a Christian is to confess that demons are real because Christ conquered them. To downplay this is to hollow out the very heart of the Gospels. Evangelicals who hedge on the supernatural do not look sophisticated. They look faithless.

The Apostle Paul was equally blunt. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” he wrote, “but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” That is not poetry. It is theology. Paul understood that behind every empire, every ideology, and every tyrant were powers of the unseen realm. Caesar was not just a man. He was a pawn in a cosmic struggle. That is why Paul described Christ’s death not only as forgiveness of sins but as a triumph over the principalities and powers, nailing them to the cross.

For Paul, the resurrection was not only a promise of heaven. It was the proof that Christ had broken the grip of the powers that rule this world. Evangelicals often flatten the gospel into a transaction of sin and forgiveness. The gospel is that and more. It is also cosmic victory. It is the public shaming of the demonic realm. To treat demons as superstition is to betray Paul’s entire vision of the Christian life.

THE OLD TESTAMENT WITNESS

Long before the New Testament, Israel knew the world was alive with spiritual powers. The first commandment itself assumes the presence of other gods, not as real rivals to Yahweh’s sovereignty but as counterfeit powers seeking worship. The Psalms thunder against the nations’ idols, not as empty statues only but as spiritual deceptions that enslave those who bow down to them. The prophets described pagan rituals as sacrifices to demons. When Daniel prayed, an angel came to him with a message delayed because the “prince of Persia” resisted him. That is not mythology. That is revelation. The kingdoms of this world are not merely political. They are animated by spiritual rulers who oppose God’s people.

The earliest Christians had no embarrassment about this reality. The church fathers wrote about demons constantly. They knew the pagan gods were not innocent myths but demonic pretenders. They treated idols as spiritual traps, not cultural ornaments. When early Christians refused to burn incense to Caesar, it was not only because they would not give a man divine honor. It was because they recognized the act as worship of the demonic powers that stood behind the cult of empire. To them, conversion was not moving from one worldview to another. It was liberation from demonic dominion into the kingdom of Christ.

The Reformers carried this same understanding. Martin Luther famously threw an inkwell at the devil during his temptations at the Wartburg Castle. He was not playing games. He believed Satan was real, active, and enraged at the gospel. John Calvin, far from being a cold rationalist, warned constantly about the craft of demons and their work in corrupting doctrine. Puritans preached about the snares of the enemy with the same seriousness they preached justification. None of these men thought they were being superstitious. They were simply reading their Bibles and taking the supernatural seriously.

THE MODERN EMBARRASSMENT

What changed was not the Bible. What changed was the Enlightenment. Philosophers declared that reason ruled and that all spiritual realities were fantasies. Over time, even Christians bought the lie. The supernatural was explained away, not with Scripture but with skepticism. Preachers grew embarrassed to speak of demons. Theologians began to allegorize away passages that had once been read straightforwardly. The academy replaced the pulpit, and rational respectability replaced the fear of the Lord. By the nineteenth century, much of the Protestant world had been declawed.

The result is the absurd spectacle we see today. Secular people describe a murderer as demonic, while Christians write books explaining why demons probably do not exist. The world admits the supernatural with trembling. The church denies it with a shrug. This is not enlightenment. It is blindness.

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