Is the Occult Back? And Why Did the Church Stop Warning Anybody?

Is the Occult Back? And Why Did the Church Stop Warning Anybody?

Philip C. Johnson | August 28, 2026

Twenty-five years ago I taught a continuing-education course for FACCS in Florida on the occult and its dangers. I was not trying to spook a room of teachers. I was trying to get them to treat the unseen world as real: not a costume, not a personality quiz, and not a harmless hobby. Student curiosity dressed up as self-discovery is problematic. We talked about vulnerability and about unwisely opening yourself up to demonic influence. We talked about the armor of God as if Paul wrote those verses for people who would actually need them.

Then the subject more or less disappeared. Churches got embarrassed by it. Youth groups found other material. A lot of pastors got fluent in “mental health” and clumsy, or silent, the minute the conversation turned to demons. For a couple of decades it felt as if we had outgrown the warning.

We hadn’t. The warning just stopped being given.

This week I watched Jeremy Boreing’s live show with Dr. Richard Gallagher, Jenn Nizza, and Billy Hallowell. Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist the Catholic Church brings in when a case might be possession and somebody has to decide whether it is psychiatric first. Nizza spent twenty-five years as a professional psychic medium and now tells people to get out of that world and come to Jesus. Hallowell has been reporting on the supernatural as a journalist. The podcast was not some fringe episode. It sounded like a status report.

Pew Research found that about 30 percent of American adults consult astrology, tarot, or a fortune teller at least once a year. Younger women are deep in it. Teenagers learn spells on TikTok faster than most churches will walk them through Ephesians 6. People still say they are doing it “just for fun.” That is usually how it starts.

Nizza said her readings were often accurate. After she cried out to Christ she concluded the accuracy was real and the source was not dead relatives. The point of that whole practice, as she tells it now, was to keep people away from Jesus. Secret knowledge. Personal power. No Lord and Savior.

Gallagher is more skeptical. He will not let you collapse every dark night of the soul into an exorcism. Oppression happens, he says, but possession is rare. He is also unwilling to pretend that every unexplainable case is a chemical imbalance. Demons deceive. They isolate. They do not ordinarily seize the steering wheel and drive. Free will is still in the room, which is why “the devil made me do it” is a lazy sentence and a dangerous one.

Even so, the temperature has changed.

In February 2023 Tucker Carlson said he was attacked in his sleep and woke with bleeding claw marks on his ribcage. He contacted Rod Dreher, the conservative writer and Orthodox Christian behind books like The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder, because Dreher takes the unseen world as a matter of fact and Tucker knew it. Dreher put him in touch with two exorcists. Tucker declined. He thought it sounded too Protestant, too close to witchcraft. He said he would handle it with a Bible and himself. Whether his story is true or not, what you cannot honestly claim is that this is still 1998, when a man of his profile saying any of that would have been treated as a joke. The Vice President has said aliens are probably demons. That used to live in a church basement pamphlet. It is now a sentence from the man next in line to the presidency. Plenty of pulpits still will not go near it on a Sunday.

Candace Owens belongs in this same weather system, especially in what she has been saying about Israel and the Jews.

You can criticize an Israeli government. That is an argument about policy. Owens has been doing something else. She has told her audience that Jews worship Baal and that Israel kills children because of it. She has called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice.” She has written that “we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel” and named it “the synagogue of Satan.” She said Charlie Kirk came to her in a dream and told her he was betrayed. She said the two of them could astral project. For months she has treated his widow and people around Turning Point USA as if they were part of the killing.

Last week a viewer wrote that “we are legion right behind you.” Owens read it on the air and kept it. “This is how we grow. This is how we are legion.”

If you grew up in church you already know where that word comes from: Mark 5. The other side of the Sea of Galilee, in the country of the Gerasenes. A man living in the tombs, naked, cutting himself, too strong for chains. Jesus asked his name. The answer was, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” A Roman legion was thousands of men. The Gospel is not talking about a fan club. It is talking about a horde of demons. Christ sent them into a herd of pigs. The pigs ran down the bank into the water and drowned.

Owens can say she only meant she has a lot of people behind her. Fine. Words still carry their old weight. Someone who talks about Baal, child sacrifice, leaving the body at night, and messages from the dead should not be startled when Christians hear “legion” and think of Gerasa. Hatred of Jews at that pitch did not begin with this war.

Boreing put the measure of the whole thing in one sentence on his show: “When someone promises you secret knowledge, what they’re actually offering almost always is slavery.” The rush of finally seeing what everyone else is too blind or too paid-off to see is ancient. It feels like waking up. It is usually a collar.

Lindsay Clancy belongs in this conversation too, and I say that carefully.

In January 2023 she strangled her three children in the basement of their Massachusetts house and jumped from a window. She has described a voice telling her this was her last chance, that she had to kill them so she could kill herself, that they would suffer if she were gone. She had been coming apart for months: sleepless, calling for help, in and out of treatment. Her lawyers say postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors say she planned it. A jury is now deciding whether she is a murderer or not criminally responsible.

I don’t know if she was possessed or oppressed by evil spiritual forces. Command hallucinations show up in postpartum psychosis. That is a medical fact. It is also a thin kind of Christianity that stops at the diagnosis and refuses to ask whether a broken mind can become an open door. Women in pink have gathered outside the courthouse to say she needed help. She did. Three children are still dead.

People pay for “plant medicine” weekends and come home talking about entities. Of course they do. They opened something and named it wellness.

I keep coming back to the course I taught. We used to say this out loud. Then we decided it sounded unsophisticated. The occult did not become sophisticated while we were looking away. It became a lifestyle brand. Conspiracy became a substitute for discernment. A certain kind of hatred learned to quote Scripture. And the church, which used to treat Ephesians 6 as equipment, treated it like a memory verse for children.

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12) And what should be the response? The belt of truth. Breastplate of righteousness. Gospel of peace. Shield of faith. Helmet of salvation. Sword of the Spirit. Prayer. Obedience. None of that requires a map of the local covens. None of it requires a séance with better lighting.

I taught the warning when it was unfashionable. I watched it go out of style. I am watching the country walk into the thing we used to name. The unseen never left. We just stopped telling the kids it was there. 

They grew up, bought the cards, and some of them started hearing voices.