Medium Unwell

A few years ago, an old family friend called with some rather unusual news. Her daughter, who is about my age, had taken up a new career. She had been a small-business owner, running a perfectly respectable catering service and, apparently, doing rather well for herself. But a divorce had caused her to think more deeply about the fleeting nature of things. She began to consult mediums, people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead. Before long, she, too, was talking to dead people. And they were talking back to her. My childhood friend had found a second calling. The little girl who used to play in our group of toddlers some 45 years ago is now a medium herself. She provides, according to her business website, energy coaching, spirit readings, and messaging with loved ones “on the other side.”

We all grew up Catholic in southern Louisiana. Our parents and grandparents would have dragged us by the ear to talk to a priest if we ever spouted off about séancing with spirits or giving “psychic readings.” If I had ever mentioned in passing that I’d been having conversations with dead people, I would have found myself, courtesy of someone in my immediate family, in a confessional sweating bullets in no time flat. Our old family friend, alas, had moved off to California years ago, and over time she — and her kids, my childhood friends — gradually slid from Catholic to Catholic-inflected New Age. She has had a lifelong devotion to St. Anthony, but in phone calls from out West she took to calling him “Tony,” explaining how he had helped her find misplaced keys or a parking spot at the mall. One of her other children — not the part-time channeler of spirits from the great beyond — began wearing his Rosary instead of praying it. This led, our friend explained, to his seeing “visions of Jesus” during a bout with a serious illness. Right. I bet.

It was easy to dismiss all this as West Coast weirdness, to laugh it off as something that happens when totally uncosmopolitan and guileless swamp-dwellers like us set off into the big shining frontier on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. If you’ve ever seen The Beverly Hillbillies, you get the idea. Yokels showing up in California are bound to run into trouble. In my friends’ case, the trouble came in the form of “manifesting” and other such nonsense. But it had been years since I had spoken to any of them, so I just shrugged and thought, well, that’s what you get when Cajuns start mixing it up with Valley Girls. It gave me the creeps to know that someone I used to ride tricycles with had hung out her shingle as a medium, but our past was long ago and far away, and the trade she plies now has nothing to do with me.

Or so I thought. The more I turned the matter over in my mind, the less sure I became that what my former childhood playmate was up to was that much different than how we had been raised.

Living in southern Louisiana means going from time to time to the French Quarter, where you can find, on any given day, a dozen sad sacks sitting in front of St. Louis Cathedral charging money to read palms and predict futures. Shops in the area sell cheap junk themed on the voodoo stylings of everyone’s favorite Creole soul mumbler, Marie Laveau. When a structure in New Orleans associated with Laveau burned down recently, there were predictable jokes down home about its being the work of the “Voodoo Queen” from beyond the grave.

We think of ourselves as being pretty well inoculated against necromancy and crystal-ball gazing. That nonsense is for gullible tourists. But I can also remember casual conversations about horoscope signs. People, including me, would make offhand comments that someone’s disposition must be because he was a Taurus, or because she was a Gemini. I knew my own Zodiac sign and would check the newspaper each morning to find out how I would fare that day. A good horoscope report would put a spring in my step. A bad one would have me dourly looking out for whatever trouble was star-bound to come my way.

Come to think of it, we Catholics were regular pagans. Our next-door neighbors’ kids at one point had a Magic 8 Ball, a plastic sphere filled with some kind of liquid in which floated a die on the sides of which were written short words like “Yes” and “No.” Shake the ball, and the die would float to the top, where, through a clear window, you could read the response — from whom or what, exactly? — to the question you had posed. I had no qualms about shaking the 8 Ball for answers to my pressing pre-teen questions. I can’t remember anyone, child or adult, saying anything against that kind of bedroom soothsaying.

That wasn’t all. At edgier parties, some of the older kids would go into a dark bathroom and try to summon “Bloody Mary” out of the mirror. I can distinctly remember some junior-high-age girls screaming, long hair flowing behind them as they ran from the bathroom, crying out that they had seen “her” in the darkened glass. I knew at least one person from my school who had a Ouija board. At Halloween we would all dress up as pirates or Darth Vader or werewolves and go out among the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins to threaten violence if not sufficiently paid off in Tootsie Rolls. There were pumpkins carved up and glowing on front porches, redolent of skulls from human sacrifices long ago. Chinese restaurants gave out fortune cookies, and I am guessing I was not the only one to keep his fortune slip, pressed between the pages of a book, when it indicated I was going to experience some big change in my luck. I had a rabbit’s foot keychain, as did just about every other kid I knew. And pretty much everyone at my school was convinced the world was going to end on December 3, 1990, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake was to rock the New Madrid fault line at 4:56 in the afternoon, thus fulfilling the numerological prophecy of 12/3, 4:56, 7.8, 90. (Predictions of the end times, of the “rapture” and so forth, were everywhere in those days. I and many others took them dead seriously.)

It was only when I started reading the Bible as an adult that I learned none of this was kosher. My shock at hearing that my old friend from Louisiana had gone into the I’ll-talk-to-your-dead-relative-for-cash business in California, and my instinct to distance myself from that transparently bogus quackery, gave way, over time, to memories that much of my young life had been spent as a de facto pagan. The memories came fast and thick once I discovered that I, too, was a quack of the first order. I know it probably sounds trifling to some, but after seeing the first Star Wars movie in the theater, I came home and, alone in my room, pressed my forefingers into my temples and attempted to stir objects on a dresser using the power of “the Force.” Childish imitation of a movie scene? Yes. But also a very dangerous fiddling around with powers — of darkness, not of the imaginary Jedis — far beyond my control. Much later, after I had read books and listened to lectures by exorcists such as Fr. Chad Ripperger and Fr. Gabriele Amorth, I was much more careful about things like that — terrified, really — and had no truck with anything that even hinted at DIY spirituality.

I was scared out of my wits by true stories of liberation from demonic oppression, but I was also dismayed to find that many around me were as cavalier as ever about the occult. It was well before our family friend’s daughter in California started her part-time shaman gig that the Harry Potter book and movie series exploded into a global phenomenon. Suddenly, every youngster in creation was a little warlock. Kids were wearing capes and waving wands, muttering Pig Latin that came, in part, from perversions of the language from the Latin Mass. “Hocus pocus”? That’s a corruption of Hoc est enim corpus Meum (“This is My body”). For millions of children around the world, these kinds of mockeries became a kind of shared language, along with the idea that “magic” is a universal power and there are good and bad strains of it. The war between angels and demons, between God and Satan, had been dumbed down to a kid’s book and cheapened into amusement-park rides. Today, Harry Potter is everywhere — there’s even a Harry Potter-themed metro station in Tokyo — and people appear, by and large, to be oblivious to the dangers inherent in dabbling in demonic sorcery. As Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, an exorcist for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., said in these pages, “Hundreds of thousands of people in this country are practicing witchcraft. Some of them believe they are ‘good witches’ and are not involved in evil. But magic and curses do not come from God and necessarily lead one into the dark world. Ultimately, getting involved in the occult and invoking magic opens one to Satan’s influence” (“Interview with an American Exorcist,” Jul.-Aug. 2022).

Come to think of it, there were raven-haired Goth girls in my Tennessee high school who boasted of being witches and casting spells in their rooms. They had creepy books from occult shops in Atlanta and enjoyed torturing the boys by claiming to have cast hexes upon them. I used to laugh out loud at such antics. Looking back, though, in the late 1990s I went to see the Indigo Girls, many of whose songs are a-drip with New Age gobbledygook, play at a music festival called the Lilith Fair, named for an ancient Middle Eastern she-devil. I should have laughed less and paid attention more.

It may seem at first that the spread of casual witchcraft, the blithe acceptance of Semitic demonesses, and the rise of Harry Potter could have happened only in post-Christian America. As America has gotten weirder and weirder spiritually — with the über-Protestantism of “Christian nationalism” (somebody did not get a very important memo) competing with witchcraft, “atheist megachurches,” transhumanism, GOOP-crystal metaphysics, ayahuasca, and Soul Cycling — it seems increasingly plausible that someone like my old childhood friend should try her hand at some freelance shamaning. And not just her. In a recent Atlantic article, historian Molly Worthen writes that “eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy” (June 2). This may sound like a breakdown of Christianity, but consider the opening of Worthen’s piece. She describes something called the Catch the Fire Church, where a Toronto-based evangelist named Carol Arnott hails down spiritual conflagration on the people in the pews. “Fire on them, Lord!” Arnott shouts into her microphone. She compares her fired-upon congregation members to “steaks marinating.” “Knees buckle,” Worthen reports, and “people collapse into their seats.”

We Americans have long thought that, given our Bible-thumping heritage, we are culturally immune to hucksters and gurus hawking aura readings and long-distance calls with the dead. But the truth seems to be, as the Catch the Fire Church and other such yahooism attests, that our bedrock Protestantism was not a bulwark against New Ageism but a preparation for it. If Arnott can “marinate” her congregation in whatever unholy juices she is spewing, then any Jack or Jill can likewise get up on stage and do some impromptu mediuming. It wasn’t the end of Protestantism in America that opened the door to necromancy à la carte. It was Protestantism’s natural progression. And as the Catholic Church in America, and in many other places in the world, has Protestantized in the wake of Vatican II, whatever defenses we might have had against the incursions of the Devil have been crippled.

There are surely other factors, too. Not every scrap of idiocy springs from the bad soil of Jonathan Edwards. The deterioration of the faculty of reason that comes with the everything-is-permitted view, the atrophying of the mind when all moral standards are destroyed and we are bidden to accept every depravity as part of a blanket celebration of “diversity,” is also to blame. We can no longer think in the West, and that is not the fault only of the Puritans. Take the following nugget of wisdom from “Bella,” a TikTok creator in London who has more than a million people following her video shtick about astrology. A Times of London article quotes her explaining that a “sense of agency” is driving her Gen Z audience to check in with her regularly for astrological advice (Jan. 19). Ask yourself, dear reader, how can turning your life over to the whims of planets and stars possibly redound to your having an increased “sense of agency”?

But let’s be careful before we laugh at Bella’s non sequitur. How many of us, in our lonely hours, have ever googled big life questions, hoping “the Internet,” the shaman we carry around in our pockets, will give us something to look forward to, some meaning beyond the wreck of Western civilization? If only that were the end of it. Unlike Google, which just spits up a list of webpages, AI chatbots pretend to have conversations with their supplicants. That isn’t Protestantism’s fault, either. It’s ours, humanity’s, for having given up our natural reason, and our immortal souls, to false beliefs, all in the name of whatever good things — harmony, universal brotherhood, psychic healing — were promised us in return.

A recent First Things article by Thomas P. Harmon, “Demons and ChatGPT,” hints that the trouble with chatbots may be only beginning (June 17). Some people “are earnestly convinced,” he writes, citing a report from The New York Times, “that the chatbot is a window to other realms.” For many in America and around the world, the Internet is not just a shaman. It is increasingly seen, with the rise of AI, as the medium of an aborning god. When the new pontiff, Leo XIV, began his papacy with a call for a Rerum Novarum-type head-on reckoning with the social upheaval caused by AI, he may not have been thinking only of the social teachings of his eponymous predecessor, Leo XIII. The next time you are in a crowd of people, look around to see how many have their faces buried in their phones. Technology is a cult like none that has ever existed. Almost all of us have its sleek, rectangular idols within reach at all times. And those idols, more and more, speak to us, tell us things with a seeming omniscience that many of us mistake for a mark of divinity. Recent popes have had to do battle with widespread secular indifference to religion, but Leo XIV may find that one of his biggest challenges is getting people to stop believing in the false god of AI.

None of the technological marvels that are enslaving us today were around when my family friend’s daughter and I were running around in diapers in a Louisiana suburb nearly five decades ago. But somewhere along the way, that little girl became a “medium,” and that fills me with dread. But what is even scarier is that, unbeknownst to me, I have lived a life largely un-Christian, too. And now both she and I are caught in a new age of New Age, a time of technological idolatry in which everyone is fighting in a spiritual war that so very few of us even realize is underway.

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