Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as ‘endarkenment’ (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our backs on God, we have become easy pickings for demonic forces.
‘Oh Lord’, said Angus, turning wearily away, ‘I’m so sick of demons.’
This delighted me then and still delights me, both because it’s so surreal and also because it rings so true. If you’d told me ten years ago that young political types in 2024 would be talking knowingly about the ancient devil-gods of the Mesopotamian region – Moloch, Ishtar and Baal – I’d have said your vape was spiked. But sure as Donald Trump is back in the White House, serious talk of angels and demons is now almost normal in conservative circles.
Tucker Carlson, the former chat-show host and a friend of Trump announced recently in an interview with Dreher that he had actually been ‘mauled by a demon’ when lying in bed one night. The attack left him bleeding, he says, and with scars from the demon’s claw marks. And almost the strangest thing about this story was how very little attention it received. The new vice president, J.D. Vance, is a friend of Dreher’s too, and did a fascinating interview with him for the Lamp magazine in which he explained that he’d converted to Catholicism in response to the ‘civilisational crisis’.
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