LINK Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic
I can't believe this hocus-pocus is actually increasing!
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This isn't limited to the Catholic Church, it is a prominent feature of fundamentalist Christianity as well, particularly the pentecostal and charismatic and holiness branches thereof. There's a church called Hegwich Baptist Church in NW Indiana that ministers to its congregants primarily through "deliverance" (their term for exorcism). The concept of "going clear" in Scientology is basically a variation on the same theme, with different terminology (e.g., thetans instead of demons).
mordant
Level 8
Nov 22, 2018
2
I have a theory about historical distance and normalization that might be applied here. It's late, the theory is still largely inchoate, and this is my first time verbalizing it, so pardon my lousy-wordiness:
Once the origins of particular knowledge (attitudes, beliefs, mores, etc.) become sufficiently remote in time--and its ramifications sufficiently taken for granted--societies regress and revert away from said knowledge.. Like, once something gets woven into the fabric of a society, eventually people stop seeing it.
e.g. anti-vaxxers, people who think feminism and/or civil rights crusades are unnecessary, anti-science, anti-expert, and anti-intellectualism types, etc.
The exorcism thing I read as just a particular flavor of the "woo" wave, which could be interpreted as a sign that more and more people no longer stick to a rational, emperically scientific framework for viewing the world--you know, that crazy revolution of thought that started back in the 1700's.
stinkeye_a
Level 8
Nov 22, 2018
1
That sounds reasonable. But why would that happen?
@maturin1919 good catch
@tnorman1236 @hankster covered most of it, I think. Immediacy of experience, and ability to relate to and/or appreciate something remote? I've been wanting to look into this more, because it seems to be cropping up so much (at least in America) and i'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it. I think it has to do with something being so "taken for granted", so "baked in", that people don't even see it anymore. Take vaccines, forex: when they were first developed and all these diseases started to be vanquished, people were ecstatic and amazed and grateful. Those people saw children crippled by polio, etc.--it was part of their immediate experience. Flash forward to today, few people have seen firsthand the effects of polio, measles, etc.; many of these diseases don't even exist anymore. It's not part of our mental landscape. It takes a certain leap of logic, an abstraction, to have the same degree of appreciation for something you haven't seen, haven't lived, haven't experienced.
@stinkeye_a Agreed. That makes sense to me. I think there's also something to be said for some need in a lot of people to believe in mystery. Some people can't handle everything being explainable, for whatever reason.
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