After watching the videos of mobs of supposedly progressive students at Manchester University, shouting, swearing, threatening, intimidating and attempting to terrify a handful of their contemporaries – who had the temerity to set up a pro-life student society on campus – it’s hard not to ask the question: What on earth possessed them?
Sometimes there are moments when idiomatic language gives away more than we might expect. The scenes in Manchester appear to constitute one of those moments. The “protesting” students appeared to be in the grip of something dark and dangerous. Their ordinary personalities and dispositions disappeared. They were instead inhabited by rage, expressed in contorted, spitting faces, bulging eyes and threats of violence and even rape in one reported case. Was this just an eruption of bad humour, or does it constitute something more?
This is more than an exercise in curiosity: it ought to constitute an exercise in what spiritual directors have long referred to as dyscretia – discernment. So what are we dealing with here? Is this a psychological issue, a political one or perhaps even a spiritual one?
I remember the first time that the scale of the abortion industry, even just in this country, hit me. I was in the middle of a live radio show that I was hosting on faith and ethics. As a rather annoying anti-abortionist continued her apparent spiel, and I gave her airtime, I checked the numbers on Wikipedia. “Six million,” I muttered on air. “That’s a holocaust.” Two things followed from that. The management threatened to sack me if I ever used that language again; and I began to think about abortion differently. It wasn’t long before I started to join the dots and think in terms of child sacrifice to dark gods. And I found myself wondering if Molech was back?
But it’s less intellectually embarrassing to try out other analytical options first. Let’s try the socio-political one with the Manchester students. Was this political “will to power”? Or was it intellectual frustration? The frenzy and rage deriving from mental confusion; symptomatic of frustration over ideologies they have failed to grasp and understand, or that threaten their own value systems and which usually time in a well-run seminar could smooth out? Or was this frenzy and rage something that could be soothed by counselling – with a period of time spent in the therapeutic services that all universities provide nowadays for distressed students?
But if the diagnosis is that it is more than that, it takes us into different territory. Is this something moral, ethical and perhaps even spiritual? Was this nearer a form of (ir)religious possession? If so, “discernment of spirits” is a deep Catholic well to draw from. We have a long history and an informed experience to help us.
Jordan Peterson has been very helpful in moving the conversation about ideas and personality and spirituality to a new level. When faced with an ideological opponent who seemed to operate beyond the range of rational conversation, he has begun to propose that something akin to possession is taking place.
We are all used to the concept that “we have ideas”, but Peterson has turned this round and suggested that the best explanation in some circumstances is that it is “the ideas that have us”.
A rule of thumb, for those who practice spiritual direction, is that one begins with the empirical, the rational, the psychological, and only having exhausted those categories of enquiry, does one move on to the metaphysical. The chief difficulty with the crowds of enraged and scarcely restrained students in Manchester is that it’s hard to find a rational explanation for their fury.
Abortion seems to invoke not just rational argumentation, but visceral rage. It appears that crowds of enraged protestors are caught up in a form of group psychosis.
The Gospels are the main conceptual map for the metaphysics of the clash between the spirits of this world and the Holy Spirit. They describe the incarnate Son of God who entered time and space, confronting what we might call pagan or unclean spirits to free humanity from them. The scene is set in the Gospels of a front-line conflict between the two rival ethics, spiritualities and metaphysics; between Light and Darkness.
The worst persecution of Christians under Diocletian – Roman emperor from 284 until his abdication in 305 – occurred in exactly this framework of reference. The oppression was initiated by the emperor after consulting in 302 the Delphi oracle, who urged the destruction of the Christian faith. This was not a matter of Roman religious cultural imperialism or intolerance, but a raw conflict between the two world views of the day – between the ancient archetypal gods of pre-Christianity and the Christ and his Church.
With the courage of the martyrs and the arrival of Constantine, the Christianisation of the world and the repudiation of the ancient spirits began to be implemented. The Gospels offer startling insights into the drama of the expulsion of evil spirits and their determination to return.
But what would happen if Christendom renounced Christ, and created a vacuum? The West in particular has been expelling Christianity – and its protection, practice and presence – from society for many decades now. We ought to ask what has filled the vacuum?
What ideologies/spirits have characterised our society since then? Three ideologies, which in the religious world have accompanying deities, have imposed themselves: the hatred and displacement of the one God – Yahweh; a preoccupation with sex and sexuality, and a determination to sexualise humanity; and an abortion industry that has destroyed children on an industrial scale.
Is it a coincidence, or something more than that, that the three primary gods of ancient civilisations, Baal, Asherah and Moloch, represent these three phenomena? In the first instance, a repudiation of the One God; in the second, hyper sexualisation of devotees; and in the third, child sacrifice?
In his book Return of the Gods [capitalisation of “gods” being the published format], Jonathan Cahn describes the three archetypal rivals that during the first covenant proved such determined and persuasive alternatives to the One God; and argues that as a consequence of repudiating Christ and Christendom, they are back.
Because the pragmatic empirical diagnoses we began with don’t deliver sufficiently to offer persuasive explanations for what we saw in Manchester and elsewhere, and see in fact taking over our culture.
The ideologies or the spirits that we see captivating the crowds of the enraged appear to be characterised by a visceral repudiation of the idea of the One God and his ethical values, accompanied by a determination to hyper-sexualise the whole culture and an indomitable will to sacrifice and celebrate the sacrifice of our children (both beyond but especially in the womb).
The dark gods or spirits appear to be back in force. We will need more than rational arguments to drive them out of hearts, heads and hysterical crowds. We will need the same devotion to Jesus, to prayer, to sacrifice and courage that the early Church employed in its first repudiation of the evil that so powerfully captures and dominates the human condition.
Photo: ‘Offering to Molech’ in ‘Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us’, by Charles Foster, 1897. The drawing is typical of Moloch depictions in nineteenth-century illustrations. Image in public domain.
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