When my wife and I had our twin baby boys circumcised in our
home last year, the Hasidic rabbi who performed the bris left us
with a surprising parting gift: an amulet for protection against
demons. It was a laminated card printed with Hebrew texts including
imprecations against Lilith, a female demon of the night. Alluded
to in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, she seduces men to sin and
kills infants in their sleep. When I queried the rabbi about this,
especially about some esoteric and incantation-like phrases on the
card that I couldn’t decipher, he gracefully dodged, referring me
to unspecified kabbalistic secrets.
Though amused by the curious souvenir, I was also glad to have
it. I hung the card above our babies’ crib.
It was a reminder that, as much as we think of our age as
cynical and literally disenchanted, supernatural belief has hardly
been erased. In fact, it may be on the rise. A CBS poll in October
reported that 48% of Americans believe in ghosts (and 22% claim to
have seen one). Among those younger than 45, 54% believe, as
opposed to 41% over that age. Belief in other forms of paranormal
and occult phenomena is on the rise too: In the 1980s, 25% of
Americans accepted the idea of alien abductions, for instance, but
40% say they do now, according to Newsweek.
CBS poll in October What individual surveys don’t capture is the
impressive diversity within what psychologist William James called
“the reality of the unseen,” or Puritan witch-hunter Cotton Mather
called the “invisible world.” Polls ask mostly about well-known
experiences — Have you used a Ouija board? — but neglect wilder
phenomena.
A few weeks ago, I found myself seated on an airplane next to a
lively, curly haired woman in her 50s. She introduced herself as a
career and spiritual counselor and regaled me with accounts of
reincarnation she has elicited from clients and from her own
recovered memories. When I told this to a Jewish-born colleague, a
cerebral guy who occupies a prominent media perch, he launched into
a narrative of his supernatural encounters with spirit beings,
mediated by a syncretist Brazilian church, Santo Daime, and aided
by drinking a foul-tasting concoction mixed from psychotropic
jungle vines and leaves.
A popular nightly radio program, “Coast to Coast AM” with George
Noory, draws 3 million listeners nationwide and is devoted to
sharing all types of experiences outside the mainstream. The show
comes on at 9 p.m. in Seattle, where I live, and my ritual is to
listen to Noory as I bustle around the kitchen, making dinner and
drinking wine.
Listeners call up, one after another, with personal narratives
of what Jewish mysticism would describe as the “other side” of
existence. Sure, I’m skeptical about crop circles, conspiracy
theories and cryptozoology. However, I’m also sympathetic to the
late conservative philosopher and ghost-story writer Russell Kirk,
who valued the paranormal for its suggestion that reality consists
of more than mundane material processes. I get the persistent sense
that something profound is affirmed by the eerie accounts on
Noory’s show.
The latest scientific theory holds that particular brain
functions evolved for purposes suited to the survival of the
species, but then got “hijacked” by religious and other
supernatural beliefs. Maybe that’s right, but explanations like
that partake of a certain pat, naive quality reminiscent of a
Rudyard Kipling “Just So Story” (”How the Leopard Got His Spots” …
“How the Human Got His Belief in Demons”). They are also
suspiciously unfalsifiable. If people had over the centuries
completely abandoned the supernatural, evolutionary psychologists
could spin out an equally plausible tale to explain that.
Another possibility is that the human need to believe in the
unseen world itself points to, while not proving, the reality of
hidden dimensions. It could be that materialism — the philosophical
assumption that reality is nothing but physical stuff — is a
prejudice rather than a fact. Perhaps an unseen reality does exist,
revealed in flashes that can be confusing or misleading, to which
we sometimes give flaky designations. Like “Bigfoot.”
Religions used to confidently navigate this twilight realm. Some
faiths still do, quietly. When Louisiana’s Catholic governor, Bobby
Jindal, was being considered as a running mate for John McCain, the
fact that Jindal once participated in an exorcism became a briefly
sensational media story. As for the rabbi who presided over our
twins’ bris, the evangelistic branch of Judaism to which he
belongs, Chabad, stands out as bucking the trend elsewhere in
Judaism toward a pallid rationalism.
The same trend is mirrored in other faiths, especially the
shrinking mainline Protestant denominations. It may be that such
pallidness helps explain why Americans turn to florid paranormal
beliefs, as opposed to traditional supernatural ideas. Indeed, U.S.
polling data from Gallup, reported by Baylor University
researchers, shows that belief in the occult is more common among
non- or infrequent churchgoers or those belonging to a liberal
Protestant denomination than it is among frequent churchgoers and
conservative evangelicals.
Religious leaders representing respectable faiths, intimidated
by secular prejudice, may wish to take note as they scan the empty
pews. The human hunger for a vigorous, unapologetic interface with
the unknown can’t be entirely repressed. As Sigmund Freud knew, the
repressed has a way of returning.
David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute
and the author of “The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish
Orthodoxy” and “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in
Western History.”