When I last visited New Orleans, the Robert E. Lee Monument was being used as an altar. Two voodoo priestesses, turbans atop their heads, scattered gunpowder and grave dirt on the granite plinth. With splendid indifference to those who had erected the memorial, they summoned their gods through an offering of rum and cheap cigars.
It was a sign of the times. Worship of strange spirits is on the rise in America, often in ways we do not acknowledge. Tarot readers, ghost hunters, UFO abductees, and shamanic healers may not seem to have much in common with the noble pagans of old. But in a society shaped by comics, sci-fi, and multi-culti kitsch, inchoate polytheism manifests itself as paranormal belief.
According to Pew Research, 65 percent of Americans believe in the paranormal, and their number is increasing. Christianity never denied the reality of what St. Paul calls “principalities and powers,” but its hatred of idols and demons restrained interest in the occult. Now that aversion is declining along with the Christian churches. Paranormal belief and experience is more common among the young than among the old, among the unchurched than among the religious. Before his death in 2016, the Vatican exorcist Fr. Gabriel Amorth warned that witchcraft and devil worship were rapidly spreading.