Here’s some good news and some bad news. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

According to historian Rodney Stark, the world is more religious than ever before, contrary to secularists’ predictions.

Part of the reason is Christianity’s growth in the global South. But here in the West, there’s a much less comforting phenomenon underway.

As Matthew Schmitz writes in First Things, “65 percent of Americans believe in the paranormal, and their number is increasing.”  Now, we Christians know there are such things as demons, and we oppose them. But as Christianity retreats in the West, Schmitz argues, so is our culture’s aversion to the occult.

Atheism can’t fill the void left by Christianity. God created humans to long for something beyond ourselves. We’re restless, Augustine said, until we find rest in God. You can take away God, but the search for meaning is in every human heart.

And let me add a word of warning from C. S. Lewis about the occult: If you really want to know the Devil better, “you will. Whether you’ll like it when you do is another question.”