Spiritual Warfare, Social Media and the Egregore
Is the Age of Mass Delusion Actually the Age of Mass Demonization?
Spiritual warfare. It is one of those topics, like mysticism, that many don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. It just makes them squirely as soon as you mention it. It brings up visions of cheesy horror films or ministries with dubious reputations. “Deliverance ministry” is lumped into the same bucket as “faith healer” for many. So, we just stop talking about it. Or we find ways to discuss the subject that allow us to maintain credibility in a world where materialist science still holds sway. The demonic becomes something banal that makes sense to us in a world dominated by psychology. We are told that we all have demons that we deal with. We all have a shadow side. Behaviors, social phenomena, or events that come into the news are described as “demonic.” But how many people actually believe that there are real demonic entities, you know, demons, fallen angels, involved? Few, if any. Even among Christians. And those who do know well enough to keep quiet about it. Why? Because talking about demons and demonic influences is considered socially unsophisticated and downscale. You can talk about it, as long as people know that you are not really serious about it. If you want to move in the right circles, you need to keep that kind of thinking to yourself or find ways to talk about that that “sophisticated” people can accept. You talk about “enchantment” instead.
Here is the problem, though. Increasingly, when we look at what is happening in society, the explanation, “It’s demons,” seems increasingly more plausible, and not in an ironic, arch way. That is one piece of it. The other is that, as Christians, we have the Bible, and the Bible says all kinds of inconvenient things that must be explained away. When we are told that Jesus cast out demons, demons who spoke to him, demons that drowned a whole herd of pigs, demons that affected people physically, mentally, and emotionally, was this just them struggling with their “shadow side”? And then, when Jesus cast them out and the people got better, was this the result of them finally being able to confront their issues and grapple with their shadow, coming to accept that part of themselves? Hardly.
But when we read the scriptures, there is more going on with demons than just their influence on people’s personal and psychological well-being. Understanding the role of the demonic is vital as we work to spread and bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ. It is not a matter of making the right arguments. Jesus himself said it this way to Paul on the road to Damascus, as recounted in Acts 26:
16 “‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me. 17 I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18 to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’”
The characterization here is that those who are not “saved,” who are not “in Christ,” are in bondage to Satan, chief among the demons. This thing that we call “evangelism” or “church growth” is primarily a spiritual war. People are in bondage to Satan and his demons. God chooses to work through us on the front lines as his foot soldiers in this battle. That means doing the work of evangelism is doing the work of engaging the demons who are keeping people prisoner.
This is reinforced elsewhere. We don’t proclaim the gospel just to people. Ephesians 3:10:
“His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”
Those “rulers and authorities” are the fallen angels, demons. Jesus himself warns in John 14:10, that when he is gone, “the prince of the world is coming.” This is exactly how Paul characterizes our struggle to spread the gospel in Ephesians 6:12:
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Our battle, our fight, is real, and it is with Satan and his demons who hold the people of the world in bondage. It is not enough to have arguments at the ready, a solid witness, because these same demons blind people so they cannot see the truth in Christ. 2 Corinthians 4:4:
“The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
It is interesting that he calls Satan “the god of this age.” We will have more to say about this in a bit. But what is clear is that we are in a spiritual battle when we are “doing evangelism.” Just so that people can hear the gospel, a battle must be engaged with Satan and his demonic forces. Paul certainly understands it this way. 2 Corinthians 2:10-11:
10 “Anyone you forgive, I also forgive. And what I have forgiven—if there was anything to forgive—I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake, 11 in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes.”
Paul is cognizant that Satan is always on the lookout to trip us up in our work. We have to be aware of all the ways he can undermine the spread of the gospel. In this, there is a constant pressure on us from “the world” to embrace its philosophies, its way of thinking and doing things, which, as he says in Colossians 2:8b, can take…
“…you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”
This spiritual battle is always present, but, as Paul says later in the same chapter, verse 15, we engage it with the confidence that,
“…having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”
Even though these realities are hidden in Christ, waiting to be fully revealed in the last days, we engage knowing that “in Christ” the battle has been won. But just as our personal victory “in Christ” is not fully revealed today, demanding of us that we “work out our salvation with fear and trembling,” so this spiritual war must also be worked out with fear and trembling. But we fight the battle covered in the blood of Christ and his victory over death. But just as our personal battle with the sin that clings to us is real, so too the battle with the princes of this world is very much real.
But before we dive into this more, we must talk about the nature of idols and idolatry, because this is an important piece of the puzzle that is often overlooked. There are two threads within scripture about idols, one is that they are nothing, mere wood, stone, and metal, as in Deuteronomy 4:28:
“There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell.”
Or Isaiah 44:19:
“No one stops to think,
no one has the knowledge or understanding to say,
‘Half of it I used for fuel;
I even baked bread over its coals,
I roasted meat and I ate.
Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left?
Shall I bow down to a block of wood?’”
And while this aspect of idolatry is true, it lends itself to a materialist understanding of the kinds of problems we face. When we talk about something becoming an idol in our lives, we just see it as some material reality to which we have given too much respect and devotion. The solution then is to put things in their proper place. As long as we don’t make things into idols, as long as material realities don’t take up too much of our attention, then pretty much anything can be a good thing. The practical result is that we rationalize our attachments and dismiss the importance of a whole range of influences in our lives. It also leads us to dismiss the seriousness of a statement like this in Colossians 3:5 where Paul says,
“Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.”
If idols are just things of wood and stone, then, obviously, there is nothing to these desires other than their material, their psychological, reality. The spiritual life becomes little more than the proper management of one’s emotions. It also becomes easy to sidestep sin. I am not greedy; I just work hard. It’s just good business. Maximizing my opportunities. You, anyone, would do the same.
But what if there is more to it than this? There is another thread in the scriptures. Idols are the front, the focus, the material representation of demons. The worship of idols is actually demon worship. The false gods of the nations are demons stealing the worship of human beings that should be offered to the Living God alone. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul says this:
“Do I mean then that food sacrificed to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? 20 No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. 22 Are we trying to arouse the Lord’s jealousy? Are we stronger than he?”
What is interesting about this passage is that he says both things at once. That idols are on the one hand “nothing” but yet at the same time the food people are offering up to the idol is also being sacrificed to demons.
With demon worship, and with idolatry in general, one element that we need to see, one that separates Christian worship and spiritual practice from the pagan, is that predominantly idolatry is transactional. In other words, worship and sacrifice are offered up so that you might get something in return. You make a sacrifice so as to secure a good harvest, a healthy childbirth, this sort of thing. It’s a transaction. Christian worship is meant to be fundamentally different. Our worship centers around God as God. He is worthy of worship and sacrifice even when we get nothing in return. This is because of who he is as God. When we go to church and we are unhappy because we “didn’t get anything out of it,” we are approaching Christian worship with a pagan mindset. You go to church, you give your time and attention, and you expect to come away having been “fed.” This is a pagan mindset.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t bring our requests to God, that we shouldn’t expect him to pour out blessings into our lives; but we should not expect God to answer “yes” to our requests “transactionally,” as if God owes us something because of the sacrifices we have brought him. The scriptures are quite clear that at some point in our spiritual journey, God will withdraw himself from us and confront us with the question of whether we will pursue him for his own sake, even though we are getting nothing out of it. This is the desert experience. The dark night of the soul. At its most extreme, it is what happened to Job and the way that he was tested. It is in this exact area that we become vulnerable to demonic temptation. Will we look elsewhere to find the things that we crave? Or will we sacrifice those cravings on the cross and direct our attention to God alone? Will we as churches try catering to people’s feelings and desires, turning the church itself into something idolatrous, almost pagan, rather than giving them good counsel, directing them to offer those desires up to God and God alone without expectation?
This is but part of why being mindful of “spiritual warfare” matters.
As we go deeper into this, we must caution people. There are two dangers. One is that we ignore the demonic. The other is that we start seeing demons in everything, and this starts to consume our attention. We are to direct our thoughts to God. This is not a casual warning, but the heart of the spiritual life, as Colossians 3:1-4 teaches us:
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
This is precisely why God will withdraw himself at times, to wean us off a transactional mindset, to spur us to seek him alone and who we are “in Christ.” This breaks one of the cornerstones of idolatry and thus one of the avenues that the evil one can use to tempt us.
Not every temptation is the direct result of demonic activity. There are three primary avenues of temptation. The first is our own sinful nature and the “strongholds” we have allowed to be built up in our lives. Sometimes, sin is just you being your own worst enemy. We are flawed, stained, and corrupted by sin. This is operating at the level of our being. This is why we need Christ. We need a change in our being, our essence, one that only God can accomplish “in Christ.” Once we have given into temptation once and made room for it within us, these can build up strongholds within us. This is why telling people that it is ok to have homosexual desires, to identify as gay, but not act on those desires, is such terrible counsel. You are actually telling people that it is ok to build strongholds in which you harbor and nurture desires for sin. You are basically telling people to hold onto the thoughts and feelings that Satan can use to tempt and oppress them. This is not the only sin. You can do this with lust, anger, with greed, with covetousness, envy, pride, bitterness, unforgiveness, and so forth. You can create strongholds for all manner of sinful and destructive thoughts where the sin arises without any help from the evil one, or these same strongholds can become weak points for the devil to torment you.
Secondly, there is “the world” or what we might call the “world system.” As we have discussed above, the world is under the authority of the “principalities and powers.” This is one of the downstream effects of sin and part of the judgement of God revealing itself in the here and now. But this does not mean that everything that happens within the world system is directly being done by Satan and his demons. No, of course not. The systems, once set up, will do the work for them. Once a system is flooded with pornography, the porn does its own work. Once you have made greed a cornerstone in society, “It’s the economy, stupid,” will do its own work once people have bought into it. When people are willing to give themselves over to temptation, it makes the devil’s work easy. He can just leave them to it, and they will keep themselves in bondage.
And this brings us to the third origin of temptation: Satan and his demons. The devil is real, and he does tempt people into sin. Plain and simple. When someone says, “I have known that I was gay since I was five,” I have a pretty good idea when the demons started whispering in their ears. When a kid starts taking money out of his mom’s purse to buy candy at the corner store, that thought might not have come to him unbidden. That moment when you didn’t seem like yourself and you blew up at someone at the office. It could have been just stress. That is a possibility. You might have created a stronghold in your emotional life where you harbor and nurture anger and resentment. It might just be that the reason you are “not yourself” is that you were being tempted and gave yourself over to a demon, even just for a time.
A lot of people experience episodes of sinfulness like this, where they are not themselves. You could psychologize it, and it could be something coming from within their sinful self, but maybe a demon is having its way with them for a time. It might be that a stronghold has given some demon access to you and your life. They may not be there all the time. The demon might come and go. But it knows, not because they have access to your thoughts, they don’t, but because they are adept at reading you, because of things you are holding onto, often bitterness and unforgiveness, that it can have its way with you any time it wants, playing with you, bringing you down any time you seem to move forward in life. In Acts, when Jesus talks to Paul about people being in bondage to Satan, he means it.
Having discussed the three avenues by which we are tempted, it is worthwhile pausing to discuss a phenomenon being talked about in the aftermath of the emergence of social media and LLM algorithms – often referred to incorrectly as “artificial intelligence” – that of the “egregore.” This is a term that has migrated into the online discourse from esoteric spirituality. I originally heard it as an explanation for the divine, for spirits, to explain them in a way that makes sense to people deeply immersed in modernity, people who often don’t want to give credence to Christian religious claims. The “AI” definition generated by Google is actually pretty decent in this instance:
“An egregore is a non-physical, autonomous entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts, emotions, and intentions of a distinct group of people, such as a family, club, church, or even a corporation. Believed to have an independent existence, an egregore is seen as having the power to influence its creators and can manifest with both positive or negative effects depending on the nature of the thoughts that formed it.”
As an explanation for God, the gods, as well as angels and demons, it’s basically just warmed-over Feuerbach on steroids. That aside, I do think there is something to it as a phenomenon. It is akin to “the madness of crowds,” that is, the way that large groups of people will come to manifest a kind of group personality. Crowds, the mob, have been with us for a long time. The thing about mobs is that they have a kind of recursive property in that they feed back on themselves. People can influence the mob, whipping a group into a frenzy. But the mob can also act on those who are part of it, catching them up into its collective space, its mood, its personality, changing them, even if for a time, like a spell has been cast over them. They can have this sensation that they are not themselves. I think this is a big part of why Jesus was constantly pulling back from and disengaging from the crowds that followed him so as to pray. One gets the sense that he understood the recursive danger of the crowd, and so as not to get sucked in, he withdrew and re-grounded himself in the Divine Presence.
It is this space that people are drawn into, not just mobs, but in all mass events, where you get caught up in the moment, which is important for us to consider here. Just a few paragraphs ago, we talked about the process of temptation and being in the grip of sin as us not being ourselves. It could be that we are in the grip of our sinful nature, what psychology explains away as our “shadow side,” or it could be something more malign. One explanation, that of the esotericists, is that the crowd creates a spiritual entity that then dominates them while they are in its grip. I suppose that is possible. But as Christians, we have a simpler explanation: these types of mass events potentially open people up to the demonic. Just as we can create individual strongholds that open us up to influence from demons, so too groups of people can collectively create strongholds that open them up to demonic oppression, even control.
If we then apply this to mass media, including social media, it provides insights to understand the potential of these media and our interaction with them. When we are talking about the different forms of mass media, as Jacques Ellul explains to us, they are not neutral instruments.
“Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.”
Mass gatherings, mass media, including social media, can become portals for demons to gain control over a group, even if just for a time. The longer that such immersion in the crowd goes on, the longer that these portals are open and can be an avenue for the influence of demons, the more that people can be oppressed and enslaved by them. This is one way that the powers and principles assert control. We can explain propaganda away as merely a material phenomenon, people trying to influence and control us politically for purposes of the acquisition and maintenance of power. We can explain business propaganda, otherwise known as product advertising, materially, as a form of economic control, so that we buy products and engage in economic activity so as to make its purveyors money. But what if political propaganda and product advertising to the masses are generating an egregore, a collective consciousness that creates an avenue, a “portal,” for demonic oppression? We are not in Kansas anymore, Dorthy.
Now let’s think about social media over the last few years, through the period of COVID and the BLM riots, the invasion of Ukraine, and the way that people’s views were manipulated by social media, often on a dime. We laugh about the “I support the current thing” meme:
But now, let’s look at more recent events and think about the response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This was, in a very short amount of time, a mass event. The outrage. The anger. The calls for justice. The calls for retribution. All of it, fully justified. But on another level, this played out over social media, where the responses were amplified recursively and fed by the political divides in the nation. If we think about “the world” as being under the authority of the “powers and principalities,” and step back and ask questions about what has unfolded recently, given all that we have discussed so far, where could they lead? The young man who shot him seems to have been in the grip of something. Could this have been initiated by demonic elements? Given the nature of social media, could this have been used to manipulate people, stirring up their collective sense of righteous outrage, to control them in ways that furthers demonic control and oppression over society? Satan would love nothing more than to spur Christians into an orgy of bloodletting. And it is not just this event and this happening. The propagandistic nature of all mass media, including social media, is to heighten the “us vs. them” binary, to elevate emotion over nuanced thought, to excite people and manipulate them into conflict. The propaganda of agitation, agitprop, is well named. Social media is a 24/7 arena of agitprop.
Before bringing this back and closing off this piece by talking about spiritual warfare and the current church landscape, I ask the reader to indulge me in one more form of social criticism, to begin to perhaps think about the currents of the last few hundred years as the West has come to be dominated by business interests and the commercial class. It is hard to deny that a significant part of our societal landscape is dominated by covetousness and greed, by envy and gluttony. We as Christians have worked hard to justify our full participation in industrial capitalism. But if we take seriously Paul’s description of greed as idolatry (Colossians 3:5), or Jesus telling us that the deceitfulness of wealth chokes out the Word of God (Matthew 13:22), or when Paul also tells us that the love of money is the root of all manners of evil (1 Timothy 6:10), and then we go ahead and make greed and covetousness a foundational part of our society, is it not possible that this “idol” is an egregore that has opened a society wide portal through which we are now being oppressed, harassed, and controlled by Satan? Before you dismiss the possibility too quickly, you might want to look around and see where we are and what greed has wrought in our society.
Now, as for the churches, especially in this era of the “Church Growth Movement,” there has been an intentional downplaying of these realities to focus on the more material needs of people. We no longer emphasize that people are sinful. Rather, we let them believe that they are more or less good people, who are “broken.” They can come to church and Jesus will be there to fix them. Preaching becomes practical to address the “real needs” people have. How to improve communication in their marriages. How to talk with their kids. How to make life more meaningful. How to manage their finances. We need to meet people where they are at. Nothing too strange. Evangelism is more like an accounting problem: how to move people from the “unchurched” to the “churched” column. Or it is a marketing problem, getting the message out and generating buzz. Churches adapt to make themselves more like the world so that people who are “seeking” can relate to the church. Everyone is on a religious journey. Come have your religious journey with us. Let Jesus be your wingman and help make your life fabulous. Talking about actual spiritual realities is bad for business. Telling people that they are either “in the world” or they are “in Christ” is off-putting. Telling people who think of themselves as a “good person” that they are in bondage to Satan will be a big turn-off.
But if what Jesus told Paul on the road to Damascus is true, and it is true, then we are in the middle of a spiritual war. It changes things. This is the essence of the book of Revelation. It pulls back the curtain on the spiritual war going on behind the scenes so as to give us comfort when we are being persecuted for our faith, to remind us, not just that we are going to win this war, but we have already won, and the after celebration is going to be amazing. If evangelism is more than just a marketing or accounting problem, it fundamentally changes how you approach everything. You are engaging in a battle with Satan for the eternal future of people all around you. And I can tell you this, Satan will not want to give them up willingly. He is quite content to let people go to church as long as no one ever frees them from his possession.
This battle is fought in prayer. Dedicated and disciplined prayer. We must ground and anchor ourselves in the real presence of God. It means more than just believing in the idea of God and salvation in Jesus Christ. It means believing that we have been set free, that we are made new, that we are living the resurrected life, that we are the body of Christ, who is the image of the unseen God. We make God visible to a world that is presently under the authority of the powers and principalities. It means keeping ourselves fixed on Christ, who is seated at the right hand of God in a determined and disciplined way, so that we don’t become entangled in the world. It means we must always be watchful and alert to the schemes of the devil. The church is here to reveal the Kingdom of God, to conquer in his name. We do this through conversion and discipling:
“‘…to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’”
But if anyone of us is going to face off against Satan, we cannot do this on our own. Only a people of faith, of prayer, a people deeply rooted in the presence of God, a people who practice the faith, walk the narrow path with seriousness and purpose, can even begin to hope to stand against such an enemy. But “in Christ” we will do more than stand; we will participate in and reveal his victory over sin and death.