Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Garasenes asked him to depart from them; for they were seized with great fear; so he got into the boat and returned. — Luke 8:37

In polite society we have not wanted to talk much of demons and the demonic. In our liberal, educated culture, we believe that sin was due mostly to ignorance and that evil could be eradicated by education. In our psychologically enlightened times we have avoided the more ancient religious and mythological language of devils and evil. We have instead preferred words like repression, impulses, sublimation, drives, complexes, phobias, regression, neuroses, psychoses, manic-depressive, schizophrenic, and schizoid — to name a few.

If we have been suspicious of religious healers, exorcists, and spiritual counsel…