It doesn't really surprise me, because exorcisms were common in my Baptist Church experience as a youth. My own father performed exorcisms sometimes in his capacity as a Baptist minister, and as a child of eight to maybe 12 years old, his exorcisms stories absolutely terrified me.

I lived in constant fear that the demons supposedly surrounding me would get to me and inhabit me. Once, when I was about 12, I had a nightmare about Satan coming to me in the form of cat. It was one of those dreams that's so vivid you think it's real until you wake up and have time to process. Like dreams of flying, chatting with a dead loved one, etc.

But because of my religious indoctrination, it took me a long time to process that Satan nightmare, to understand that it was just a dream.

Incidentally, demon so terrified me that I had a hard time overcoming my fear even after I realized I was an atheist at 16. I was well into my twenties before I stopped experiencing terrors in the dark. Sometimes I couldn't even bring myself to walk into a dark room, so vivid was my fear of the demonic.

Intellectually, I had long rejected the existence of demons, Satan, or anything remotely like that. I truly, sincerely did not believe.

But the fear etched into my neural circuits wasn't so easy to dismiss. It took me time, and eventually some therapy too.

Thanks for writing this. I'm astonished that the Church of England approves of exorcisms and officially performs exorcisms. I think that's heinously superstitious and absolutely disgusting of them.

I thought maybe you or the article you cited were overstating things a bit, then I dug into it, and it's absolutely as bad as you write.

What is it about Christians that can tend to make them such superstitious, horrible people?

I mean, you think of the Church of England as a fairly progressive institution, despite the fact that they remain stubbornly, officially homophobic and abusive to queer people, as when the Archbishop of Canterbury last year declared to the world that we queer people are sinners and will always be considered immoral in his church.

But exorcism? Seriously?

How cruel, terrible, and superstitious.
I never would have thought that of them.