Who knew there are Church of England exorcists? A Telegraph investigation has revealed that in 2023 a Norfolk NHS hospice, Priscilla Bacon Lodge, wrote to the local Church of England “deliverance ministry”, requesting help with paranormal incidents at the site, which had previously been a children’s hospital. A minister was duly dispatched to anoint staff and bless the premises.

It may come as a surprise to some to learn that the Church of England offers this service at all. When Alastair Campbell shut down an interview question about Tony Blair’s religious beliefs in 2003 with the flat statement that “We don’t do God”, he captured something that has long been generally true of at least elite English culture: a sense that faith is all very well, but anything too mystical is at best mildly embarrassing, if not outright suspicious.

In this context, it is surprising to find exorcists in Britain’s established Church. But it is, in fact, a relatively recent development, according to historian Francis Young. A ruling dating back to 1604, Canon 72, “had effectively banned exorcism unless authorized by a license granted by the bishop, and no such license was ever granted in 365 years”. But Canon 72 was repealed in 1969, and since then “deliverance” has become increasingly common in the Anglican Church. Today, every Church of England diocese contains at least one individual who assists with “deliverance ministry”.

My first thought on reading this was that it must surely be connected to the more general mushrooming in bizarre beliefs alongside the rise of the internet. But as Young shows, the phenomenon long predates such digital-era weirdness as “Birds Aren’t Real” or the QAnon fandom. Nor is it attributable only to immigration from places such as Africa, where exorcism is comparatively normalized. The change Young describes precedes mass immigration into the UK, and also mass adoption of the internet, by several decades.

Instead, he suggests three home-grown cultural shifts. The first is “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”, which is to say a general increase in the cultural salience of mystical, paranormal, and unexplained phenomena from the Sixties onwards. Second is the rise of charismatic Christian ministry across multiple denominations. And third is the influence of The Exorcist, which was published in 1971 and adapted into a popular film two years later, propelling exorcism center stage as horror material.

Since a horrific 1974 incident in which a man murdered his wife and family dog following an Anglican attempt at exorcism, the practice has been strictly regulated. My local vicar explained to me that ministers will respond to any request for “deliverance” initially for psychiatric or abuse concerns, as there is considerable overlap with more prosaic interpersonal conflict and mental illness. But even once these have been discounted, strange occurrences persist. The Rev. Jason Bray, Dean of Llandaff Cathedral, describes how he deals with about a dozen incidents a year as deliverance minister, ranging from people who need reassurance to genuinely inexplicable sightings and “poltergeist” activity.

What, then, should we make of this return of the spooky to Britain — long the most skeptical, empiricist, “don’t do God” people in the world? Perhaps the real answer is that it never went away. After all, there’s no shortage of spooky English folklore and urban legends. But the Church of England has always reflected, and helped to consolidate, the country’s prevailing elite moral norms: indeed, it still does so, for example in its embrace of DEI, “reparations” and other upper-bougie preoccupations.

So perhaps it’s no coincidence that England’s once aggressively rationalist elite culture began to shift in the Sixties, driven especially by affluent young people from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds embracing the counterculture. Accordingly, the Church of England also moved to accommodate this shift within its own establishment, resulting — among other things — in an increased willingness to facilitate requests for deliverance ministry. It’s hard to say what any of this tells us about whether or not ghosts are real. Certainly, the Dean of Llandaff Cathedral considers his work to be real and worthwhile. Perhaps the prevalence of apparitions is in fact a two-way street: if you expect to see more of them, you will.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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