Etiology in Contemporary Religious Thought

 

On October 31, 2024, American political commentator Tucker Carlson claimed that he was attacked by a demon in his sleep. In an interview with documentarian John Heers about this experience, he said that when he woke up in the middle of the night he “had four claw marks on either side, underneath {his} arms and on{his}left shoulder”. Not much was made about this supposed event outside this interview and the occasional mention of it by Carlson in speaking appearances, but I think that this supposed occurrence can be used to explain a lot about how the concept of etiology, that of providing an explanation to an occurrence, affects religious thought. First of all, Carlson said that after this, supposedly, occurred to him, he had a “very intense desire to read the bible” after saying that he didn’t come from a “faith tradition” which acknowledged the existence of supposed demon attacks. The Christian religion and its etiology is therefore, serving as a comforting presence through its demonic explanation of this random event. However, there is an important fact about this story which I have left out up until now, which is that Carlson said that when he was supposedly attacked by a demon in his sleep, he wasn’t sleeping alone but was sleeping with “{his}wife and four dogs”. From this, one can infer that the simpler explanation for what happened to Carlson in his sleep is that one of his four dogs scratched him, with no demonic forces at hand at all. But this fact about the situation cuts to a core part of modern-day religious etiology. Which is that despite all the material explanations for tragedies and seemingly bizarre occurrences, people still gravitate towards the meta-physical explanations which religions provide for one reason or another. Maybe it’s because someone already believes in the religion which provides the explanations in question and can therefore have less trouble believing those explanations than ones which could contradict their faith. Another reason could be that someone had a previous bad experience in recent memory, and said person, not wanting to believe that two incredibly difficult experiences happening to them in quick succession is just an unfortunate coincidence, finds an unorthodox sense of comfort in the idea of a supernatural force trying to test them at a particular time. One could argue that Carlson’s belief that he was attacked by a demon could explained by both of those hypotheses, in that he was already a believer in Christian thought and recently had a bad experience happen to him right before the supposed demon attack. Carlson said that he was attacked “about a year and half” before the interview was given in October of 2024. That means Carlson had this experience around April of 2023, the same month that his employer Fox News fired him from the network. If taken at face value, Carlson’s conception of this event as an attack from a demon against him serves as a way to analyze how not only Christians use etiology for themselves, but how every religion which contains demonic supernatural forces in its dogma use it to explain bizarre unwanted occurrences.