In A Sociologist’s Journey into the American Heart of Darkness, Kevin Christopher of the Skeptical Inquirer reviews American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty:
Cuneo begins his book with a poignant and timely lamentation of the modern Catholic priesthood: “The past three decades haven’t been particularly kind to the Catholic priesthood. One would be hard-pressed to find another profession that has fallen harder or further from grace in so short a period of time.” He notes the dramatic thinning of the ranks beginning in the 1960s and 70s, the frantic scramble to find relevance in the modern world, and the endless sexual scandals. The image of the Catholic priest, writes Cuneo, “has more often been the priest as pious fraud, the priest as philanderer, the priest as yesterday’s man — equivocating, beleaguered, and thoroughly redundant.”In one exceptional area, however, the priest remains a cultural hero. “That area,” writes Cuneo, “is exorcism, and it is the priest-as-exorcist that has somehow managed, in defiance of all odds, to retain a heroic grip on the popular American imagination.” Modern Catholic liberals had hoped that exorcism would be relegated to Church history along with the other medieval trappings and customs. What such Catholics never anticipated, according to Cuneo, was the modern media’s role in breathing new life into the ancient rite of exorcism.
In the first four chapters Cuneo deftly sketches out the sundry sources of the exorcism renewal. He begins with the well-know pop Ursprung: William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and the 1973 film of the same title that it inspired. He characterizes Blatty’s work as massive structure of fantasy resting on a flimsy foundation of a priest’s 1949 diary account of the possession of a young boy in Mount Ranier, Maryland.
I can still remember renting The Exorcist — somehow I’d never seen it — and watching an interview with Blatty where he explained that he wrote The Exorcist as, more or less, a work of pro-Catholic propaganda. I almost spit out my drink. The true horror comes in realizing that it worked.