The Faith of "The Exorcist"

Last month, on August 7, the Hollywood director William Friedkin died at the age of 87. Friedkin was most famous for his films The French Connection and The Exorcist. 

You may have seen a commemoration of Friedkin and The Exorcist in a New York Times opinion piece by Matthew Walther entitled "The Ultimate Horror Movie Is Really About Heaven and Hell."

Walther notes that Friedkin "repeatedly acknowledged the essentially religious nature of the [The Exorcist]." And that while many have considered The Exorcist to be a genre horror film, Walther argues that people fail to appreciate what the film "really is," namely "an art film premised on the idea that the claims the Catholic Church makes for itself are true — not in some loose metaphorical sense but literally." As Walther argues:

When it came out, “The Exorcist” didn’t just shock audiences with lurid scenes of projectile vomiting and spinning heads. It also forced them to acknowledge a tension, most acutely felt in the Catholic Church but omnipresent in Western society, that had grown between two rival conceptions of religion. Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s? “The Exorcist” came down on the side of tradition. After the conclusion in 1965 of the Second Vatican Council, from which the vernacularization of the liturgy and other changes in Catholic discipline emerged, the church experienced a deepening crisis: a decline in its moral authority, a collapse in vocations and Mass attendance, and a widespread rejection of the supernatural, even by clergy, in favor of a more sociological understanding of the faith.

Due to the modern tides of secularization and disenchantment, the devil has been demythologized, turned into a metaphor. I recount all this in my book Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted. As I describe in the book, in my own life I held to a "sociological understanding of faith," viewing "spiritual warfare" as primarily about the pursuit of social justice. Demon possession in the Bible was probably just an ancient understanding of mental illness. But I go on in the book to describe my own journey in taking the devil and the demonic more seriously. To be clear, I tell no lurid stories in the book about personal encounters with possessed persons. Sadly or happily, there is no projectile vomiting. But my experiences as a prison chaplain have profoundly changed how I view the battle between good and evil. 

In The Exorcist this chasm of belief is seen in the two priests tasked with conducting the exorcism. On the one hand, is the modern, skeptical, disenchanted and Post-Vatican II priest, the young Father Kerres. Walther describes him:

Father Karras is a typical clergyman of the modern era, a young liberal Jesuit disillusioned with the priesthood for whom secular learning and even physical exercise have usurped the role of dogma. When the mother of the possessed girl asks him how someone obtains permission for an exorcism, he replies, “I’d have to get them into a time machine and get them back to the 16th century.”

The other, older priest is Father Merrin. Father Merrin is old-school when it comes to the demonic. Walther describing him:

Father Merrin is an older, traditionally minded scholar-priest, an expert in ancient Near Eastern cultures who accepts the reality of the demonic and fears it. He is an embodiment of what Pope Benedict XVI once called the “hermeneutic of continuity,” a refusal to regard the 1960s as the beginning of a new divine dispensation.

In short, Walther concludes that The Exorcist is a profoundly religious film, which cannot be understood separate from the metaphysical claims it is premised upon. The devil is real in The Exorcist. As Walther concludes:

In “The Exorcist,” neither the plot nor the characters can be understood from a nonreligious vantage point. That is not true of beloved costume dramas such as “Becket” (1964) and “A Man for All Seasons” (1966), whose Catholic heroes exhibit virtues that can be easily understood in secular terms — courage in the face of tyranny, love of country, devotion to conscience. Nor it is true of more experimental films such as “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and “The Seventh Seal” (1957), which reduce Christianity to a kind of existentialism, an abstract reckoning with the meaning of human life.

In the world of “The Exorcist,” Father Merrin is a good character because he is a faithful and orthodox priest who accepts that what the church teaches is true: that we live in a moral universe in which the stakes are not life and death — as they end up being in many conventional religious dramas — but heaven and hell.