In 2014, I Landed my dream job. I didn’t realize it would involve desperate strangers asking me to save them from demonic oppression.
I grew up in Texas, but after high school I went to Hampshire, an experimental college in Massachusetts that will sadly close at the end of the year. Sometime during the cold New England winters, I fell in love with comparative religion. In an era before Google, reading sacred texts from Asia and the Middle East felt like discovering ancient secrets. As I moved from studying texts to studying people, I came to realize that religious worldviews can function like alternate realities: Two human beings may have a totally different understanding of how the universe works and what we’re supposed to be doing. Every summer, I returned to Texas for work, and people would ask me what my major was. Hampshire was the kind of school that didn’t have majors, but when I told them I was studying religion, they would sneer and ask, “What are you going to do with that?” High school friends, employers, nearly every Texan I talked to—they all knew that the academic study of religion was a big scam. To them, religion was a private matter, totally separated from politics, law, or economics. As such, studying it was a totally subjective, indulgent undertaking. Since I had fallen for the scam, that meant two things: 1) They were smarter than me, and 2) I was bound for a life of poverty.
