Yes. Christian Scripture presents angels and demons as real and still at work, and Dr. Dan Morrison argues that most believers already accept this in principle. The trouble lies in how they use the belief. Many Christians switch the supernatural off when it would be awkward and switch it on when it would be useful. That habit, more than belief or unbelief, makes the whole subject look like special pleading. A consistent position takes the unseen world seriously and refuses to hand it the burdens Scripture gives to us.
Where does the suspicion of convenience come from?
The skeptic’s charge deserves a fair hearing. If a person invokes spiritual causes only when they help, the belief starts to look like a tool rather than a conviction about how the world is.
Morrison does not dodge this. He describes two opposite habits among believers. One explains away whatever is spiritual in Scripture, so that miracles and spiritual beings become symbols for something else, usually politics. The other turns concrete, bodily obedience into something vaguely spiritual, which Morrison says believers do “in order to, I would dare say, relieve us of some of the responsibility of what it means to follow Jesus.”
He then names the pattern linking the two. We “miss out on the spiritual reality of what’s taking place, but only when it’s convenient for us,” he says, and in the next breath he adds the reverse: the same people spiritualize when that is convenient. So the charge concerns something other than quantity. The amount a person believes shifts with the situation.
The premise both habits share
On the surface the dismissive Christian and the demon-everywhere Christian look like opposites. Underneath, they often make the same move. Each treats the unseen world as an explanation available on demand, and each settles whether something is spiritual by asking, without saying so, which answer asks less of them.
Morrison’s own examples show how this works. The man who told him a sneeze was a cold demon was reaching for a spiritual cause where an ordinary one would do. The person he confronted with “This ain’t a demon. You did this” was using the devil to carry a choice that was theirs. On the other side, a believer who finds the miraculous embarrassing quietly reads it out of the text. The direction differs; the test is identical.
That test is comfort, and comfort has nothing to do with truth. A belief that tracks reality has to be willing to cost you something either way. Sometimes it must say this really is spiritual when that is unwelcome. Sometimes it must say this is simply you, which is unwelcome too.
Morrison proposes a different first question. Instead of asking what is easiest to believe, he asks, “what does scripture teach? And how do I embrace what the Bible actually says?” That question resists bending to a mood, because its answer was fixed before the mood arrived.
What does Scripture actually commit a believer to?
Angels run through the New Testament: at the tomb, at the ascension, strengthening the apostles across Acts, and throughout Revelation. They are no decorative touch confined to a few early chapters. They appear across the accounts of the church’s first decades. Morrison summarizes their role this way: “angels are messengers of God who do God’s bidding in order to bring comfort, support,” and at times to fight on behalf of God’s people.
In Daniel 10 a messenger tells Daniel his prayer was heard from the first day, yet the answer was delayed by conflict Daniel could not see. In 2 Kings 6:17 the prophet prays for his frightened servant: “LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” The army was there before the servant saw it. His fear came from what he could not see, not from what was missing.
Paul states the same idea without narrative. Ephesians 6:12 reads: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” If that sentence describes reality, far more is happening in an ordinary day than most believers admit. “I think we miss so much, and I would dare say we ignore so much,” Morrison says.
The other half of the picture is what the anxious believer tends to drop. Paul describes the powers through three images from the ancient world: slavery, war and government. In each, the powers once dominated humanity, and in each Paul announces that the domination has been broken. Colossians 1:13 says God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” Colossians 2:15 says of the powers, “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” Galatians 4:9 asks why believers would turn back to the “weak and beggarly elements” and choose bondage again.
The victory has limits Paul himself marks. Ephesians 2:2 still speaks of “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” The powers remain active over those outside Christ. For those in Christ, Morrison concludes, “we are no longer under the powers of the enemy.” Believers stand firm without living afraid, and 1 John 4:4 gives the reason: “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” Real and defeated: the scriptural position needs both words.
Doesn’t this turn the devil into an all-purpose excuse?
This is the strongest objection, and it is a logical one. Once you allow that unseen beings act in the world, any event could be credited to them. A claim that explains everything risks explaining nothing, and it hands every person a ready way out of blame.
Morrison takes the worry seriously because he has watched it happen: “I have seen situations where it’s like there’s a demon under every rock and around every corner.” His answer leaves spiritual causes in place while treating them as one category among several that a person has to tell apart.
There are three possibilities. Sometimes something spiritual does seem to be going on. Sometimes the cause is a person’s own choices, and Morrison presses the point with a blunt question: “if you wanna say it was a demon, then my question is, were you possessed?” When the answer is no, the conclusion follows. And sometimes, he says, “we have to acknowledge we still live in a fallen world and things happen.” A sneeze is the body doing what God designed it to do.
Lisa Fields locates the motive behind the error. She says much of “our fascination with the demonic is us trying to make sense of the pain in our lives.” People can open doors through anger or disobedience, she grants, yet “there’s also times where it is just, you’re just struggling because that’s life.” The difficulty is that “we are always looking for a formula.”
No formula exists, but a process does. “That’s where I think discernment and prayer come into play,” Morrison says, and he adds godly counsel and a community of faith that prays and discerns together. Where something spiritual is involved, the human side still remains. In his words, “the demonic can exacerbate some of the things that we got going on in our lives.” An addiction still has to be treated as an addiction. When Fields adds, “Let’s get you some therapy,” for the trauma underneath, Morrison treats it as part of the work, not a lapse in faith.
Morrison’s sharpest argument here is a logical one. “Next to God, the devil gets lied on more than any being in all of creation,” he says. The devil is a creature with limits: “But the devil cannot do this, this, this, this, and this all at the same time.” Blaming him for everything quietly grants him qualities that belong to God alone, such as being everywhere and behind everything at once. The believer who sees demons in every corner ends up with a bigger devil than Scripture describes, which distorts the spiritual world as surely as denying it does.
Genesis 3 shows the pattern at the start. Blame passes from Adam to the woman to the serpent. God judges the serpent and still holds the humans to account. As Fields reads it, God “will still hold you responsible for your actions even if you were influenced by the enemy.” Paul’s account of sin in Romans keeps the same structure, and Morrison draws the line plainly: “The devil has some responsibility and some role, but the human responsibility is there every single time.” Influence is real. It never transfers the guilt.
Is the quiet in the Western world evidence against it?
A skeptic has a second objection. Believers in much of the majority world speak openly about spiritual powers, while in secular Western settings such reports are rare. Perhaps the reports come from culture rather than reality.
Morrison has heard Westerners dismiss these accounts as just African spirituality, or as something Black Americans inherited. He turns the inference around: “Why would there be demonic manifestations in a realm where you don’t really believe in the devil anyway?” A culture that has already decided the devil is unreal gives him no reason to prove otherwise.
The argument has limits worth stating. It shows that the absence of visible manifestations settles nothing, since quiet is what you would expect on either view. By itself it cannot show that demons are present, because the same reasoning could explain any absence at all. Its job is defensive: it removes a bad inference without supplying a positive case.
The positive case rests on the testimony of Scripture and on the ministry of Jesus, who acted as if the powers were real. Belief does not make them so, and disbelief does not unmake them. As Morrison puts it, “in the event that you don’t believe in an angel, that doesn’t mean that angels don’t exist.” What exists does not depend on a poll.
What does consistent belief look like in a life?
Morrison’s practical test applies to both habits. To someone reporting frequent angelic encounters, he asks, “how is this making you more like Jesus?” To someone who sees demons everywhere, he asks whether all that vigilance shows up as love toward the people nearby. For everyone the question is the same: “does my fascination with this bring me closer to Jesus? Does it make me more like him?” A belief about the spiritual world that breeds suspicion and isolation is producing something other than Christlikeness.
The biblical accounts also show a pattern. “Angelic encounters by people often occur when people are isolated and alone,” Morrison observes. Jacob wrestles alone at night. Joshua meets the commander of the Lord’s army by himself. Mark 1:13 says Jesus “was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.” Peter sits in prison after James has been killed, and an angel leads him out. The shepherds at the nativity are an exception Morrison himself names, so this is a tendency, not a rule the text states.
The isolation in view comes from persecution, illness or crisis, not from a person who withdraws by choice and calls it private faith. And the story keeps moving. Once freed, Peter goes straight to the gathered believers, so the angel’s help returns him to the church instead of replacing it. Hebrews 13:2 turns the theme toward other people from another direction: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Behind both stands Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that the man should be alone.”
This exposes one more cost of the convenient habits. Dismissing angels forfeits the comfort Scripture offers the isolated, and chasing spiritual experience often becomes a substitute for people. Consistent belief keeps the comfort and keeps the people.
What stays open
Some questions remain unsettled. Morrison admits, “I always say what they look like, I don’t have a clue.” Scripture says far more about what angels do than about what they are. Specific claims about ranks, territories and the names of spirits go beyond what the text plainly says, and faithful Christians differ on them.
Sorting individual cases is unsettled too. No one offers a method that files every struggle neatly under spiritual, chosen or simply part of a broken world. What remains is a way of proceeding: prayer, discernment, counsel, care for body and mind, and a refusal to pick the answer by its comfort.
That refusal marks the real line between consistent and convenient belief. The question is less how much a person believes than whether the belief may bind them when it is unwelcome. A Christian who believes in angels only when life feels thin, and in demons only when guilt feels heavy, has believed what serves him. Scripture offers something harder and kinder: the powers are real, Christ has beaten them, your choices are still yours, and you were not made to face any of it alone.