Trained Catholic exorcists in the US

The universe, in its infinite sense of humor, has arranged matters so that the number of priests trained to expel demons from human bodies rises and falls in perfect synchronization with the number of chickens we raise to be killed and eaten, which suggests either that poultry farming is genuinely demonic or that we are simply very good at finding patterns in things that have nothing to do with each other. Between 2005 and 2021, as American broiler production climbed from roughly 26 billion birds annually to 32 billion, exorcist training programs expanded with an almost eerie loyalty to the trend, r=0.968, which is the kind of correlation that makes you wonder if God was taking notes on both spreadsheets.

The real story is probably much less interesting and yet somehow more fascinating: both numbers follow the steady economic expansion of the American middle class during this period, with occasional dips during recessions. The Catholic Church, flush with relative wealth and worried about spiritual crises real or imagined, invested in training more exorcists just as the poultry industry, riding global protein demand and industrial efficiency gains, expanded its infrastructure and bird populations. Population growth alone explains a good portion of this—more Americans meant more souls (by Catholic logic) and more consumers demanding cheap chicken, which means more birds raised in concentrated operations that would frankly terrify anyone exposed to their actual conditions. A broiler chicken operation housing 30,000 birds in a single shed creates approximately 330 tons of manure annually, which is to say that American chicken farming produces something like the annual waste output of a mid-sized city.

We are the kind of species that will stare at two completely unrelated trend lines and feel absolutely convinced we have discovered something true, which is either a profound failure of pattern recognition or its most heroic achievement. The exorcists and the chickens climbed together through economic booms and busts, through policy changes and cultural shifts, through a period of ordinary human muddling that looked, when graphed, like destiny. Perhaps that should tell us something about correlation, causation, and the stories we tell ourselves when we're alone with a spreadsheet at three in the morning. Humans are pattern-seeking machines.