Trained Catholic exorcists in the US

Vinyl record sales in the US collapsed in the 1990s and then, beginning around 2005, staged a resurrection that can only be described as miraculous. Trained Catholic exorcists, also thin on the ground for some decades, underwent a parallel revival. By 2023, the correlation between the two stood at 0.97 across ten data points. It is possible that the same person buying a reissued copy of Rumours also needed a consultation with a priest. It is also possible that both trends simply enjoy a good comeback narrative.

The vinyl revival and the exorcism training revival are both expressions of a broader cultural counter-modernism that accelerated after 2010. Vinyl sales grew from under a million units in 2005 to over 43 million by 2023, driven by nostalgia, audiophile culture, and a rejection of streaming's disposability. The US Catholic Church's renewed emphasis on exorcism ministry similarly reflects a traditionalist revival within American Catholicism, with the first formal US exorcism training conference held in 2010. Both trends attracted practitioners who felt something important had been lost and needed to be recovered.

Nostalgia and tradition are powerful economic and institutional forces that tend to move together. When a culture decides to recover what it abandoned, it rarely does so in just one domain.