Stephen King got rich by tapping into something universal: the primal, human fears that haunt us all, regardless of race, class, or creed. Books like “The Shining” and “Salem’s Lot” are effective whether you read them in Borneo or Bangor, in Czech or Chinese.
Never mind the master of modern horror’s recent fixation on America’s president — a figure who (at least for King’s senescent Woodstock-generation cohort) represents an evil worse than Pennywise and Randall Flagg combined. The author’s late-career Trump derangement syndrome can’t undo the undeniable impact his more than 60 novels, countless short stories, and a flood of TV and movie adaptations continue to have on pop culture.
King once described organized religion as ‘a dangerous tool.’ His online tirades often single out Christians, casting them as theocrats, hypocrites, or villains.
That is an impact well-worth examining, especially for Christians. Beneath the lurid gore, King’s books can seem oddly comforting and even wholesome. King has a knack for creating heroes out of “regular” Americans, flawed but well-meaning small-town folk who watch “The Price Is Right,” drive Chryslers, and buy Cheerios at the supermarket.
What’s more, these heroes do battle in a world where good and evil are clearly delimitated, with the former always triumphing over the latter. King seems to adhere to the sort of “culturally” Christian worldview that still held sway in the America of his youth (he was born in 1947).
Folly of faith
But a closer look at King’s more than 50-year career reveals a consistent tendency to subvert Christianity. Indeed, it seems that King has applied his considerable storytelling gifts to denigrating faith as much as inducing fear.
King doesn’t simply tell tales of terror. He builds worlds where Christianity is a sickness, believers are lunatics, and God is either cruel or indifferent to our suffering. His work isn’t just critical of religion, but a deliberate inversion of it. The sacred becomes sinister, and devotion becomes disease.
In “Carrie,” King’s first novel, the villain is not the telekinetic girl but her mother — a wild-eyed Christian who punishes her daughter for being human. Blood becomes sin, the Bible becomes a weapon, and faith is presented as the root of madness. Millions of readers met Christianity through that book and learned to detest the believer more than the devil.
The monster in the pews
In his novella “The Mist,” he repeats the theme. Trapped townsfolk turn to a hysterical woman who quotes scripture on her way to presiding over human sacrifices. She becomes a prophet of panic, a parody of piety. The monsters outside may be frightening, but the believer inside is worse. Once again, King’s message is clear: The sacred is the scariest thing of all.
Then comes 2014’s “Revival,” perhaps King’s clearest expression of his contempt for Christianity. It begins in a small New England town, where young Jamie Morton meets Reverend Charles Jacobs, a gifted preacher who wins hearts and fills pews. But when tragedy strikes his family, the reverend’s faith vanishes. From his own pulpit, he mocks belief, denounces God, and is driven out in shame.
Years later, Jamie — now a weary musician addicted and adrift — meets Jacobs again, no longer a man of God but a man of wires and obsession. The reverend has replaced prayer with experiments, chasing power instead of purpose. When he finally forces open the door between life and death, what he finds isn’t heaven or hell, but a monstrous parody of creation — an insect god ruling over the void. It’s less revelation than ridicule, King’s way of saying that only a fool would still look to God for guidance.
Pulling punches
It’s worth noting what King never touches. He spares Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism the same disdain he reserves for Christianity. To mock those faiths would be called “punching down” by the cultural gatekeepers he aligns himself with.
But his compass is as broken as his conscience — spinning wildly, always pointing away from truth. He pretends he’s striking upward at power when, in truth, he’s sneering downward at the poor and ordinary believers who build churches, not empires. It’s all fair game in art, so long as the victims are mostly white and Christian. Mocking Islam would be “insensitive.” Ridiculing Hinduism would be “problematic.” But tearing into Christianity? That’s considered brave. In King’s moral universe, faith is fair game, as long as it’s practiced in small communities, not gated ones.
Photo by BENJAMIN HANSON/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
‘Spiritual vandalism’
Another important point worth emphasizing is that King’s world isn’t godless. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s god-haunted, but the divine is turned on its head. His priests prey instead of pray. His crosses offer no comfort, only despair.
This is not accidental. King once described organized religion as “a dangerous tool.” His online tirades often single out Christians, casting them as theocrats, hypocrites, or villains. He preaches clarity while painting conviction as madness. The man who once wrote about demons now sees them in ordinary Americans.
What King practices is a kind of spiritual vandalism. He keeps the architecture of Christianity — the rituals, the icons, the language — but fills it with sacrilege. The chalice still shines, but the wine is poison. Grace becomes guilt, creation becomes cruelty, and salvation becomes surrender. It is not atheism but corruption — the gospel rewritten in reverse.
King vs. the King
Yet even in his rebellion, King can’t escape the faith he so clearly despises. His stories are soaked in scripture, each one haunted by the very God he denies. Every curse echoes a prayer. Every desecration betrays a longing for what was lost. Behind his hatred lies hunger. A need for meaning, even if that meaning must be mutilated to be felt.
The irony is almost biblical. King writes of hell because he still dreams of heaven. He rejects the transcendent but cannot stop reaching for it. That is why his work feels so spiritual even in its cynicism — because rebellion is, in its way, a strange kind of worship.
This Boomer icon may never kneel before Christ, but his stories do — in rage, not reverence. They curse the altar, yet can’t look away. Stephen King may write about death, but his real subject is the divine he can’t quite kill.
Stephen king, Carrie, The stand, The mist, Revival, Literature, Entertainment, Trump derangement syndrome, Culture, Faith