In 1965, Paul Harvey delivered one of the most enduring commentaries in American broadcasting. He called it “If I Were the Devil.”
Harvey imagined how he would weaken America from within: undermine churches, confuse children, corrupt schools, fracture families, encourage drugs and replace personal responsibility with dependency. The country would not need to be conquered if its people could be persuaded to abandon the foundations that held it together.
More than six decades later, the warning remains unsettling.
Consider the change in America’s religious landscape. Gallup recorded Christian identification at 93 percent in 1967. Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study put that figure at 62 percent, with 29 percent of adults identifying as religiously unaffiliated. Pew also found that the Christian share had been relatively stable in recent years, following decades of decline.
Harvey was offering a warning, not a timetable. But his commentary invites a question: What would the Devil’s strategy look like in 2026?
With full credit to Harvey’s original idea, I suspect it might sound something like this.
If I were the Devil, I would not announce myself. No horns, no pitchfork, no red cape. I would not tell Americans I intended to destroy their country, their families, their children or their faith.
I would come promising to help.
I would speak the language of compassion, safety, tolerance, convenience and progress. I would understand that people resist an open demand for their freedom. Frighten them enough, however, and they may surrender it voluntarily.
If I were the Devil, I would remember COVID.
I would remember how quickly fear changed America. Schools and businesses closed. Weddings were postponed. Funerals were restricted. Families were separated from dying parents and grandparents. In many places, churches faced restrictions on gathering for worship.
Public officials were making extraordinary decisions about ordinary life, including religious practice. Courts eventually intervened in disputes over those restrictions, but Americans had already witnessed how rapidly emergency powers could reach into their homes, businesses and places of worship.
I would watch carefully.
Then I would study what happened to the conversation. Questions about school closures, restrictions, government authority and the origins of the virus often became arguments about the character of the person asking.
Was the policy effective? Had officials exceeded their authority? What did the evidence show?
Too often, those questions disappeared beneath accusations about whether someone cared about teachers, grandparents or their neighbors.
If I were the Devil, I would encourage that habit. I would want Americans to judge the morality of the questioner before considering the question.
I would blur the distinction between scientific inquiry and institutional authority. Science depends on skepticism, testing and revision when evidence changes. Institutions, especially powerful ones, can become far more comfortable defending yesterday’s position.
I would teach Americans to mistake confidence for proof.
If I were the Devil, I would make the pharmaceutical industry enormously powerful.
Modern medicine has given humanity antibiotics, insulin, vaccines, anesthesia, heart surgery and cancer treatments. Its achievements have earned extraordinary trust. That trust would be precisely what I wanted to exploit.
I would mix the credibility of generations of doctors and scientists with billions of dollars. I would encourage a culture in which every difficulty seemed to have a pharmaceutical answer.
Trouble sleeping? A prescription. Trouble concentrating? Another. Anxiety, depression, weight gain? There would always be something to sell.
Medication can be necessary and lifesaving. But I would want the commercial incentive to become so powerful that patients could no longer easily distinguish sound medical judgment from a sales opportunity.
And when someone questioned that incentive, I would dismiss the concern before examining it.
Then a case like Purdue Pharma would make dismissal harder. In 2020, the company pleaded guilty to three federal felonies involving fraud and kickback conspiracies. According to the Justice Department, Purdue continued marketing opioids to more than 100 health care providers whom it had good reason to believe were diverting them.
The opioid crisis devastated families and communities while enormous sums of money changed hands.
If I were the Devil, I would recognize how effectively greed could shelter behind respectability.
Then I would turn to America’s children.
I would not need to break into your house. You would buy the device for me, wrap it for Christmas and put it in their hands. They would carry it into their bedrooms.
The smartphone is an extraordinary tool for communication and information. I would turn part of it into a delivery system for addiction, pornography, envy, anger and despair.
I would teach a twelve-year-old girl to measure her worth in likes. I would expose a thirteen-year-old boy to pornography before he understood intimacy. I would make teenagers compare their ordinary lives with the carefully edited lives of strangers.
I would keep them awake, scrolling.
Then I would act surprised when they felt lonely.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory reported that up to 95 percent of teenagers ages 13 through 17 used social media, with more than a third reporting near-constant use. The advisory warned that available evidence did not establish that social media was sufficiently safe for children and adolescents.
We allowed these platforms to become woven into childhood while fundamental questions about their safety remained unresolved.
If I were the Devil, I would call that progress.
While children stared at screens, I would weaken the family.
I would not outlaw marriage. I would make commitment seem disposable. I would portray fatherhood as optional, motherhood as an obstacle and sacrifice as a failure to prioritize yourself.
I would tell people that personal happiness was the highest purpose of life, even when pursuing it meant abandoning the people who depended on them.
Then, when families fractured, I would invite government to fill the empty chairs: provider, counselor, parent and moral authority.
Each generation would remember a little less about what those relationships once supplied.
If I were the Devil, I would make churches irrelevant.
I would make Christians embarrassed to discuss their faith in public. Christmas would become a shopping season; Easter, an occasion for candy and rabbits. Sacred language would be welcome as profanity and awkward as prayer.
I would teach children about the wrongs committed by Christians—of which there are plenty—while giving little attention to Christianity’s contributions to hospitals, education, charity, abolitionism and civil rights.
An honest history requires both. I would prefer selective memory.
Pew’s 2023–24 research found that more than 57 million American adults had left the Christianity in which they were raised. For every person who became Christian after being raised outside the faith, roughly six had left it.
That change did not require a law abolishing Christianity. It unfolded through individual lives, families and generations.
If I were the Devil, patience would serve me well.
Then I would turn my attention to the Jews.
Humanity has rehearsed antisemitism for centuries: expulsions, pogroms, ghettos and the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered.
I would wait for living memory to fade, then bring the old hatred back in language people considered acceptable.
After Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, antisemitism became increasingly visible on American campuses. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 1,694 campus incidents in 2024, an increase of 84 percent over the previous year.
Students should never have to weigh their safety against wearing a Star of David or a yarmulke. Criticism of a government does not excuse harassment of Jewish neighbors or classmates.
If I were the Devil, I would work to erase that distinction.
I would exploit religious conflict wherever I found it. I would encourage Islamist extremists who seek to impose their beliefs through violence and coercion. I would also encourage Americans to treat every Muslim as responsible for ISIS, al-Qaeda or Hamas.
Why settle for one form of hatred when I could cultivate two?
I would want Muslims suspicious of Christians, Christians suspicious of Muslims and Jews suspicious of both. Everyone would retreat into separate camps.
People who know their neighbors are harder to manipulate. People who fear their neighbors are easier.
If I were the Devil, I would make immigration impossible to discuss rationally.
I would blur the distinction between lawful immigration and a failure to enforce the law. I would mix asylum seekers, economic migrants, criminals, smugglers and trafficking victims into one furious argument until Americans could no longer distinguish among them.
Legal immigrants who waited years would wonder why following the rules mattered. Citizens concerned about security would be told their concerns were inherently cruel. People concerned about vulnerable families would be accused of wanting no limits at all.
The cartels would profit while everyone shouted.
A country needs to know who is entering, enforce its laws and protect its citizens. It can meet those obligations while treating people humanely.
If I were the Devil, I would make that sound impossible.
Drugs would become another weapon: prescription opioids, heroin, fentanyl.
I would care little whether the substance came from a pharmaceutical bottle, a street dealer or an international trafficking network. The grieving family would be just as devastated.
And I would enjoy watching political leaders argue over blame while parents buried their children.
If I were the Devil, I would destroy trust.
Congress, the media, universities, corporations, law enforcement, doctors, churches, teachers, elections—every institution would become suspect.
Eventually, Americans would distrust one another.
I would need help, of course. Institutions would have to behave badly enough to make suspicion plausible. Betrayal is an efficient teacher.
When an institution lied, manipulated, censored, profiteered or protected its own reputation at the public’s expense, I would encourage it to evade accountability.
Then I would turn justified skepticism into permanent cynicism. Americans would move from “Show me the evidence” to “Everyone is lying.”
At that point, the loudest voice could claim to be the only honest one.
If I were the Devil, social media would be a gift.
I would give people access to more information than the greatest libraries in history, then reward whatever kept them staring at the screen.
Anger would be particularly useful.
Conservatives would see the most outrageous liberal I could find. Liberals would see the most outrageous conservative. Every racial, religious and political group would receive a steady supply of reasons to fear another.
Your ordinary neighbor—the person who works, loves the kids and hopes for a peaceful life—would receive far less attention.
I would show you the fringe repeatedly until you believed the fringe represented America.
Then I would have millions of people furious at strangers they had never met.
If I were the Devil, I would corrupt education.
I would not need to burn books if I could produce children who no longer wanted to read them. I would not need to erase history if I could turn it into political ammunition.
One group would learn that America had never done anything wrong. Another would learn that America had never done anything right.
Both accounts would fail them.
America tolerated slavery and produced people who fought to abolish it. It endured segregation and produced a civil rights movement that challenged it. It broke treaties and committed grave injustices. Americans also landed at Normandy, helped liberate concentration camps, rebuilt former enemies and walked on the moon.
Understanding a country requires confronting its failures and recognizing its achievements.
If I were the Devil, nuance would be my enemy. I would need Americans to fight over their history instead of understanding it.
Language would be another target.
A riot could be excused as a protest. A peaceful protest could be smeared as a threat. Censorship could hide behind a reassuring label. Propaganda could present itself as neutral information.
An opponent would become an enemy. A disagreement would become hatred.
Eventually, Americans would struggle to debate the facts because they could no longer agree on the meaning of the words.
George Orwell understood the danger of language used to conceal rather than clarify.
If I were the Devil, I would go further. I would attack the idea that truth can be established at all.
Personal experience matters. Perspective matters. But I would encourage people to treat every feeling as an unquestionable fact and every contradictory fact as an attack.
Once evidence becomes optional, power becomes decisive. Whoever controls the institution, the platform or the microphone gets to define reality.
I would make debt equally difficult to grasp.
A million dollars sounds substantial. A billion becomes abstract. A trillion is almost impossible to picture.
So I would let the promises accumulate in trillions. Politicians could spend, borrow and promise more, while the bill grew distant enough to ignore.
Who would pay?
Our children.
If I were the Devil, I would turn prosperity into a source of resentment.
Rather than asking how someone succeeded, people would ask why that person had more. I would make grievance more rewarding than gratitude and entitlement more attractive than effort.
Then I would confuse Americans about freedom.
Freedom protects speech, worship, assembly and the ability to pursue a life without arbitrary government interference. It carries responsibilities, including respecting those same rights in others.
I would persuade people that freedom meant protection from consequences, discomfort and offense.
Eventually, they would demand that someone else be silenced in the name of protecting them.
I would know I was making progress.
Paul Harvey’s warning endures because a country can be weakened without being invaded. Institutions can decay. Families can fracture. Citizens can surrender liberties gradually, each concession appearing manageable on its own.
If I were the Devil in 2026, I would be patient.
One family. One classroom. One church. One institution. One frightened citizen. One surrendered freedom.
Above all, I would want Americans too distracted to notice how those losses affected one another.
Because if they stopped screaming long enough to look around, my work would become harder.
They might put down their phones and speak to their neighbors. They might demand honesty from institutions while holding themselves to the same standard. They might invest more time in their families, communities, churches and synagogues.
They might read the Constitution, accept responsibility, practice courage and insist on evidence.
They might rediscover God.
Harvey’s commentary was a warning, and a warning gives people an opportunity to change course.
The question in 2026 is what we intend to do with that opportunity.
America is still here. So are its families, its communities, its places of worship and its Constitution. Millions of people still believe in faith, freedom, responsibility and truth—and remain willing to act on those beliefs.
Perhaps that is the part the Devil did not count on.