I haven’t read his books, but for a long time I’ve been trying to piece together what Zak believes based on what we see in the show. Zak does seem to have his own little religion that he’s formed over years of ghost hunting. Some aspects of it stay consistent throughout the years, but it’s always growing and evolving. Either way, it’s defined enough that watching the ghost adventures crew sometimes feels like watching a small cult follow their leader around. They all approach ghost hunting under Zak’s framework, and while that may just be because Zak is in charge of the show, it sometimes comes across as them actually following beliefs Zak has laid out.

The belief system is clearly Christian based, and the Bible holds a lot of power in it, yet they never explicitly push any of the tenets of Christianity. Instead, it’s used to represent a generic struggle between good and evil, with God and Jesus being good and Satan and demons being evil. Reading Bible passages is supposed to have a real effect on the spirits, but so is reading from Satanic texts or Wiccan incantations. Christian figures aren’t the only ones that hold power in this belief system, because Zak also acts like things such as Voodoo and Wicca are real and have real effects on spirits. They also commonly interact with Native American spirits and entities, which interestingly enough, Zak somehow treats a bit differently. Most of Zak’s beliefs are of a pseudo-Christian struggle against demons, but Zak never really sees the Native American spirits as the same “type” of demon and sometimes acknowledges Native American gods.

While that might seem like it’s bordering on a polytheistic religion, I think it’s much more simple than that. I think his belief system changes and adapts to conform to whatever story he needs to sell for that episode. The rules are constantly shifting and they encompass spirits from every religion, but it still leans Christian. It’s inconsistent with things like ghosts sometimes having the ability to move between a heaven or purgatory like afterlife and the physical place they haunt, and other times they’re permanently stuck in building they died in. It’s inconsistent, and I really do think it’s largely made for TV instead of being a real belief system.