Spiritual warfare and political demonology

Further thoughts on demon-haunted global politics

I ended last week’s essay on Rod Dreher, ARC and the Enchanted Right with this paragraph:

I’m happy the Overton Window has been broadened and we’re talking about ecstatic and mystical experiences again, even on the big stage of the ExCel Centre in London. On the other hand, I am less happy to find us back in what Carl Sagan called ‘the demon-haunted world’ and even less a demon-haunted politics.

This weekend I went down this rabbit hole a bit further, looking at the rise of the idea of ‘spiritual warfare’ in Christian nationalist politics in the US.

I began by reading a new book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by religious affairs journalist Katherine Stewart. She’s one of a number of observers, both inside and outside Christianity, who have been observing the rise of an ecstatic, demon-obsessed and heavily-politicized Christianity over the last few decades, and how it’s become more and more dominant in American churches, and more and more influential in American politics.

She writes:

The big story of our time is the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States…It is united in its profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded, and it represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. It is best described as a new and distinctly American variant of authoritarianism or fascism.

There are various streams in the MAGA movement - crypto-transhumanists, MAHA whole-earthers, InfoWars flat-earthers, and one of the biggest streams is the Christian Right, especially a charismatic Christian movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. It has around three million members, but its ideas have been taken up by a growing number of the 50 million Americans who attend church every week.

So, a very brief intro on charismatic Christianity…

Christianity has always had many forms and denominations, some more ‘ecstatic’, some more rational. There was a movement to make Christianity more rational during the Enlightenment, and there were various ecstatic revivals that pushed back against that, such as Methodism in the 18th and 19th century, and Pentecostalism in the early 20th century.

Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom

Pentecostalism, which is the fastest-growing movement in Christianity today, teaches the possibility of gifts (charisms) of the Holy Spirit like ecstatic healing, ecstatic revelation, speaking in tongues, discernment of spirits, and so on. It is a worldview in which the everyday world is brimming over with supernatural presence - both holy and demonic. The Christian may seem like some average low-income Joe or Jane, but actually they’re a front-line soldier in a cosmic Holy War, and they can do superhero stuff like zap people with their magic healing or exorcise demons or other mad shit. Who doesn’t dream of having Jedi powers?

This Pentecostal worldview then spread to other denominations through the neo-charismatic revival, which began in the 1970s. ‘Charismatic’ because it teaches that modern Christians can access the same charisms or supernatural gifts as the Apostles did in Acts.

One part of the neo-Charismatic story of the 1970s was the so-called ‘Jesus Freaks’, ie hippies who took LSD and discovered Jesus, as Rod Dreher did. One of the most famous neo-Charismatic churches in the US was called the Vineyard Church, in California, started by an ex-psychedelic Jesus Freak called Lonnie Frisbee and then led by a loveable giant called John Wimber. Wimber taught his followers that Christians today could do all the cool supernatural stuff that the apostles did in Acts - healing, prophecy, miracles, discernment of spirits, speaking in tongues, all kinds of fun with trance states. His church offered a form of rock & roll ecstatic neo-Pentecostalism which attracted everyone from Bob Dylan (briefly) to Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican evangelist behind the Holy Trinity Brompton ecstatic revival, which I mentioned on Friday.

C. Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Reformation

One of the people influenced by Wimber’s Vineyard movement was a theologian called C. Peter Wagner, who started the New Apostolic Reformation in the 1980s. Listen to an interview with him here from NPR in 2011. He took Wimber’s Neo-Pentecostalism in some new directions.

Firstly, the ‘Apostolic’ part. Wagner taught that certain special Christians today are anointed by God as prophets or apostles, and are therefore right up there with the prophets of old - Daniel, Isaiah, St Paul and so on. This, as a concept, seems likely to go to preachers’ heads. They could start thinking ‘why aren’t I up there on the Sistine Chapel next to Ezekiel and Jeremiah?’ They could also start running their churches as cults, because they’re divinely-appointed superbeings.

Carol Wimber, John’s wife (who sadly passed away last month) said in an interview with Remnant Radio: ‘John didn’t believe in any of that crap. But he loved Peter. People would say to John ‘you’re an apostle’. And he would say ‘I don’t believe in any of that stuff. I’m just a fat man on my way to heaven.’

According to Wagner, the specially-appointed apostles and prophets would then lead their church in spiritual warfare against the demons infesting their neighbourhoods. He helped run something called The International Society of Deliverance Ministers - yes, an association of exorcists - while his wife wrote a book called How To Cast Out Demons. It comes with a questionnaire at the end that local churches can use to diagnose people (particularly young people) and find out if they have a demon within them: ‘Have you ever felt nervous?’ ‘Were your parents married?’ ‘Ever imagine having sex with an animal?’ “Played Dungeons and Dragons?’ ‘Ever listen to rap?’ ‘Ever made a blood pact with the Devil?’ ‘How about transcendental meditation?’

And so on.

Wagner’s vampire-slayers would then cleanse neighbourhoods and entire societies of demons. He outlined the six-step strategy for spiritual warfare like an evangelical Pol Pot, in books such as Confronting the Powers, Warfare Prayer, and Territorial Spirits: