Passing Orders

Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare

S. Jonathon O'Donnell

• Editore: Fordham University Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823289691
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theologie & Religion
• Categoria: Theologie

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical "spiritual warfare" demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon O'Donnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order.O'Donnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies—models of the "right ordering" of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figures—Jezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan— Passing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.

1

Nations unto Light: Spiritual Warfare as Orthotaxic Religiosity

“Quis es tu, mendax, pater mendacii? Quod est nomen tuum?” the exorcist asks the demon possessing an Ursuline nun in Loudun, France, on May 10, 1634: “Who are you, liar, father of lies? What is your name?”¹ The deliverance of a proper name will create a point of reference and delimit terrain in an established demonological hierarchy, demonstrating the bond between the name and the nomos, the law. Mastery begins, Jacques Derrida reminds us, with “the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations.”² The exorcist demands answers in Latin, the language of learning, in order to master the language of an other, imposing order onto the radical alterity whose irruption here takes the form of the demonic. The imposition of order is of the utmost necessity for, as Michel de Certeau traces in his reading of the possessions at Loudun, what is symbolically at stake in this exchange is the very edifice of Christian truth. The liar must be made to testify to that truth, the lie made semblable and appropriable by it. The discourse of exorcism must therefore constrain the liar to speak this truth, the other to acknowledge the authority of the sovereign self. The demon, for its part, does not or cannot acquiesce—either to the demand itself or to the language of order in which that demand is given. “I forgot my name,” it replies in the vernacular French, after a long silence: “I can’t find it . . .”³

In the events at Loudun, Certeau traces a conflict over regimes of knowledge: between religion and science, in which traditional discourses of exorcism vied for validity against emerging systems of medicine; between Church and State, in which a centralizing French state tried to exert control over ecclesiastical and provincial authorities. Mapping these struggles, Certeau charts the contours of an epistemic rupture—of the confrontation in a society between the certainties it is losing and those it is attempting to acquire. At the heart of this rupture lies the figure of the demon. The demon—the truth of the demon—as the object of disparate regimes of knowledge becomes the site on which the legitimacy and authority of those regimes is determined. Yet this object is an ambiguous one, highlighting the tension at the heart of the discursive tradition that seeks to name and categorize it. On the one hand, the exchange Certeau relates and the broader systems of power-knowledge in which this exchange (if not only this exchange) occurs encapsulates the “unflinching attempt” to “name, comprehend, and defend against all that threatens, frightens, and harms us.”⁴ On the other hand, it illustrates the demon’s propensity to resist or exceed that very “attempt to name” and thereby categorize, comprehend, command, and control it: its tendency to not be able (or willing) to locate its name within the rubrics imposed upon it, and in doing so “expose and accuse the legal sacred order of being constructed and not natural.”⁵ Critically, this ambiguity is woven into the very fabric of demonology’s attempt to understand its object: as liar, the demon defies the stability of meaning and the sovereignty of truth to which it is forced to testify.

The tension Certeau charts in the possessions at Loudun opens a path toward mapping the contours of demonology more broadly, not only in early modern France but also in the contemporary United States. In both the demon testifies to a rupture in the order of things, demonology to those regimes of power and knowledge conjured to contort and conceal that rupture—to (re)establish epistemic certainty and explain (away) the fractures forming in the edifices of Paradise. As perhaps the premier locus of religious demonology in America today, evangelical spiritual warfare is the circle in which these regimes are summoned, its components giving shape to a mode of religious expression less grounded in claims to correct (orthos) belief or behavior (although these are constitutive parts) than on arrangements, patterns, or orders (taxa). These concepts of “correct order” or orthotaxy are constructed around three interlocking traits they are figured as possessing: integrity, incontestability, and inevitability. Such traits are discursively, materially, and affectively constituted in contrast to demonic others through the mobilization of onto-epistemological paradigms of demonology and sociopolitical practices of demonization—mobilizations that seek not simply to demarcate or even defend against difference but rather to subject it to processes of epistemic extraction and erasure through the mechanisms of a colonial worlding.

Living in a Demonized World

“Is there a cause and effect connection between an invisible invasion of demons and the disintegration of a society?” Thomas R. Horn poses at the start of his 1998 Spiritual Warfare: The Invisible Invasion. “If individual demon possession exists, could nations also come under siege to dominant demonic powers? If people who preside over legislative bodies abandon the moral laws of God, would they thereby espouse a social system that invites a regional increase in the influence of supernatural evil?”⁶ If there was doubt as to the rhetorical nature of these questions, Horn proceeds to answer them. Demons, he claims, “play an active social role in every age of history,” and by working in “close collaboration with certain unregenerate architects of society” they have even “at times” gained control of “the machine of municipal government.” The 1990s was one such time. Refracting the broader antiurbanist sentiments of American conservatism, Horn localizes demonic activity in the cities. At a time when the United States “is considered the most advanced, civilized, high-tech nation in the world,” he cautions, “spiritual regression and moral decay abound.” Indeed, “something sinister seems to struggle against the moral character of American cities, eroding our social and cultural strength from within.” Enumerating dangers familiar to culture warriors of the period, Horn lists “Idolatry, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, Satanism, homosexuality,” and the lingering specter of “socialism.” Confronting such threats, “an objective evaluation of our moral dilemma must take into account not only the visible agents of city and state governments but also the unending interaction between spiritual and human personalities. This unseen realm of demonic powers energizes and motivates ever-present and sometimes vocal human counterparts.” Ultimately, “What we see happening in America’s cities illustrates a present darkness operating with evil intentions concerning our nation’s future.”⁷

Horn, a former pastor with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, here captures concerns at the heart of many spiritual warfare discourses, highlighting their imbrication in paradigms of American exceptionalism. Spiritual Warfare is an archetypal jeremiad, representative of that quintessentially American genre that accuses the nation of having lapsed in its covenant with God, necessitating urgent course correction if it is to avoid divine judgment. In its juxtaposition of America’s place as the pinnacle of civilization and its enumeration of its decadence, the text combines fears of national decline with assumptions of national supremacy. Horn assumes a correlation should—but does not—exist between America’s geopolitical authority and its moral rectitude. With its exceptionalism under threat, however, he does not situate blame for the “disintegration” of American society only in the hands of the chosen people, but on the presence of unseen evil—on demonic spirits permitted residence through society’s sins and which then (in concert with knowing and unknowing humans) reproduce and reinforce such sins to maintain that control. The doom of America is not (solely) the result of the sins of the elect, but on those structures—and the architects thereof, human and otherwise—that provoke and sustain their sins, the removal of which would allow the nation’s privileged position to be restored. These structures are multiple and not always mutually compatible: advances in LGBT and reproductive rights; the growth of multicultural pluralism; the international drug trade; the threat of criminal and terrorist violence, and more. United only by opposition to “Christian America,” this array of real and imagined threats caused Horn and others like him to posit an enemy grander and more unified than any single struggle, conjuring the image of “a world system out of step with God—a fallen planet under Satan’s dominion, a place in need of redemption.”⁸

Siting the source of national decline in the orchestrations of literal demons might seem at first idiosyncratic. However, growing numbers of evangelical Christians in America and across the globe are conceiving of themselves as actively engaged in a spiritual war with the forces of darkness for the souls and future of humanity. Such ideas about spiritual warfare are not a recent innovation. In the fourth century, Christian monks journeyed into the wilderness to battle demons and thus temper their selves into singular images of divine unity, while urban Christianization became increasingly coded as a struggle between a singular divine truth and the myriad demonic lies comprising the pluralistic and polytheistic urban landscape of late antiquity.⁹ In early modern Europe, witchcraftdemonologies crafted heuristics such as confession that allowed a measure of command and control over the unseen forces that were seen as threatening a fragile and porous self.¹⁰ The advent of secular modernity and its “buffered self”¹¹ is often thought of as facilitating a decline in demonology as a school of theological inquiry, inaugurating an “afterlife” in which the demon endures more as an object of literary or artistic expression than of lived experience.¹² Narratives of disenchantment were never quite as successful as proclaimed, however.¹³ Occulture and alternative spiritualities continue to occupy and carve out space in ostensibly secular nations,¹⁴ while discourses of postsecularity and political theology have begun calling attention both to a “return” of religion to the public sphere and the spectral endurance of theological concepts in more secularized forms.¹⁵ Emerging from and reacting to these contexts, contemporary spiritual warfare discourses reject disenchanted notions of reality as part of Satan’s scheme—indeed, to paraphrase Baudelaire’s generous gambler, the greatest trick he ever pulled—and advances a blend of ritual action (chiefly prayer) and political activism to retake lost ground from the “illegal usurper, Satan.”¹⁶

Spiritual warfare discourses in America today often trace their origins to the early twentieth-century Pentecostal revivals—specifically the 1908 Azusa Street revival—and later postwar growth of charismatic Christianities in traditional denominations.¹⁷ However, from the mid-1980s the paradigm began to spread through American evangelicalism broadly, signaling the rise of postdenominational neocharismatic ministries and what Christerson and Flory term “independent network charismatics,” for which church growth and denomination-building were subordinated to the proliferation of specific modes of Christian expression, modes for which spiritual warfare is core.¹⁸ Popularized in the writings of evangelists such as Cindy Jacobs, Eddie and Alice Smith, George Otis, Rebecca Greenwood, and C. Peter Wagner, among others, this emerging paradigm was framed as a “third wave” (in Wagner’s term) of charismatic revival, succeeding those of Pentecostalism and postwar charismatic Christianity. This paradigm drew on the charismatic tradition of “signs and wonders” to propagate a narrative that humanity was living in the end times, Satan’s legions had been unleashed upon the earth to demonize believers, and God had given the faithful spiritual gifts to aid them in this climactic, final battle. Such gifts included but were not limited to healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, and—most importantly here—the ability to discern and expel demons from their lives and environs. This was accomplished with an ensemble of related practices, including deliverance (exorcism) rituals, intercessory prayer, and “spiritual mapping.” The last—which Sean McCloud categorizes as an evangelical form “of geomancy that discerns where and why demons control spaces and places, ranging from houses and neighborhoods to entire countries”¹⁹—was perhaps the third wave’s most defining and controversial teaching, and one that continues to shape spiritual warfare discourses in the decades since its formulation, even for those outside or opposed to the third wave proper.²⁰ Of the territories spiritual warfare maps, the “city”—as material, conceptual, and affective space—is especially critical. As Cindy Jacobs claims, the “city gates were symbols of authority. . . . Satan works hard to gain entrance to cities.” He does so, moreover, through a city’s collective sins: the city’s gates “that open to him do so because of the sin of people in the cities.” The city gates become a “gate of hell.” This does not mean the city is lost, however, for “When we found our cities on God’s laws or reclaim them according to those laws, then the gate of hell cannot prevail.”²¹

This figuration of “the city” as a prime battleground against demonic forces for the soul of the nation, which can only be taken through their (re)foundation on God’s law, exemplifies a particularly religious strand of antiurbanism. By antiurbanism I do not mean a mere rejection of the urban but an ideologico-affective complex that situates itself in opposition to both “the density and heterogeneity” of urban life and “the sense of public that grows in urban soil”—the forms of collectivity and collective action that urbanity necessitates and inspires—and so constructs the city as “the loss of intimate social relations replaced by anonymity, and of nurturing communities replaced by alienation.”²² Figured as inherently atomistic and alienating, the antiurbanist city is positioned as the antithesis of true community, constructed as emotionally and spiritually nurturing, intimate and integrated, and the sole locus of legitimate social action. In spiritual warfare discourses, this antiurbanism is bound up with the well-documented tendency among evangelicals to perceive themselves as “not at home in and different from the world.”²³ Larry Richards, writing in The Full Armor of God, outlines the reason why in relatively simple terms: “Satan spins lies that appeal to ‘the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does’ (1 John 2:16). Such attitudes and values are woven into what Scripture calls the kosmos, the ‘world,’ which we might render here as ‘human culture.’”²⁴ This sense of the world as “under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19) provokes, in sociologist Anna Strhan’s analysis, the cultivation of an individual and collective desire “to be ‘other,’ different from those around,” while also “conscious that maintaining that distinctiveness is an ongoing struggle.”²⁵ As Derek Prince writes, the duty of Christ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Paradise Has Walls
• 1. Nations unto Light: Spiritual Warfare as Orthotaxic Religiosity
• 2. Jezebel Assemblages: Witchcraft, Queerness, Transnationality
• 3. The Islamic Antichrist: An Eschatology of Blowback
• 4. Leviathan’s Wake: Demonology and the Passing of Order
• Conclusion: Paradise Refused
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index