Passing Orders
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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.
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PASSING ORDERS
Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare
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I attend closely to the racializing elements of demonology throughout this book. For now, it is worth noting that neither Schneider nor Kotsko examine or interrogate the place that notions of “passing” play with regards to their frameworks. This is important, as the racializing and receptaclizing logics of contemporary demonologies not only create and maintain unjust hierarchies between human beings (although they do this) but bring with them an abject terror at the possibility of passing, at the potential for human beings demonologically coded as “distorted, misoriented, false imitation[s] of what the human should be” to pass as Human (Wilderson), as Man (Wynter), or as Humanitas (Mignolo). Moreover, as these divisions between the coherent, integrated Human and its others are framed as intrinsic and essential, individual instances of passing cannot ever be just that. Ascendant xenophobic discourses over (racialized) “illegal migrants” or “bogus asylum seekers” are illustrative here. Discussing the latter figure’s deployment in British politics, Ahmed observes that the term “bogus” names a counterfeit coin and originated in slang for the apparatus of counterfeiture itself: the machinery that impressed spurious currency, currency deemed illegitimate and (so) inferior. The “bogus” asylum seeker, one assumed “to be passing their way into the nation” to “falsely accrue benefits,” thus becomes framed not as “a lonely spurious coin” but “a singular impress created by a machinery that is intended to defraud the whole system.”55 The counterfeit—money, asylum, whiteness, heterosexuality, and so on—is figured as passing for value it does not “truly” possess, absence appearing as plenitude. This absence is not self-contained, cannot be contained, instead figuring a “singular impress” of—to tease out the diabolic undercurrents of Ahmed’s image—a distinctly infernal machinery (inferno and inferior being linked etymologically, signaling what is below, or perhaps must be kept below for the system to sustain itself).56
However, it is because of its perceived inferiority and capacity for passing that the counterfeit becomes—as Mary McAleer Balkun writes—“the standard by which authenticity is determined.”57 It is because of the counterfeit’s existence (actual or conceptual) that distinctions between reality and falsity, between (legitimate) essence and (deceptive) appearance, become not only sustainable but required. It is the capacity for a counterfeit to be (mis)identified as authentic that necessitates articulations of the latter’s legitimacy. Structurally dependent on its alleged counterfeits, authenticity comes to adopt a similar (if disavowed) fluidity. As Mullen notes, for example, racism “reifies whiteness” by imagining a “pure” whiteness unmixed with blackness; “‘Pure’ whiteness has actual value,” she notes, “like legal tender, while the white-skinned African-American is like a counterfeit bill that is passed into circulation, but may be withdrawn at any point if discovered to be bogus.”58 Yet this economy is itself artificial, its valuations sustained by processes of (il)legitimation and control. As Hamilton Carroll has demonstrated, although white masculinity “holds the privilege of definition: to be white is to be not black; to be male is to be not female,” hegemonic whiteness requires “a complex process of maintenance” by which it is ceaselessly redefined, rebuilt and reconfigured. Indeed, due to its structural relation to its others, white privilege (and conceptions of normative authenticity broadly) is “a slippery, illusory base” positioned as “always under assault.” As a result, “whiteness is engaged in a constant process of boundary maintenance and reconstitution” that marks not only whiteness but “those categories that function in opposition to it.”59
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