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Introduction: Paradise Has Walls

“Around 8:30 AM the phone rang.” So pastor Ray Pritchard opens his 2007 book Stealth Attack. It was his wife calling, it was September 11, 2001, and a plane had hit the World Trade Center. “I don’t remember much else about that day,” he continues. “Eventually I made my way to the church and met with the staff. That night hundreds of people gathered in the sanctuary to sing, to weep, to pray.” Pritchard proceeds by outlining what was yet to come: the names of al-Qaeda and of Osama bin Laden, the anthrax scare, the color-coded alert system, the invasion of Iraq. “The world changed forever.” President Bush “was right” when he declared that the United States was at war, the pastor decides, “and he was right again when he said that the war against terror would last for years, and it might not end in our lifetime. As I write these words, despite significant progress on many fronts, there is no end in sight.”¹ Yet, while Pritchard may have begun mentally writing the book “sometime during that long day,” Stealth Attack is not about 9/11 but “a small contribution to a conviction that arose from the ashes” of its wake. “It’s a new look at an old war,” he explains, “a struggle that has been going on between good and evil since the beginning of time. It’s about spiritual warfare in an age of terror.”²

For Pritchard, America’s global war against terror becomes the modern reflection of a more ancient but equally global conflict. There “is a close link between the physical and the spiritual,” he explains, and “what happens in the unseen realm directly affects the world around us.” As such, “I have looked at the shattering events of the early years of the twenty-first century to help us understand our place in the great cosmic battle between God and the devil, light and darkness, good and evil. In that battle we are all frontline soldiers,” he concludes, “and no one gets a vacation.”³ The understanding this comparison provokes is not unidirectional. While the language of the demonic frequently lends itself to conceptualizations of America’s foes,⁴ for Pritchard those foes also permit a reconceptualization of the demonic. “Are you familiar with the term asymmetric warfare?” he opens the following chapter. “There is no better picture of Satan’s strategy than the modern concept of asymmetric warfare. Though heavily outnumbered by the armies of the Lord, and having lost his personal battle with God, he now uses unconventional warfare to bring down the Lord’s people.”⁵ Indeed, “Satan is the ultimate terrorist who led the first rebellion in the history of the universe. His attempt to unseat God was the first insurgency.” The War on Terror becomes the frame through which to reimagine the War in Heaven: a Long War in which victory is both ultimately assured (the enemy is outnumbered, outgunned, and already defeated; mission accomplished) and yet constantly deferred, “there is no end in sight.”⁶

This book, like Stealth Attack, is about “spiritual warfare in an age of terror.” Through discourse analysis of “spiritual warfare manuals” like Pritchard’s—a hybrid of self-help guide, military tactics manual, and demonological treatise—published chiefly following the Cold War (1989–2000) and in the Bush and Obama phases of the War on Terror (2001–2016), I use spiritual warfare and its demonologies as an extended case study for unpacking notions of temporality, territoriality, and sovereign power in the contemporary United States. The manuals examined in this book are varied. Many are primarily self-help texts, instructing the readers in how to discern demonic influence in their personal and familial lives, while others—more steeped in prophecy and conspiracist discourse—aim at diagnosing demonic influence in global politics or world history. Some are aimed at Christians who doubt the existence of the supernatural and seek to change this, while others are concerned with expanding the expertise of those already within the fold. While varied in scope, however, all manuals share an underlying worldview that galvanizes knowledge production, ritual action, and activism alike: humanity is living in the end times, Satan and his hordes have been unleashed, and God has given the faithful spiritual gifts with which to fight the enemy. For adherents, this conflict constitutes the foundation of reality, with all ideological systems and phenomenal events—from individual sickness, to systemic poverty, to the rise and fall of nations—being rendered superstructures built atop its base.⁷

This book does not make claims about the validity of spiritual warfare. It is not a work of theology concerned with the limits of correct doctrine, nor does it aim to adjudicate whether demons are metaphysically “real” or not. It is sufficient that spiritual warriors believe them to be and, perhaps more importantly, engage with the world in accordance with this belief. At the same time, I am not concerned with the philosophical problem through which demonologies are usually framed: the problem of evil, of why there is “evil” (moral, natural, metaphysical) in the world—although as demons are evoked as one solution to this issue, it is necessarily part of my scope.⁸ Rather, I follow a growing interdisciplinary body of research on late antique and early modern demonology that frames “the demon” as an object of discourse: that is, after Michel Foucault, an object systematically constructed through cultural, linguistic, and ideological practices.⁹ As such, this project analyzes how the production of (knowledge about) “the demon” in the spiritual warfare discourses of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America, “connects with power, regulates conduct, makes up or constructs identities and subjectivities.”¹⁰

At the heart of my analysis is the interrelation between demonology as a discursive tradition that posits the existence and activities of evil spirits and demonization as a sociopolitical reality in which traits associated with those spirits (willful deviance, ontological invalidity, inevitable failure) are mapped onto real-world populations.¹¹ And, conversely, how qualities associated with those real-world populations (asymmetric warfare, diversity, ad hoc coalition-building) are integrated into understandings of such spirits. In doing so, I interrogate how certain groups and persons become constructed as “with” demons—in the sense of both affliction and affiliation—and how this “with” acts to both consolidate and destabilize structures of sovereign power. Tracing intersections of spiritual warfare’s imposition of this “with” with the political imaginary and material practices of American empire, I explore what it means to name a demon, to name someone or something as demonic, what structures this act of naming seeks to impose, what potentialities it attempts to strip and to induce. In the process, I address a series of questions about the sociocultural function of demonologies in America today, which for now I leave open: At a time in which dehumanization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape, what work is “the demon” as a discursive object called on to perform?¹² How do the discursive traditions built around this object—demonologies—feed into and on the broader systems of power that saturate both the national landscape of the United States and its transnational impositions, including but not limited to misogyny, queer- and transphobia, settler colonialism, antiblackness, and Islamophobia? Finally, and perhaps most pressingly, how might the demonized—those of us positioned as “with” demons—respond productively to the structures of sovereign power that thus interpellate us?

Walled Heaven, Waning Sovereignty

Analyzing post-9/11 security discourses, the political theorist and sociologist of religion Michael Barkun argued that after 9/11 the United States developed a cultural fixation on invisible dangers, “dangers thought to be posed by invisible adversaries who might wield invisible weapons.”¹³ One was the terrorist, hidden in plain sight with concealed bombs and biochemical weapons. The undocumented migrant was another, an alleged harbinger of crime traversing borders that “should” be stable. A third was the pandemic, invisibly transmitted from foreign places and/or unleashed by terrorists. While these fixations all predate the War on Terror, reflecting common images of threat to American unipolarity,¹⁴ 9/11 raised anxieties around them to new heights. Combined with technological advance and shifts in domestic politics, these anxieties facilitated new systems of securitization and sovereign power. Taken collectively, Barkun argued, these figures of invisible threat traced patterns of “pollution and defilement” that (re)organized the social imaginary of twenty-first- century America, representing “potential defilers who bring impurities into what was a previously unsullied community,” removal of which would herald the restoration of order.¹⁵ Like impurities, they required cleansing; like demons, they required exorcism.

The demon is among the oldest and most paradigmatic of invisible enemies, its genealogy intersecting with constructions of both the stranger and the pandemic. Indeed, as the stranger, it functions much like the alien in that it amalgamates the collective dangers of an “outside” into “the singularity of a given form,” one that “we imagine we have already faced.”¹⁶ Framing the demon as exemplary of broader notions of the monstrous, Jason Bivins discusses it as threatening to the “sovereignty and boundedness of the flesh,” signaling proximity to “bodily and epistemic limits.”¹⁷ Such an (un)bounded body does not need to be personal, but can be communal, national, even global. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, both the rhetoric and logics of exorcism saturated post-9/11 discourses of cultural identity and military adventurism, offering what communication theorist Joshua Gunn called “a promise of recovery through the purging of something previously hidden or unnamed from a given body.”¹⁸ As a strategy of global exorcism, the War on Terror’s foundational promise was that America would (unilaterally and infinitely) hunt down and defeat “evil.” Whether such evil was secreted away in the earth (as in al-Qaeda’s Tora Bora cave complex) or “harbored” by nation-states (Afghanistan, Iraq), it aimed at the subjugation of the possessed (land, people) for the purposes of their purification.

As that against which America’s “messianic imperialism”¹⁹ mobilizes, the demon (and the demonized, those onto whom demonic activity is mapped) is central to declension narratives: jeremiadic narratives of moral, spiritual, national (and imperial) decline for which dark forces are blamed and in which the demonized are rendered (to borrow Stanley Cohen’s concept of the folk devil) “visible reminders of what we should not be.”²⁰ These dark forces are usually framed as coming from outside, or—when internal—as owing allegiance to that outside. This projection of threatening alterity enables the creation of a phantasmatic image of a walled enclosure—a paradise in its etymological sense, a garden possessed and maintained by sovereign power²¹—the sustaining of which becomes inextricable from articulations of security, sovereignty, and the stability and authenticity of states and selves. Demonologies in the United States arise when the borders of flesh and nation are (perceived to be) ruptured, disrupting concepts of cultural unity and exceptionality by “introducing pluralism and ambiguity into the national narrative.”²² As such, the conjuration and exorcism of demons becomes one way—to draw on Erin Runions’s cogent summary of Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty—that the United States “theatrically maintains a sense of bordered cohesion, through military walls and homeland security,” policing movement “at least to look as if it is fortified against the deterritorializations and political breakdown in national sovereignty.”²³

For Brown, writing in 2010, the US-Mexico border was among the most visible of walls that marked the precarious (in)security of the nation-state following the Cold War. This is perhaps even more true today, as the border becomes coded in secular and theological conservative rhetoric as the paradisiacal solution to perceived threats of demonic dissolution. Robert Jeffress, the charismatic pastor of First Baptist Dallas Church and member of President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board, for example, conjured this association in late 2018 in defense of Trump’s plan to erect a southern border wall, remarking that “even Heaven itself is going to have a wall around it. Not everyone is going to be allowed in,” and concluding unironically that “if walls are immoral, then God is immoral.”²⁴ Jeffress’ was neither the first nor last invocation of this theme. Two years before, Republican congressmen and members of conservative thinktanks convened a panel at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference on “If Heaven has a gate, a wall, and extreme vetting, why can’t America?” Later, on February 11, 2019, congressman Steve King (R-IA) made headlines by tweeting an Arkansas grocery store ad that made the next leap in correlation: “Heaven has a wall, a gate and a strict immigration policy. Hell has open borders”—a right-wing evangelical meme that had circulated in several variations since at least mid-2018.²⁵ While these instances were criticized for their interpretation of scripture, they represent a set of affective and discursive associations growing in subsets of the conservative spiritual warfare milieu. These associations, starkly manifested in more fringe elements through equivalences between the expulsion of “illegals” and advance of God’s Kingdom and demonizations of Latin American refugees as carriers of diabolic “witchcraft,”²⁶ join a violent desire for the closure of the homeland to an apocalyptic longing for the closure of history itself.

In their eschatological reconceptualization of national security, these figures and groups literalize a metaphorical relation that feminist author Rebecca Solnit constructed when, reading the narrative of the Fall through the prism of the US-Mexico border, she called Paradise “the first immigration-restricted country.” In Solnit’s reading, “Adam and Eve are the first refugees, the fig leaves the first cancelled passports,” and “the Angel with the Flaming Sword” that stops their return is “of course . . . a Border Patrol agent.” Paradise is here constituted by the violence of a territorial sovereignty claim that forcibly divides inside from out: “the wall, the guard, and the gate” maintain “the difference between the garden and the world. Whatever is inside the wall, past the gate, protected by the guard is imagined as some version of Paradise, but Paradise only so long as its separateness is protected.”²⁷ Neither the sovereign ruler who cancels the passports or commands the border agents nor the serpent that provokes Paradise’s securitization appear in Solnit’s reading, however, and we are left to guess at their assignments. Yet if God’s role as the transcendent force that makes and enforces the law can be read as somewhat stable, Satan’s is more ambiguous. Positioned as (in) the serpent only retroactively, the Devil unsettles clear distinctions between insider and outsider.²⁸ Enthroned as the “prince of this world” (John 14:30), he orchestrates and personifies the domain against which the garden maintains its identity as such.

Satan’s unsettling relation to Paradise is perhaps best dramatized in John Milton’s Paradise Lost when, having finally escaped Hell, the Devil arrives at Eden’s gates. Initially, he skulks about its walls. Then, tiring of this circumambulation, bounds over them like a “prowling wolf” (IV.183). This is not his only bestial mode. Satan’s state in Paradise is protean; he shifts through animal forms: first a cormorant, then an unnamed quadruped grazer, a toad, the infamous serpent. In a place he does not belong, Satan passes as those that do. For John Tanner, these transmutations “express more than a tactical need for disguises,” instead figuring the internal force of the Devil’s nonbelonging, attesting to “deep anxiety about continuity itself,” thereby suggesting that his fitful mutability “manifests demonic rejection of the idea of permanence figured in heaven.”²⁹ Yet it is Paradise’s continuity that is threatened by the trespassing of this passing figure. Satan traverses its borders and adopts the semblance of its occupants, unfixing its fixity. Rather than merely figuring the Devil’s internal anxiety over celestial permanence, his capacity to pass into it and as its residents exposes a deeper anxiety about the possibility of such permanence, revealing eternity to be itself unstable and transient, exposing Paradise’s imbrication in what Brown called the “tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness and instability” of (nation-state) sovereignty that a need for walls represents—not sovereignty’s “resurgent expression” but “icons of its erosion.”³⁰

I unpack the register of passing and its centrality to Paradise’s (in)security later. For now, what must be said is that, from the perspective of Paradise, the demon is that which both must and cannot be guarded against. Its passage marks the limits of Paradise and of the possibility of Paradise. It threatens the stability of eternity with the passing of time, placing an order figured as timeless and unified in relation to its own impossible transgression. At the same time, the demon also gives to Paradise its self-consolidating other, providing it with a narrative of self-legitimation that justifies the arguments that frame Paradise’s walls as necessary for existence itself, enabling rigid demarcations of order from chaos, life from death, self from other—even and perhaps especially when such borders blur or are breached. Constructing discourses about demons—demonologies—is one way Paradise tries to explain (away) this blurring and breaching, to render legible, manipulable, and eliminable threats (real and imagined, always incarnated) to its security and perpetuity. As a discourse, demonology thus testifies to acts of performative violence that, as Jacques Derrida outlines, make the truth, inscribe “a truth whose power sometimes imposes itself forever: the location of a boundary, the installation of a state . . . the dominant and juridically incontestable public truth.”³¹ However, as he notes elsewhere, as “soon as truth is a limit or has limits, its own . . . truth would be a certain relation to what terminates or determines it.” Truth is constituted by the possibility of its contravention.³² Paradise thus comes to rely on its demons, on the threat of their existence and the strategies for their exorcism. And this need for demons, for demonologies, reveals its security and continuity to be ceaselessly contested, corrupted, and on the verge of collapse. Demons here come to operate deconstructively, operating within and against sovereign power, destabilizing the very structures that require them for consolidation.

To capture this process of (de)stabilization, the construction and deconstruction of truth and its limits, this work draws upon disparate understandings of “demonology.” The first, more traditional or at least more normative, is that of study of religions scholar Bruce Lincoln. Demonology, he claims, works akin to a scientific “unified field theory.” It amalgamates rubrics that are normally differentiated in modern and secular classificatory systems—“bacteriology, epidemiology, toxicology, teratology, criminology, Marxism, psychoanalysis”—in order to build a unified model of reality in the service of a singular goal: an “unflinching attempt to name, comprehend, and defend against all that threatens, frightens, and harms us.”³³ Critical here is both demonology’s aspirations to totality and the contours of the “us” in whose name its unflinching attempt is brought to bear—an “us” that is inextricable from existing structures of power. Demonology is not just a discourse of threat but one whose acts of naming operate as processes of discursive and material interpellation, constitutive of the subjects they name—a mechanism of power that both acts on and (thereby) activates bodies.³⁴ Demonology, in sum, imposes names to classify and control (thus constituting) unruly or willful subjects within disciplinary and securitizing regimes of sovereign power.³⁵

This process of classification and control is also part of the logics of Paradise. Elsewhere, in his study of Achaemenian Persia composed in the shadow of Abu Ghraib, Lincoln identifies “the pursuit of paradise” as the leitmotif of the “incipient moment” of empire, one that empowered the imperial project through its desire not just to isolate its inhabitants but to isolate them in a space that was itself a microcosm of the world.³⁶ The paradise aspired “to include all species,” and the ideology this aspiration generated and justified trusted “that this ideal would be achieved at history’s end,” while (if begrudgingly) “accepting that, until the empire had encompassed the globe, one would have to settle for something less than totality and perfection.”³⁷ For Lincoln, the image of the paradise thereby legitimizes two phases of empire: one in which “a nation or a people organizes and energizes itself for the conquest, domination, and exploitation of its neighbors,” and another in which, as “its troops meet with success, its control extends outward, and it draws resources back to the center to fuel its further expansion.”³⁸ Paradise’s walls are never static. Rather, they partake in strategies of encompassing, enclosure, and encroachment. And as I explore later, while spiritual warriors have rarely used the image of Paradise consciously in this manner—although, as Jeffress and others show, this may be changing—the paradise’s imperial undercurrents are central to their demonologies, which operate through processes of classification and control, expropriation and erasure, framing perceived threats to “us” in the language of demonology to facilitate logics of extraction, assimilation, and annihilation.

Yet the demon is also constructed as a transgressive and unsettling figure, one exceeding demonology’s attempts to classify and thus guard against it, passing into the edifices of Paradise, revealing their porosity and provoking their collapse. Here, in addition to Lincoln, it is useful to draw on the definition of “demonology” employed by liberation and queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid. In keeping with Paradise’s imbrication with the logics of empire, Althaus-Reid positions demonology in opposition to retention: an “imperial meme” that “reproduces itself by reproducing a past,” one “based on imperial knowledge of expansion and strategies of acceptance, such as re-territorialisation and processes of identity unification which include the erasure of the past (redeeming the past by changing it).” Conceptualizing the demon as that which retention seeks to “redeem” and (thereby) erase, she advocates a framing of demonology as “a theology the starting point of which is the knowledge of rebellious spirits, a theology that exposes and accuses the legal sacred order of being constructed and not natural.”³⁹ For Althaus-Reid, the “legal” dimension of legal sacred order is primarily sexual, tied to capital-T Theology’s imbrication with normative regimes of sexuality that queerness rebels against, albeit one bound to broader regimes of racialization and coloniality. In this work, I pursue this more expansive framing, unpacking the imbrications of sex, gender, race, and coloniality and their conjoined logics of demonization.

This expansion, I detail in Chapter 1, enables the formulation of a heuristic rubric that I term “orthotaxy,” a mode of religiosity in which “correct” (orthos) patterns, arrangements, and orders (taxa)—personal, societal, cosmic—become privileged over correct beliefs or behaviors. Befitting conjurations of “legal sacred order,” within spiritual warfare discourses this orthotaxic religiosity is given shape by a mobilization of ideas of “illegality” to conceptualize both the demonic and the paradigms of bodily autonomy and territorial (co)habitation associated with it. Framing demons as figures who “rule illegally, acting as illegal squatters,” spiritual warfare makes violation of their will and seizure of their lands an act of reclamation from “the illegal usurper, Satan.”⁴⁰ As I will demonstrate, however, such accusations of illegality are themselves what constitutes and consolidates orthotaxy as “right order.” As postcolonial queer theorist Sara Ahmed has explored, accusations of willful subjectivity—subjectivity figured as willing “wrongly or too much”—are inextricable from a simultaneous, interdependent articulation of “sovereign will.” The legitimation of this latter will as sovereign requires both “the rendering of sovereign will as non-willful will and the rendering of those who do not obey the will of the sovereign as willful will.” Claims to sovereignty or to speak on behalf of sovereignty require a marking of others’ wills as a priori rebellious, as nonsovereign; one way “of thinking of sovereign will is the right to determine whose wills are the willful wills.”⁴¹ Asymmetries are what permit this accusation of willful deviance and what allows a will to figure itself as non-willful—to pass as normative, as sovereign. Consolidations of orthotaxy and its concomitant accusations of demonic illegality in spiritual warfare mimic this relation, being co-constitutive and dependent on asymmetries of power—drawn along existing hierarchical axes of oppression—that determine ahead of time which ideological structures, forms of subjectivity, and deployments of violence are legitimate or illegitimate, divine or demonic.

Starting with “the knowledge rebellious spirits,” this book centers this asymmetry and co-constitution in order to resituate and refigure demonology as a tool of critique, one which reframes and subverts the declension narratives of modern America. Alongside Althaus-Reid’s queering of demonology, I draw here specifically on the work of feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick. Building on the use of “demonic” in mathematics and physics as well as in theology, McKittrick reframes the demonic as naming “a non-deterministic schema; it is a process that is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future.” She draws here on Sylvia Wynter’s uses of the demonic, exploring how centering such a demonic element underscores how “subaltern lives are not other/marginal to regulatory classificatory systems but instead integral to them.” Or, framed more theologically, how demons and the demonized are integral to the divine order that conjures them. But this integration holds deconstructive potential, as the demon introduces uncertainty and nonlinearity into the systems that summon it for self-consolidation and edification. As such, for McKittrick, the demonic “makes possible a different unfolding, one that does not replace or override or remain subordinate to the vantage point of ‘Man’”—that is, Western bourgeois conceptions of the Human as purveyor of “unquestionable reason, value, and authority”—“but instead parallels his constitution and his master narratives of humanness.”⁴²

Subversively reframing spiritual warfare’s demonologies as capable of signifying precisely such a “different unfolding,” I expose the targets of their declension narratives as symbolizing other(ed) narratives of cultural contestation and temporal transformation: projects of dissent buried within proclamations of decline. These are projects of descension, of fall and refusal to be sure, but also of derivation—of descent as ancestry and archive—both in that “demonology” exists as part of a genealogy of description, management, and containment (theological, secular, colonial) by which it (re)situates the objects it names, and in that demons and the demonized themselves embody their own ancestries and archives, imbricated in but exceeding demonology’s unflinching attempt to classify and control them. As I will demonstrate, such descension narratives target the places where the seams of demonology’s unified field theories are most visible, exposing how the demons they name undo the systems of sovereignty and security they are conjured to reinforce, accusing those systems of being constructed and not natural. In doing so, they unsettle the boundaries of order by revealing Paradise’s walls to be porous, not stable; its structures transient, not eternal; its forms and mannerisms replicable, not unique. They offer, in brief, “a new look at an old war.”

Passing Orders

It is on the threshold between order’s consolidation and deconstruction, between the narrative of decline seeking to reassert normative order and the narrative of dissent striving to disrupt it, that “the demon” emerges as a passing figure. This passing is multiple, at once spatial, temporal, and specular. The demon passes through space, traversing borders that should remain stable, but it is also passing in time, destined for destruction, and constructed through images of deceit and dissimulation, as passing for what it is not. The last of these is especially critical. The ambiguities and anxieties of imitation have long been core to Christian demonologies: Satan’s relation to God is one of “near-perfect imitation and essential difference,”⁴³ the world order created by the Antichrist near time’s end is a “counterfeit world order,”⁴⁴ the state of sinful humanity is marked as “a distorted, misoriented, false imitation of what the human should be.”⁴⁵ Yet by positioning the demon as a passing figure I do not mean simply to suggest—apropos 2 Corinthians 11:14—that Satan “masquerades as an angel of light.” Nor, crucially, do I intend to claim that people who “pass” (whether in terms of race, sexuality, gender, religion, and so on) are demonic—although certain demonizing parties often frame them as such, mobilizing fears of invisible enemies to police the limits of being and belonging. By positioning the demon as a passing figure, I wish instead to tease out the imbrication and implications of the registers of its passing, and thereby excavate its structural relationship to notions of temporality, identity, and sovereign power—one core to the discursive and affective work it is conjured to perform today.

The ties between sovereignty and identity are deep-rooted and constitutive. As Derrida argues, before “any sovereignty of the state, of the nation-state, of the monarch, or, in democracy, of the people, ipseity names a principle of legitimate sovereignty, the accredited or recognized supremacy of a power or a force.”⁴⁶ Ipseity, from the Latin ipse (“itself”) inscribes identity at sovereignty’s heart, marking a principle of the selfsame, the recognition of those like oneself and thereby the power, authority and proprietary possession that comes with the codification of that one-self. Yet if the structure of sovereignty rests on identity as selfsame, then passing—and in theopolitical modes, demonic passing most of all—unsettles it at its foundations. Passing is about identities, Elaine Ginsberg writes, “their creation or imposition, their adoption or rejection, their accompanying rewards and penalties.” It is about the borders built between identity categories and “individual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing.” Perhaps ultimately, it is “about specularity: the visible and the invisible, the seen and the unseen.”⁴⁷ Given this framework, how might the register and archive of passing inflect upon an American demonology organized around the relation between the seen and the unseen, between material superstructure and spiritual base, between (allegedly deceptive) appearance and (a projection of) inner “truth” that must be discerned and subsequently dispossessed?

Passing presumes a disconnect between essence and semblance, which galvanizes regimes of securitization that attempt to discern the “truth” of marked subjects—a truth often figured to be dangerous, perhaps demonic and disintegrative in nature—and thereby situate such subjects within paradigms of discernment and diagnosis, and ultimately projects of displacement, dispossession, and destruction. In the United States, passing is archetypally associated with race, with the crossing of the “color line,” but also with other categories such as sexuality and gender. How passing marks these categories in relation to wider “legal sacred order” is distinct, however. The passing of sexual minorities, for example—whether by being closeted or simply by conforming to societal gender expectations—has been framed as assuaging the anxieties of normative order. The existence of the “closet,” for example, permits that order to enact a fantasy of totality and homogeneity, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has demonstrated.⁴⁸ Demonology can function analogously, becoming a receptacle of deviancy that permits fantasies of normative exception. Exploring the depiction of Satan in Dante’s Inferno, for example, Laurel Schneider frames the demon through Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet, positioning Hell and Purgatory (albeit more ambiguously) as “indispensable containers of the repressed fluidity and ambiguity of Heaven, the very repression of which makes Heaven’s monolithic claim to superiority possible.”⁴⁹ Demonology here consolidates normative order by conjuring the abject vessels of its ambiguities, fluidities, and desires. Many of the spiritual warfare discourses discussed exemplify this demonology of the closet, positioning the source of “deviant” identities (gendered, sexual, religious) in unseen forces that can be removed, resolving the split between the seen and the unseen by normativizing the former through exorcizing the latter.

Yet while the closet is often framed as reassuring to (hetero)normativity, the ability both for racialized subjects to “pass” as white and for transgender subjects to “pass” as cisgender more often evoke anxiety rather than alleviating it. Gayle Wald demonstrates how the color line has long served a “territorializing” function “through its ability to impose and regulate social inequality” in accordance with the “changing needs and interests of white supremacy”—needs and interests that passing unsettles by revealing race to be “more liquid and dynamic, more variable and random” than it is figured in hegemonic discourses.⁵⁰ The gender divide operates in distinct but analogous fashion. As Toby Beauchamp explores, post-9/11 security cultures have increasingly figured gender nonconformity “as inherently deceptive in ways that justify continued surveillance to locate its truth,” discursively fusing the “concealed sex or gender” of trans or gender nonconforming people with the “concealed weapons” of suspected terrorists as threats to the (normative, static, pure) body politic. The overproduction of legal documentation required of transition facilitates this securitization, as it renders the transgender subject’s capacity to “pass” contingent on the existence of trails of medical, legal, and related documentation that—from the perspective of the state—ensures possession of a subject’s archive and (thus) their “truth.”⁵¹ In the case of both race and gender, the possibility of unmarked and undetectable passing unsettles categories that are discursive figured and materially enforced as ontologically distinct. Yet while gender is often a privileged site of anxiety within spiritual warfare, as discussed in Chapter 2, the broader archive of racial passing carries specific weight and generates specific anxieties that are critical to the concept’s mobilization in contemporary demonologies.

Discussing the racialized logics of slavery in America, Harryette Mullen notes that such logics define “the black as a facsimile or counterfeit of the white in order to deny the rights and privileges of whiteness.”⁵² This framing of blackness as counterfeit rests upon an underlying system that figures blackness as ontological absence, an absence that Black theorists have framed as foundational to the metaphysical structures of our antiblack world, in which blackness becomes (in Frank Wilderson III’s words) “the very antithesis of the Human subject . . . a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity.”⁵³ This denial of legitimate being—ontological negation—is core to the theological structures of demonology and (therefore) to the theopolitical structures of demonization. Christian demonology frames demonic evil at the lowest point of a hierarchy in which being (ontos) is bound to God (theos) as apex and guarantor of morality and existence. This synthesis of ontology and theology—ontotheology—underlies Western metaphysics, placing God as/at the summit of a moral-ontological hierarchy as absolute good and (therefore) absolute being. Situated as/at the nadir of this same hierarchy of being(s), demons occupy a state in which moral deviance from order correlates necessarily to ontological absence. The “incarnation” of ontotheological evil thereby enables a construction of bodies as similarly void of being—and void due to a priori willful deviation from right order. That such bodies often are and have been racialized has not escaped notice. Building on Alexander G. Weheliye’s framing of racialization as the process of organizing human beings into those permitted full, partial, and no access to the category of the Human—itself drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers—Adam Kotsko traces a path from Christianity’s construction of rebellious angels as condemned to rebel against God in perpetuity through medieval Christian demonization of Jews to modern demonization of Black people. Reframing racialization through demonization, Kotsko argues that the racialized subject is framed as inheriting “moral failing on the model of original sin” and (therefore) as an intractably and intrinsically criminal opponent of creation.⁵⁴

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

Passing disturbs the foundations on which the opposition between “counterfeit” and “authentic” is built. It reveals, in Linda Schlossberg’s words, how “identity categories intersect, overlap, construct, and deconstruct” each other; the “passing subject’s ability to transcend or abandon his or her ‘authentic’ identity calls into question the very notion of authenticity itself.”⁶⁰ From the stance of normative order, passing’s threat is in what it reveals in its unrevealing: to pass is to go unmarked by difference, and the ability to pass for “straight” or “cis” or “white” calls attention to how whiteness, cisness, and heterosexuality themselves are also in a perpetual state of passing, one that figures them as normative, as beyond the alleged volatility of racial “tensions” or gender and sexual “deviancies.” Normative categories are constantly redefined, rebuilt and reconfigured in response to assaults (real or imagined) on their normativity; frameworks such as whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality pass as natural by disguising the factors, marks, and learned behaviors that occasioned their production.⁶¹ They obscure their contingency by framing others as lacking independent, legitimate substance, as dependent—indeed, parasitic—on the normative category, as evil is framed as parasitic on the good. Passing figures—those seen to transgress the ontological bounds of sovereign order—are therefore rendered threats to Paradise’s perpetuity.

In the anxieties over waning sovereignties and ethnonationalist identities that saturate contemporary America, notions of legions of (in)visible folk devils generated by infernal machinery both trouble and justify the systems that attempt to exclude them. They provoke the development of mechanisms designed to secure the edifices and the pursuit of Paradise. “The figure of the passer,” Ahmed writes, corroborating Beauchamp, is “generated by a system as a mechanism for legitimating itself; it is how legitimacy is legitimated.”⁶² The counterfeit is the standard for authenticity, allowing it to differentiate itself from its inferior and infernal others and to police the limits of its Paradise. These mechanisms act to obscure the fact that social categories of supremacy are not only currencies untethered to any measure of value beyond that ascribed to them, but also that they are ceaselessly redefined, their characteristics re-pressed. The possibility of passing calls this assumed unmarked value into question and so, as Beauchamp explored, necessitates the passing of orders that might permit the counterfeit’s detection—the development of surveillance systems that will make the passing figure always detectable. For spiritual warriors this logic of surveillance that renders the counterfeit always already knowable as such ultimately comes to possess an apocalyptic dimension closely tied to passing’s temporal register. The counterfeit is marked for transience by an assumed gap between its inner essence and its outer manifestation that is seen to doom it a priori. It is passing in time as well as through space: when detected, it becomes a passing phenomenon, is “withdrawn” from circulation. There is an assumed inevitability to this discovery that grounds order’s assurances of authenticity and legitimacy. An authentic is thought of as stable and constant, its record is clean, it is what it seems to be. But as Derrida contends, while the classical philosophical definition of truth is the “indefinite survival of the ‘stable,’” there may be no reason—no absolute, ultimate, structural and structuring reason, beyond any and all possibility—why either a lie or its desired effects might not remain undetected unto infinity.⁶³ That is, there may be no reason to presume that a counterfeit will ever be detected, or must even be detectable.

Yet if the counterfeit—structurally speaking—might neither be detectable nor its effects rectifiable, then its constitutive lack of being or belonging may never be exposed, its impact never undone. Given time, it might even be mistaken for the truth that it claims to be. Given time, it might even become truth or at least accepted as such. As I will demonstrate, it is this possibility that the counterfeit might never be detected, that the passing figure might not inevitably pass on, which haunts demonologies in America today. Resultantly, such demonologies are oriented around notions of discernment and systems of knowledge production, on creating a “unified field theory” that would permit the detection and defeat of passing figures (racialized, sexualized, gendered, colonial), but also towards an eschatological horizon—on the end of time itself. For if there is no absolute reason a lie should not remain undetected until time’s end, time’s apocalyptic finale becomes positioned as that which reveals the truth sub specie aeternitatis, ending all possibility of being or seeming otherwise. The temporality of this revelation is shared by theological and secularized apocalypticisms alike, rooting both victory and defeat in claims of originary and essential (im)perfection. While the former can claim “that the ending of the story has somehow been hidden or revealed in the narrative since the beginning of creation,” the latter can argue “that the state which eventually collapsed was somehow ‘doomed’ or ‘flawed’ from the beginning.” Either way, the end is figured as “less of a surprise than a logical outgrowth of a trend . . . [that] can be traced back to the beginning or the founding of the state.”⁶⁴ The revelation apocalypse brings is therefore not simply one of truth but of all that passes, of all deemed to be counterfeit by the arbiters of that truth—a judgment always already imbricated in the asymmetries of sovereign power.

Eschatology here operates as a tool of projected or post-hoc delegitimation, enacting an imperial inscription of a prelapsarian past actualized through the exposure and erasure—or rather, designation and destruction—of passing figures. This is not a move to eliminate the need for passing’s “near-perfect imitation” as a tool of either subversion or survival—that is, an end to the pain to which material realities of passing are often linked—but rather of the “essential difference” it was constructed as masking. Anchoring the proper and expropriating ordinances of time, the apocalypse’s anticipated revelation of which orders are true and which false, which eternal, which passing, sustains biopolitical and necropolitical systems of what Elizabeth Freeman terms chrononormativity: those techniques by which “manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines.” Imbricated in a revanchist nativism seeking to reassert the rhythms of racial hierarchy and cisheteropatriarchal norms and the perpetuation of a racializing, colonial capitalism for which there is allegedly no alternative, chrononormativity enacts the violence of (re)temporalization by which bodies are forced into modes of maximal production, a production of value and futurity in which “teleologies of living” structure familial and collective logics of inheritance in service of “a legacy,” a “properly political future” that may be ethnic, national, or otherwise.⁶⁵ In the regimes of spiritual warfare discussed here, demons—and those of us “with” demons—do not or cannot assimilate to these modes of (re)production. They resist teleology, inhabiting the queer rhythms of a world beyond the cultivation and curation of the garden. Paradise’s securitization is thus always a securitization of its temporal sovereignty. Encroaching on and enclosing alternative temporalities, the pursuit of Paradise forecloses on their possibility of survival, casting them into zones of no future based on ascriptions of ontotheological absence tied to accusations of willful deviance. Exposed in the instant of eschatological disclosure, all other orders are—before the judgment throne of sovereign will—rendered merely passing orders.

The Broad Road

This work follows the trace of these passing orders, these counterfeit orders that pass for “true” ones, which provoke the passing of orders that might safeguard order from its own passing. It does so across four core chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage contextually and theoretically. It outlines the central features of spiritual warfare demonologies, teasing out their structure to posit a framework for understanding spiritual warfare’s mode of religiosity as “orthotaxic”—as fixated less on correct belief or practice than on correct arrangements and orderings of (social, spiritual, political) reality. I demonstrate that such “correct” orderings are justified as normative through a posited possession of three related attributes: integrity (it is whole and wholesome, unblemished, complete-in-itself), incontestability (systems of being and believing are invalidated simply by diverging from it), and inevitability (it is the unavoidable culmination of the historical process). These attributes are formulated in juxtaposition with the demonic figure of the “arche,” or “territorial spirit,” which is conjured to represent illegitimate territorial and temporal orders, both ideological and material, that simultaneously contest, consolidate, and threaten to counterfeit normative order. Drawing on deconstruction and postcolonial and decolonial theory, I contend that spiritual warfare’s demonologies operate as attempts to exert mastery over both space (property, territory, bodies) and time (history, teleology, and the archive)—attempts inextricable from broader structures of American exceptionalism, empire management, and the enduring epistemic violence of modernity’s inextricable imbrication with its colonial dark side.⁶⁶

Having established the context of US spiritual warfare demonologies and the paradigms of order they are conjured to reinforce, the work then engages in case studies of three demonic figures commonly discussed in contemporary spiritual warfare texts in order to unpack the work that “the demon” is called on to perform. My reasons for structuring these chapters around specific demonic figures are several, but foremost is that scholarship addressing the sociocultural and political uses of demonology, whether historic or contemporary, generally treat all uses of demons as interchangeable.⁶⁷ While this approach has merits for examining the structural role of demons for identity construction, and is also deployed within this book, as Runions demonstrates in The Babylon Complex specific demonic figures (e.g., Babylon) can also be deployed to manage more specific anxieties (e.g., around empire, freedom, and control). Passing Orders follows in Runions’s footsteps by demonstrating that in addition to the work performed by “the demon” broadly, specific demonic figures are strategically deployed to manage distinct anxieties and represent distinct relations of power and ideas of difference. While some of the work performed by these disparate figures overlaps, they are often differentiated in themselves and in regard to the populations they are mapped onto. That is, different(ly) demonized groups are predominantly figured as “with” different demons. The spirit of Jezebel, for example, is almost never associated with Muslims.⁶⁸ Conversely, the spirit framed as behind “Islam” is never associated with feminists or queer or trans folk.

Chapter 2 inaugurates the case studies by exploring demonologies of the Jezebel spirit. Adapted from the Queen Jezebel of 1 and 2 Kings and her symbolic recurrence as a false prophet in Revelation, Jezebel transcends her textual image as a mortal woman to become a transnational and transhistorical demonic spirit whose influence infiltrates all arenas of American life. Inheriting and disarticulating complex theological-textual archives and embodied histories of racial-sexual ordering, the Jezebel spirit reflects anxieties over the destabilization of borders, opening both self and state to the dangerous influence of foreign bodies. Drawing on queer theory, the chapter explores how conjurations of Jezebel construct her as revealing the boundaries of bodies to be always already porous and perforated, manifesting as a fear of nomadism and a loss of futurity figured as the reproduction of sameness. Ultimately, it argues that Jezebel represents a structural disinheritance of the reproductive futurism of an America built on concepts of stable, sovereign unity. Constructing and conducting an emergent vision of the body politic through a deviant body politics, Jezebel manifests as networks of process and flow, messy multiplicities that eschew any societal reproduction along unitary lines and contest their theologically prescribed role as abjected vessels to be colonized, coerced and ultimately annihilated by reinscriptions of “right order.”

The Jezebel spirit comes as close to ubiquity within spiritual warfare texts as any demon. Even texts primarily concerned with other conjurations of demonic alterity will either invoked her name directly or else make gendered and sexualized references to the loss of national sovereignty, individual autonomy, and patriarchal values that she is figured as responsible for. These other demons are framed as usurping the ground of America through the cracks Jezebel opens, but in different ways. Chapter 3 focuses on one of these by exploring a rising subset of texts that place the Islamic Antichrist at the heart of their end times tales—an Anti christ that is singular and corporate, an individual Antichrist and an Islamophobic vision of “Islam” itself. Drawing on postcolonial and critical race theory, the chapter explores anti-Muslim spiritual warfare discourses as they work to conjure a phantasmatic “Islam” as inverted mirror of and reaction to Euroamerican imperialism, born from the self-defensive dissimulation strategies of asymmetric conflict and the force of anticolonial and antiracist rage. Merging Islamophobia and antiblackness, these demonologies position the relationship between colonizer and colonized, between whiteness and blackness, and between Christianity and Islam in analogous relation to that of the divine and demonic, with the latter assuming the position of a derivative and destabilizing imitation. Critically reading these demonologies, I argue that the Islamic Antichrist reflects (white) Christian America’s disavowed systems of messianic imperialism. He subverts their claimed authenticity and authority through colonial mimicry and decolonial violence, ultimately exposing the terrifying and terrorizing foundations of an ontotheological order in which any attempt by those consigned to nothingness to exceed or escape the realm of pure function will only ever appear as an attempt at usurpation.

Chapter 4 follows from the question of foundations by interrogating spiritual warfare discourse around the Leviathan spirit. It traces Leviathan’s genealogy in the chaos dragons of Near Eastern cosmology, from whose corpses the world was made, and their inscription as a figure of sovereign power, linked to biblical narratives of Egypt and cemented in Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. Framed as inherently multiple, Leviathan is called on in spiritual warfare texts to figure disparate and often conflicting movements that threaten to usurp the “proper” temporal sovereignty of Christian America, foremost of which are resurgent revolutionary politics, secular state apparatuses, and revitalized Indigenous traditions. Working through deconstruction, decolonial criticism, and settler colonial studies, the chapter explores how Leviathan disrupts “settled” narratives of time, rupturing a present by embodying histories that refuse to be over and other sovereignties that contest spiritual warfare’s claims to territorial and temporal rule. It argues that Leviathan destabilizes the colonial imposition of truth on which orthotaxy’s claims to authenticity are built, exposing how the interplay between orthotaxy and its demonized others causes the division between counterfeit and authentic to blur and break down. In the absence of an apocalyptic ending, the once-and-for-all advent of truth that vanquishes all ambiguity and possibility of an otherwise, orthotaxy threatens to blend into the very legion it strives to defeat.

These figures—Jezebel, the Antichrist, Leviathan—who appear almost jarringly disparate, have been chosen to convey both the scope of spiritual warfare demonologies and their underlying similarities. Each figure demonstrates a part of the shifting contemporary American demonological landscape, inscribing and reinscribing different archives and genealogies that are (always imperfectly) subsumed into spiritual warfare’s unified field theory. Moreover, while each of these demonic figures acts to contest the structures of orthotaxy through processes of passing and counterfeiture, each can also be framed as challenging one of orthotaxy’s foundational attributes more than others. To preempt my conclusions, demonologies of Jezebel undermine integrity, articulating anxieties of process and flow that expose an integrated body politic as always already absent, the sovereign’s throne as always already empty. Those of the Antichrist challenge incontestability by constructing a discourse of competing unity, an uncanny other so (un)like the self which threatens to replace sovereign order with its abject simulacrum. Finally, Leviathan unravels claims to inevitability by exposing the haunting of definitive futures by the possibilities it has deemed to be over, but which refuse to remain settled. Embodying and articulating joint projects of descension, each demon(ology) reflects a different crisis in attempts at consolidating sovereign power. They dissolve its thresholds, contest its right to rule, and impede its ends. In doing so, they reveal the structural dependency of sovereignty on its demons: its need for passing orders to safeguard it from its own passing.

Constructed as dissimulated and transient, each of these passing orders is framed as predestined for collapse by the radical difference spiritual warfare posits between (legitimate) appearance and (illegitimate) essence. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) this difference, these allegedly demonic orders display remarkable capacity for resilience and resurgence, survival and subversion. Challenged by the demonic capacity for mimicry, orthotaxy can itself only attempt to replicate a divine order that remains forever external and elsewhere. Evoked and reevoked time and again to combat multiple and recurrent conjurations of its Old Enemy, orthotaxy is revealed as passing for what it is not, working according to a ceaseless process of imitation and alter(itiz)ation that cannot but alienate it from the immutable truth it claims to represent. Stripped of claims to indivisible wholeness, incontestable right, and inevitable fulfillment, orthotaxy becomes just a possible order (perhaps not even a passable order) passing for a value that neither it nor any other order can truly possess. Ultimately, Passing Orders asserts, at the heart of demonologies—in their securitizing anxieties over counterfeiture and ardent eschatological anticipations—lies the terrifying realization that all things pass, and all things will pass.