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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 Christians is to continually live life so that “we challenge the world with a glimpse of the Kingdom.”²⁶ Medina Isiah is more proscriptive: Christians must be firm in losing their attachments to “this world’s ideas, principles, and moral standards. . . . The Word of God is clear, it commands us to not be shaped by, or mimic, the ways of the world.”²⁷

Within this antiurbanist demonology, few spaces become more archetypal of the kosmos to be rejected than the cosmopolis, which comes to be symptomatic of a specific conceptualization of space. Theorists of space have long demonstrated how space is both a product and productive of dynamic social relations, producing sites of becoming that give rise to new emergent relations of centrality and marginality, domination and resistance.²⁸ As Katherine McKittrick outlines, geography—as “space, place, and location in their physical materiality and imaginative configurations”—is bound up with racial-sexual patterns of domination that create and naturalize a normativity that is conditioning and seductive, but not absolute. “The production of space is caught up in, but does not guarantee, long-standing geographic frameworks that materially and philosophically arrange the planet according to a seemingly stable white, heterosexual, classed vantage point,” she writes. This vantage point is figured as unitary and transparent, naturalizing racial, sexual, and economic hierarchies as given by “repetitively spatializing ‘difference,’” unevenly situating the world within a given ideological order so the location of nondominant groups become where they “naturally” belong, fixed and stable.²⁹ Cities often exemplify and exacerbate this unevenness, “reiterat[ing] social class distinctions, race and gender distinctions, and (in)accessibility” through fostering flows of capital, spaces, infrastructure, and people in ways that privilege and mirror white, capitalist, and heteropatriarchial geopolitics.³⁰ Yet while urban inequalities are often parts of spiritual warfare demonologies, such inequalities are often framed as results of heterogeneity itself—or at least as an absence of a particular (divine, sovereign) unity. As such, spiritual warfare (whether in principle or practice) often comes to reinforce rather than challenge the unitary vantage point from which relations of domination are naturalized.

This naturalization is dependent upon the specific ways that spiritual warfare’s vision of selfhood is constructed in relation to singular divine power in opposition to a demonic figured as diverse and (therefore) divisive. “God puts a high premium on unity and hates division,” Steve Sampson writes.³¹ However, the unity sought is not just any unity, but tied to God as singular truth. “As much as we want unity,” Jennifer LeClaire cautions, “we can’t compromise truth for the sake of unity. That’s really not unity at all.”³² The fostering of integrated unity in relation to a truth guaranteed by sovereign will becomes the foundation of legitimate action and communal rejuvenation while drawing clear lines between territories of self and other, priming the latter for conquest and colonization. Drawing on the image of Hebron, where Abraham entered Canaan, Sandie Freed writes that “Possessing new land requires unity, holiness and accountability. In order to take our land of Hebron today, God requires an army that is in covenant with each other.”³³ This idea of the covenantal army geared towards territorial ownership and societal transformation, galvanized by the cultivation of an ipseity in alignment with (and solely accountable to) sovereign will, highlights the first attribute of what I am terming orthotaxic religiosity: integrity—the concept of being both whole and wholesome, unblemished and complete-in-oneself.

This integrated unity is personal and societal, founded on ideas of God as singular and omnipresent in contrast to demons as multiple and contingent. “Unlike the Holy Spirit, who is everywhere at once and can speak to millions of people simultaneously,” Alice Patterson writes, “the devil can only be in one place at a time. By himself Satan would be totally ineffective, but in cooperation with other powers of darkness he erects structures to deceive and manipulate entire nations.”³⁴ As I discuss later, notions of demonic contingency and cooperation are critical to the demonization and delegitimization of projects of resistance. For the moment, I wish only to note how this framing mirrors antiurbanist ideas of the city’s sense of public life. Lacking innate community mediated by the omnipresence and simultaneity of God, demons are framed as forming ad hoc alliances to build structures that, while having definite and widespread effects, lack truth and (thus) all authenticity, validity, and survivability. Demonic systems are linked not by a sovereignty that is “everywhere at once” but by contingent, even rhizomatic, networks of present darknesses cooperating in and across regional ecologies—even and especially when they command ostensibly vertebrate systems like municipal governments or nation-states, systems that themselves become cast as regional cells in willful resistance to a centralized yet omnipresent totality of divine will and rule.

Architectures of (Dis)Order

Understanding the discursive function of regional “powers of darkness” is key to understanding contemporary spiritual warfare, as these are the primary figures through which its demonologies are conceptualized and enacted. The scriptural basis for such powers is derived from Ephesians 6:12, a ubiquitous verse in spiritual warfare manuals: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”³⁵ In his comprehensive Bel iever’s Guide to Spiritual Warfare, Thomas White explains that this passage holds the Apostle Paul’s codification of “Hell’s Corporate Headquarters”; that is, the unseen demonic hierarchy. At the bottom reside “spiritual forces of evil.” These represent the spirits “that commonly afflict people,” including but not limited to spirits of “deception, divination, lust, rebellion, fear, and infirmity,” against which the majority of everyday spiritual warfare is directed. Above these are the “powers of this dark world,” which “operate within countries and cultures to influence certain aspects of life,” and above these the “authorities,” a word that “carries a connotation of both supernatural and human government” and figures “forces that ‘[stand] behind’ human structures.” Finally, at (or near) the summit are the “rulers,” also known as “principalities,” territorial spirits, or by the Greek archai: “high-level satanic princes set over nations and regions of the earth.”³⁶ LeClaire frames these as “the CEOs or five-star generals of the demonic realm, reporting directly to Satan himself.”³⁷

The precise occupants of each rank in the hierarchy are fluid, with demons classified as merely spiritual forces of evil in one location or text becoming principalities in another as spiritual warriors seek to map distinctive territorial ecologies. Moreover, Satan—ostensibly the pinnacle of this infernal hierarchy as “prince [archon] of this world” (John 12:31)—is personally absent from most texts. As such, although he is undoubtedly understood to exist in spiritual warfare discourses, the Devil comes to reflect more of an organizational rubric for amalgamating, categorizing, and demonizing difference than a discrete entity who engages in the lives and environs of everyday people. This is the purpose of lesser demons, and ultimately of the archai themselves, for while most spiritual warfare manuals and practices are focused on the deliverance of individuals from demonic oppression the possibility of this oppression is figured as dependent upon the regional presence of an arche: a “principality is what assigns demonic spirits to operate in the disobedient,” Charisma House’s annotated Spiritual Warfare Bible states.³⁸ These territorial spirits “rule illegally and have a direct effect on the people living in their assigned areas,” Jacobs explains, elaborating that they “work to ‘brainwash’ citizens from having the mind of Christ and thus neutralize the power of the Kingdom of God,” such as by fostering “moral decay or addictions” in the populace.³⁹ Ultimately, Bob Larson writes, it is through the structures organized by the archai that Satan is able “to build a literal architecture of evil in human lives, an infrastructure that can serve his purposes.”⁴⁰ The goal of personal spiritual warfare is then “to locate and go after the [demonic] strongman who has engineered the unwelcome superstructure inside you.”⁴¹

Much like the etymology of the word itself, an arche in spiritual warfare “coordinates two principles in one,” as Derrida once outlined. One is “the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle.” The other, is “the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle.”⁴² The principalities conjured in spiritual warfare manuals encapsulate both principles, naming a point of commencement and of commandment, an origin as well as an order. Understanding archai in this way clarifies the highly structural nature of spiritual warfare’s demonological imaginary, where failures of personal and collective evangelization become rooted in the existence of elaborate and mutually sustaining ideological, affective, and institutional complexes. Larson’s use of “superstructure” here is noteworthy, highlighting how in spiritual warfare the material world is understood as built atop a spiritual base—something McCloud has explored in depth. Drawing on Wagner’s claim that third wave practices enable believers to see “the world around us as it really is, not as it appears to be,” McCloud argues that spiritual warfare deploys a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” analogous to materialist hermeneutics like Marxism or psychoanalysis. Yet, when it “lifts the obfuscating veil” of reality, spiritual warfare finds neither “the material conditions of existence” nor “the repressed memories of childhood traumas,” but a clash of unseen, spiritual forces—good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons—the conflict between which becomes reality’s condition of possibility.⁴³

This hermeneutics manifests in spiritual warfare missionary paradigms, as spiritual conflicts come to be represented and reflected in material political, military, and ideological ones. Jacobs’s narrative of missioning in the USSR is illustrative. “July 1990 brought a crashing of walls between nations,” she begins, “a time of unprecedented answers to prayers” in the wake of which she journeyed alongside six other women into the USSR “to meet with Soviet women, intercede on their behalf and touch the lives of those who have had little, if any, personal ministry.” Handing out tracts in Moscow, Jacobs and her companions find nobody will take them within Red Square. Discerning demonic influence, they pray to God to break the demon’s power, and “within moments all the tracts were gone from our hands.” She concludes, surmising that “After our prayer Satan could no longer blind their eyes. We had taken possession of territory Satan wanted to control.”⁴⁴ Similar examples are found in texts by other spiritual warriors. Wagner, for example, frames the 1945–52 US occupation of Japan as the “most serious setback for Japan’s territorial spirits,” because “Emperor Hirohito publicly denied [his divine] status” and the government formally separated itself from Shinto. This weakened ties between the Japanese and their traditional gods and so “Christianity grew well for what are now known as the ‘seven wonderful years.’” In a related example that highlights the more fractious, competitive nature of demonic spirits, Wagner relates a conversation with Cho Yonggi, founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea, in which Cho framed the success of Christianity in Korea (contra Japan) as tied to the damage to traditional Korean religion done first by the Japanese occupation and later by communism. Conflict between competing demonic spirits weakened Korea’s own indigenous powers, permitting easier evangelization.⁴⁵

Extending the base/superstructure image into more Gramscian territory, spiritual warfare might here be understood as a supernaturalized conflict over hegemonic perceptions of reality—a war over what ideas and concepts are given credence in a society, which sociocultural bodies are granted legitimacy by these concepts, and how these collectively impact occupants of specific territories, making certain actions and possibilities thinkable and others unthinkable. The clearest example of this understanding is in Francis Frangipane’s 1989 The Three Battlegrounds. Frangipane defines spiritual warfare as, at heart, a battle over “one essential question: Who will control reality on earth, heaven or hell?” However, since Heaven and Hell lack physical weaponry, “When it comes to angelic and demonic warfare, the battle rests not in physical weaponry but in the power of agreement between mankind and the spirit realm.”⁴⁶ As the engineers of “unwelcome superstructure[s],” archai are critical to how this “power of agreement” is materialized and territorialized, facilitating a theopolitical imaginary that envisions nations as “an ontological bond between a people and a territory” that takes both proper (divine) and improper (demonic) form.⁴⁷ Jacobs explains: “There cannot be two ruling entities over a nation. Depending upon our intercession, the righteousness or sin of a nation, and other spiritual factors, either the angel of the Lord or a fallen angel will be enthroned over that country.”⁴⁸ The results of rule by an archai are figured as universally negative, meaning that—in Freed’s words—“entire nations are cursed with poverty and infirmity; they have bowed down to false images, and a death structure of iniquity is established.”⁴⁹ Engaging in a blend of intercessory prayer and political activism, spiritual warriors can overthrow these structures, establishing “God’s rule into [sic] an area, taking it back from the illegal usurper, Satan.”⁵⁰ Jacobs calls this process “dominion intercession,” and it is spatial and temporal in nature.

Drawing parallels between contemporary charismatic deliverance and early modern exorcism, Renaissance scholar Armando Maggi notes that the removal of demons from objects, places, and people has always entailed a restoration of time as much as a reclamation of space. Dominion is central here, as the exorcist’s power over demons was linked to the dominion over the earth Adam received from God in Genesis 1:28. Joining dominion over territory to the stability and staticity of a prelapsarian world creates a framework in which, Maggi contends, “demons signified the present time dominated by decadence and pain, whereas an exorcist evoked the order of the past”—and, importantly, the postapocalyptic restoration of that past.⁵¹ In spiritual warfare today, this intercession is not just personal but regional or national, allowing spiritual warriors to disrupt the improper bond between a people and the archai structuring their lifeworlds, restoring them to a state of lost purity. As Matthew Lee, Margaret Poloma, and Stephen Post write, spiritual warriors frame this as a mission for positive change “driven by a conception of ‘the good’ that proponents see as consistent with the will of God.”⁵² And given the results that spiritual warriors assign to living under death structures, one can see why. Wagner, for example, claims the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu (reframed as an arche) was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the collapse of the Japanese “bubble economy,” and even the “3/11” Tohoku earthquake and nuclear disaster.⁵³ Jacobs, meanwhile, credits Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait to attempts by the “prince of Persia”—adapted from Daniel 10:13 and 20—to recoup the empire of Nebuchadnezzar, adding in a later edition that “other empire spirits” in the region are trying to “regroup and take back ancient territory such as that conquered and ruled by the Ottomans.” In case her intended target might be unclear—given which nation was accused of empire-building in the 2000s—she clarifies: “Islam sees its mission to be conquering the whole world in the name of Allah. Satan wants to fill the earth with terror and terrorists.”⁵⁴ In two continent-wide examples, British-born Ghanaian minister Dag Heward-Mills claims “Africa is dominated by territorial spirits of poverty, superstition and war. That is why the continent, although blessed with human and natural resources, is plagued with backwardness and under-development.” Similarly, he asserts “Europe is dominated by territorial spirits of atheism, homosexuality and immorality.”⁵⁵

In these examples, the necropolitical dimension to spiritual warfare’s “conception of ‘the good’” starts to become clear, bringing into focus how the discernment and designation of death structures can work to create the subjects they name, framing certain lifeworlds as deviations from divine order and worthy only of dispossession and destruction. And here it is crucial to recognize that the principles of the principalities are deemed a priori illegitimate. “They rule illegally,” as Jacobs wrote. If the arche is “the place from which order is given,” then this cannot be a legitimate order; if it is “there where things commence” then all it commences (physically, historically, ontologically) must be erased. Here the second attribute of orthotaxic religiosity is made clear: incontestability. Orthotaxy is framed as being absolutely sovereign: it alone holds rightful rule over territory, and other systems of being and belonging are invalid simply by diverging from it. The kingdom of darkness is not a kingdom proper—that is, a legal territory ruled by a sovereign ruler—but a counterfeit that will eventually be unmasked and undone. And contextualized with regard to the regions listed earlier—Japan, the Middle East, Africa—this ascription of illegitimacy also adopts a distinctly (neo)colonial countenance, one reinforced by two interconnected ideas that emerge from spiritual warfare: its understanding of idolatry and conception of ancestral sin.

Unlike in other modes of Christianity, “idolatry” in spiritual warfare does not mean the worship of beings that are not real but rather of beings that are real but not true. Deities like Amaterasu or Allah—here seen as distinct from the Christian God—metaphysically exist but are demonized, the worlds they signify—Shinto and Islam, respectively—given spiritual power but denied epistemic and ontological validity. Spiritual warfare here epitomizes what decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, writing on the colonization of the Americas, discerned as the “real project” behind the “extirpation of idolatry.” This extirpation, he claims, was “not a religious issue, but an epistemic one. The eradication of other forms of knowledge was the real project at stake,”⁵⁶ rooted in what he calls the “hubris of the zero point”—the hubris of believing that one’s knowledge is produced not from a situated location but the neutral center, sub specie aeternitatis. This epistemic hubris is reinforced by spiritual warfare notions of hereditary curses or generational iniquity, which claim that the sins of one’s ancestors continue to impact the present, carried in the blood, opening one to demonic oppression through the sins of the father. While such ancestral sins can include bloodshed, murder, and sexual violence, one of the most frequently identified is idolatry—particularly with regard to racialized or colonized communities.

Anthropologists have discussed the racial dynamics of ancestral sin discourses. Writing of Guatemala and South Africa, respectively, both Andrea Althoff and Melissa Hackman observe that while issues plaguing Black and Indigenous populations like poverty or sickness are credited to ancestral idolatry, the crimes and atrocities of white settlers are rarely if ever framed as causing issues for their descendants.⁵⁷ Settler societies might sometimes have to atone for past violence, but systemic and structural issues faced by colonized populations are never a result of such acts of violence but of the lingering specter of traditional identities and ways of life. This is clear in Heward-Mills’s framing of Africa, where problems stem not from histories of slavery, colonization, and ongoing exploitation under global capitalism, but from “superstition”—for which the only true cure is Christianization⁵⁸—and also in more localized national or regional demonologies. Such framings corroborate not only Mignolo’s claims about idolatry but also—by linking evangelization to economic success—situate spiritual warfare solidly within the matrix of what he terms modernity/coloniality: of colonialism’s constitutive place in/as the “under lying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization” and of modernity’s “rhetoric of salvation (by conversion yesterday, by development today)” that must necessarily “marginalize or destroy whatever gets in the way.”⁵⁹ This alignment exposes spiritual warfare’s imbrication in what Lincoln termed empire’s incipient moment, the pursuit of Paradise. For this Paradise to be (re)created, competing architectures must be delegitimized, their architects dethroned, their archives appropriated into a singular, teleological narrative of history.

The Demonological Frontier

Practices of delegitimization, dethroning, and appropriation orient spiritual warfare theopolitics, fostering a framework that seeks not simply to (apropos Lincoln) “defend against” threatening unseen forces but to assault them. Discussing late antique urban Christianization, Dayna Kalleres argues that rather than being used simply “to mark alterity, to emphasize otherness or monstrosity . . . to measure and maintain a deliberate distance,” as in Jonathan Z. Smith’s category of the demonic, demonology often worked to proactively navigate political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts. Analyzing the In sanctum Julianum martyrem of John Chrysostom (d. 407), she notes that rather than create distance from the demonic, John “depicts frightening images of the demons’ power to corrupt and invade the human body in order to galvanize Christians to act; he offers a plan to move closer to the demons’ location and engage with them directly in spiritual warfare.” Moreover, “he provides a reliable antidemonic weapon”—the relics of the titular martyr Julian.⁶⁰ Kalleres calls this process, through which Christians were pushed towards active, antagonistic engagement with the demonic diabolization, and although deployed for analyzing late antique demonologies similar practices are at work in contemporary spiritual warfare. While they do not offer relics, spiritual warfare manuals perform an analogous function, teaching readers how to orient themselves towards and combat the demonic. Such manuals constitute the material hub of a new science of demons, one that is cartographical—concerned with mapping territories and spheres of influence, of discerning precisely where demonic spaces begin and end, and how they might be revealed—and colonial—aiming at the conquest and conversion of these spaces, assimilation of their traditions into spiritual warfare’s knowledge regimes, and cultivation of new modes of subjectivity aligned with sovereign will. And, exposing the imbrication of this cartography within the matrix of modernity/coloniality, it relies on a twofold temporal narrative that joins perfection of demonological knowledge to irreversibility of territorial enlightenment.

As Hawaii-based pastor Richard Ing shows, spiritual warfare joins a surety of legitimacy to an uncertainty of specific knowledge that renders its demonologies exceedingly plastic. Satan divides the world into different areas of control, he claims: “countries, regions, cities, towns, neighborhoods, homes, churches, families, and individuals. I don’t know the exact borders of these areas, but I know they exist.”⁶¹ Spiritual geography is here positioned as an imperfect but increasingly evolving science, a framing echoed by Frangipane when he writes that “our culture and the boundaries of worldly knowledge must not be allowed to rule over us, for old limitations are destined to go.”⁶² Despite this, discerning the identities and territories of archai draws heavily on “worldly knowledge.” Jacobs contends that one “can find evidence of demonic influence by studying the music, culture, architecture, and art” of a region. Indeed, in “America it is not hard to discern the ruling spirits over some of our large cities through the architecture.” For example, while once “the tallest structure in a town or village would have been the church” in modern cities “the tallest buildings will invariably be banks.” Demonic influence might also be situated in cultural or historical prominence rather than only physical height: the blood shed at the Alamo in San Antonio “gave legal entrance to the spirit of murder and spirit of violence.” Folk art is positioned as particularly revealing of demonic residency. “In Resistencia [in Argentina],” Jacobs relates, “we found three panels painted with the symbols for the spirit of death [which ruled over the city]. Sometimes [in other cities] the paintings are sensual and may indicate a spirit of lust or sensuality.”⁶³

Interrogation of regional folklore, art, architecture, music, and cultural practices functions here as enemy reconnaissance. This is crucial since, while demons “play an active social role in every age of history,” as Horn stated, the boundaries of demonic territories and the archives of archai are in a state of adaptation, evolution, and flux. Data about their territories and traditions must therefore be acquired, classified and systematized, permitting the naming, comprehension, defense, and offense against those that frighten and threaten to harm “us.” Even the ascribed identity of archai themselves are subject to alteration. As LeClaire writes self-deprecatingly in her 2016 Waging Prophetic Warfare (billed in a foreword by Jacobs as a “fresh revelation . . . revisiting and reexamining the teachings that have gone before”), “Early on in my spiritual warfare training, I had limited revelation and a limited arsenal. I was lacking in solid spiritual warfare fundamentals. I thought everything was Jezebel or witchcraft.”⁶⁴ Earlier materials are therefore revisited and revised as new revelations arise. Whereas in Certeau’s Loudun the restoration of right order rested on a placing of demons into preexisting demonological taxonomies, spiritual warfare’s evolve and adapt, maintaining an underlying structure but adjusting to new knowledge and contexts, divine revelations, and demonic encounters.

This construction of an imperfect corpus of data that can be filled through empirical observation situates spiritual warfare discourses in the broader intellectual trajectories of Western modernity, even as they shun modernity’s more secularizing trajectories.⁶⁵ Like other modernized systems of knowledge production, spiritual warfare figures knowledge as progressively realized and systematized through the formulation of taxonomies, systems of ordering and classification oriented around the discernment of causal regularities and universal standards that are applicable across social and societal modes.⁶⁶ Understood as active agents of history, the discernment of demons becomes an unveiling of the hidden mechanisms of history itself and their exposure and elimination becomes a narrative of progressive enlightenment waged through territorial conquest. As Frangipane explains, “Satan has a legal access, given to him by God, to dwell in the domain of darkness.” This darkness is a domain of absence, but “its cause is not simply the absence of light; it is the absence of God, who is light.”⁶⁷ Reclaiming territory thus becomes an erasure of darkness by light—and thus by God, truth, and presence. “When we possess the land over our cities,” Jacobs explains, “we gain control of their political, physical, and spiritual arenas. . . . As we pierce the darkness over our cities, more and more of God’s light and glory will pour into them.”⁶⁸ While demons have “legal” rights to territories of darkness, these territories are merely passing spaces in which demons are positioned as transient and nomadic residents. They will eventually be filled (and so erased) by God’s light: “When light is turned on in a dark room,” Frangipane writes by way of analogy, “darkness becomes light.”⁶⁹

This narrative of progressive enlightenment indicates the third and final trait of spiritual warfare’s orthotaxic religiosity: inevitability. That is, it positions itself as the ultimate and unavoidable result of the historical process, guided by the hand of providence itself. Eventually, they foresee, spiritual warriors will perfect the unified field theory of their demonology and God’s light will overcome the present darkness, asserting rightful ownership over the world. With its dualism and logics of possession, spiritual warfare reflects what Derrida once named heliopolitics: the “ancient clandestine friendship between light and power . . . between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession.” As he observed, metaphors of light often served to obscure mechanisms of oppression through appeals to truth, masking acts of violence with claims to objectivity.⁷⁰ While Derrida is here addressing Western philosophy, the dynamic he names is highly relevant to spiritual warfare—especially as tied to its (neo)colonial cartographies of knowing. The heliopolitics of spiritual warfare manifest in its expropriating will to truth, its drive to synthesize diverse rubrics of knowledge, assimilating the archives of the archai it encounters to craft an ever-more-perfect body of data that will permit the discernment, delegitimation, and defeat of invisible invaders and their more and less visible agents.

Grounded in the assumed neutrality—the hubris—of the zero point, spiritual warriors figure their intercession as benevolent, a remaking “consistent with” God’s will as the necessary ground for human flourishing, especially given the negative consequences they ascribe to rule by demonic archai—commencers and commanders of death structures that bring poverty, infirmity, and demise. Yet, as Mignolo and McKittrick both show, unitary and transparent geographies that depict how places “just are” further the uneven spatialization of difference, (re)producing space through sexual, racial, and colonial hierarchies. Orthotaxic frameworks of integrated unity, incontestable right, and inevitable victory partake in these uneven productions. Accordingly, any imposition of consistency with divine will carries consequences for all who cannot or will not conform to that will, for those whose territories of darkness (bodily and geographic) are not structurally permitted to contest the heliopolitical imposition of truth. Later chapters focus on these consequences, on the regimes they impose and resistances they inspire. Here, however, two examples suffice to represent the conjunctures of territoriality, time, and truth in spiritual warfare’s heliopolitical imaginary, as these intersect with global and distinctly American regimes of racialization and coloniality: Haiti and Hawaii.

As Jeffrey Kahn details, Haiti has a specific relation to US regimes of sovereignty and securitization as the “Haitian”—later, “Haitian migrant”—has long been a figure of American political demonologies. Tracing the emergence of biopolitical regimes from the nineteenth century through the Cold War, Kahn demonstrates how Haiti became paradigmatic of a blend of “pathologized geography and sovereign power” core to the Caribbean borderlands of the United States and instrumental in developing the offshore borders and containment practices later mobilized in the War on Terror. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, he excavates the “chronotopes of contagion that structure modernist regimes of historicity,” binding space, time, and bodies by joining figurations of “decelerated or regressive temporality [to] stunted or degraded subjectivities that both produce and are produced by the decaying landscape in which they are embedded”—a landscape Haiti became archetypal of.⁷¹ Spiritual warfare discourses theologically recode these paradigms, situating the root of the nation’s penury not (just) in racial or cultural sources but in spiritual ones. This is effected with a rewriting of the nation’s origin story, in which several hundred slaves gathered at Bois Caiman on August 14, 1791, under a leader named Boukman. Conducting a Vodou ritual, Boukman invoked spiritual forces to aid the slaves in their insurrection—one whose 1804 success made Haiti the Americas’ first independent Black republic. Recalled and revised in times of national change and crisis, this story holds immense power for Haitian nationalists and spiritual warriors alike—but for opposite reasons. For the latter, Boukman’s ritual was not (only) an instigator of national liberation but a diabolic pact, through which—apropos Larson—“In exchange for freedom from the French, participants pledged the ongoing allegiance of their nation to Satan.”⁷² Or as Clinton Lane relays in more detail: “Boukman, looking to heaven, denounced God because He could not deliver them from slavery and then gave the country of Haiti to the Voodoo spirits if they would deliver Haiti.”⁷³ Reinscribed as territorial spirits, the Vodou powers become the foundation—the arche—of the Haitian nation, its penury paradigmatic of the death structures they erect.

In her comprehensive work on spiritual warfare in Haiti, Elizabeth McAlister observes that this narrative, which makes Haiti “the only nation to be dedicated to Satan” is a “backwards mirror image” of evangelical framings of the United States as a Christian nation with a providential destiny. As such, it not only justifies a neocolonial missiology that claims Haiti’s penury will be alleviated via the excision and exorcism of its foundations, but augments a regional theopolitical imaginary in which Haitian impoverishment and American flourishing become naturalized results of divine order. Temporality is central here. Drawing on Trouillot as Kahn did, McAlister notes how the Revolution was so disruptive of European ontological and political assumptions about race and culture that it was “unthinkable.” She goes further, however, by pointing to a theological element in this modernist historical imaginary: “the Revolution was unthinkable also because pagans could not vanquish Christians. A corollary to the politics of race, the reversal of Christian historical teleology,” in which Christianity was to inexorably spread across the earth, was seen as similarly impossible.⁷⁴ The Haitian Revolution therefore becomes a (diabolically induced) rupture in developmental/soteriological temporality, one that is not just the antithesis and negation of (and so justification for) American orthotaxy but one that threatens to pass into it, causing it to pass on, as Haitians and their traditions migrate north.

This concept of diabolic temporal rupture is not limited to Haiti, but is core to spiritual warfare broadly, as demonstrated elsewhere in framings of Hawaii, which similarly became key to US political imaginaries during the Cold War.⁷⁵ Whereas Haiti became symbolic of atavistic contagion to be policed, however, Hawaii became “an imagined racial and consumer paradise” and “gateway state” that mediated between Asia and the continental United States—the no less biopolitical proving ground for a new model of US multiculturalism that (as multiculturalism often does) disavowed its colonial and racializing history.⁷⁶ Perhaps accordingly, where Haiti was read as symptomatic of an existing diabolic rupture, discourses about Hawaii are chiefly concerned with this rupture’s possibility. This is most clear in the aforementioned pastor Ing’s Spiritual Warfare, which devotes a chapter to “The Hawaiian Religion.” Acknowledging the injustices of Hawaii’s annexation and the widespread expropriation of land by white Christians, Ing sees a threat of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) returning to “ancient demon religions,” and advocates for Christians to “ask forgiveness of the Hawaiian people for the sins of our Christian forefathers” to avert this. Echoing Althoff and Hackman’s findings, this request not only does not entail returning stolen lands—marking forgiveness less as a mechanism for Indigenous restitution than for absolving white guilt—but Ing proceeds to declare that the “rallying cry of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement [itself] is a direct attack on Christianity.” As with Haiti, this is because Hawaiian Kingdom nationalism is framed as drawing on traditions opposed to the providential teleology of (white) Christianity. By 1890, Ing claims, “almost 95% of the Hawaiian race was saved”; today, many are returning to gods who “of course, are all demonic in nature” and manifest in increasing promiscuity, homosexuality, and even human sacrifice—something that as Kānaka Maoli traditions grow in popularity, Ing assures us, “is just around the corner.”⁷⁷

Ing’s framing, if perhaps fanciful, is both illustrative and ironic. As Kānaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui unpacks, not only are many Kingdom nationalists themselves Christian, but international legitimation of the Kingdom’s original sovereignty was also linked to its Christianization and adoption of male-dominated leadership and Western gender and sexual norms.⁷⁸ Yet, while this complicates Ing’s anxieties, it exposes the distinctly settler colonial dimensions at work within them. His narrative is one in which Indigenous traditions surrender to Christianity before being allowed to resurge due to the unrepented sins of the settler state. The death structures these sins permit, however, are oriented not against settlers—who emerge curiously unscathed—but Native Hawaiians. The solution Ing proposes is therefore not to dismantle the settler state but to seek forgiveness for past atrocities in order to facilitate its continued existence: atonement becomes not simply a replacement for solidarity but a means of neutralizing resistance, perpetuating asymmetric relations of domination that have become transparent and naturalized, geographies of sovereignty, subjection, and subjugation that “just are.” As Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson details, Western norms of knowledge production often entail claims that “the colonial project has been realized: land has been dispossessed; its owners have been eliminated or absorbed.” In short, that it is “‘settled’ . . . ‘done,’ ‘finished,’ ‘complete.’” Yet the “ongoing and structural project to acquire and maintain land, and to eliminate those on it, did not work completely. There are still Indians, some still know this, and some will defend what they have left. They will persist, robustly.”⁷⁹ Spiritual warfare framings of Haitian and Hawaiian sovereignty mirror this structure, transforming both into diabolic insurgencies of things the settler project deems “over,” ruptures in a narrative of orthotaxic inevitability that is ineluctably enmeshed in regimes of antiblackness and coloniality. Through its heliopolitical imaginary, spiritual warfare here reflects (on) the incompletion of the settler project, reinscribing and attempting to recuperate its subaltern realities of subversion and survival, sketching out ever more detailed maps of the shifting borderlands of a demonological frontier to facilitate their settlement and stabilization.

Under World

The demonologies of Haiti and Hawaii briefly outlined begin to demonstrate spiritual warfare’s imbrication not merely within global structures of antiblackness and coloniality but in specifically American bio/necropolitical regimes of border security and settler colonialism. This is not only due to their geopolitical positions. While spiritual warfare is practiced and understood as “a global campaign operating in regional theatres of conflict,” in anthropologist Dan Jorgensen’s words,⁸⁰ these theaters are conjoined by asymmetries reflective of broader geopolitical forces, particularly ideologies of American exceptionalism and practices of US empire. America’s unique position in the spiritual warfare imaginary—especially the third wave’s—has been documented. In his history of spiritual mapping in the United States and Argentina from 1989 to 2005, René Holvast explicitly roots the paradigm in ideologies of Manifest Destiny and their framing of the “superiority of the US and its civilization.” Drawing on this inheritance, he argues, spiritual warfare constructs the United States as “a natural epicentre of divine initiative on earth,” a position that becomes transparent and naturalized as the primacy of American evangelical mission theology and the prominent role of the United States in missionary work are rarely questioned either by practitioners or even their religious critics. Further, despite “being an ‘international’ movement, budgets, schools, initiatives, and personnel came predominantly from the US” and many key figureheads are “either citizens of the US or non-US citizens under the influence of the US through education or funding.”⁸¹ Pithily summarizing the Americanism he saw underlying spiritual mapping, Holvast writes that in the paradigm “the destiny of the Christian version of the US was manifest.”⁸²

If this Americanism is visible globally, it is attenuated in the manuals of US-based spiritual warriors. US historical and cultural images and idioms abound in such texts, while the (continental) United States is framed both implicitly and explicitly as “center” to a nonevangelical (or less evangelical) “periphery.” Among the clearest examples of this are in framings of the ongoing War on Terror, which I have touched on in relation to Pritchard’s post-9/11 framing of Heaven’s Long War, of Satan as “ultimate terrorist” waging an asymmetric (and doomed) conflict against God. Pritchard is not alone, however. In 101 Answers to Questions about Satan, Demons, and Spiritual Warfare, prominent evangelical author Mark Hitchcock devotes entry 56—“What are the main activities of demons?”—entirely to asymmetric warfare,⁸³ while third wave warrior Eddie Smith compares Christians’ failure to see “the unseen warfare that rages around us” to Americans’ failure to process the War on Terror as “an ideological war, a spiritual battle that can never be won with guns and missiles.”⁸⁴ Perhaps the most telling correlation, however, is found in Linda Rios Brook’s Lucifer’s War. Using the ongoing war in Afghanistan as an extended metaphor, Brook compares humanity’s imbrication in the ongoing cosmic war to Afghani citizens who, while “the legal occupants of the land,” are “powerless to summarily dismiss the armies” that fight there and whose “lives are [therefore] consumed by conflict they did not invite and for the most part do not understand.” This is, however, not only a metaphor. Echoing Pritchard and Smith, the War on Terror becomes both a material reflection and a chance for chastisement, as it is—at “its roots”—an “ideological and spiritual war over views about God,” an alleged truth at which “Western nations nervously balk.”⁸⁵

All these texts assume or express a set of binary oppositions that condition one another: God/Devil; Strength/Weakness; Righteousness/Evil; and, most obviously but most important, America/Terrorists. America’s alignment with the position of righteousness and divine sovereign will is naturalized, its military and technological superiority bleeding into the omnipotence and omnipresence of God himself. Brook’s reading is especially revealing here. By casting Afghani citizens as a neutral center, a metonym for a humanity torn between divine and demonic forces, she subtly delegitimizes domestic resistance to US occupation—not simply by aligning resistance with coded-foreign terrorists/demons, but that by positioning them as only human she renders attempts at liberation unaligned with US/divine interests a priori illegitimate, no less lacking in truth and thus destined for dethroning and dispossession than the demonized terrorists. Brook’s text here subtly invokes the classic colonial inversion that casts native peoples not as indigenous but as “invaders” that land must be reclaimed from.⁸⁶ And in this context it is telling that Lucifer’s War contains one of few explicit acknowledgments of spiritual warfare’s coloniality. In an attempt to exculpate America from colonial ambitions, Brook proclaims that: “Unlike the war in Afghanistan, the opposing forces [of God and Satan] do indeed have a plan for colonization that will determine which kingdom will be established and ultimately rule the planet.”⁸⁷

Linking together the demon, the terrorist, and (if disavowed) the colonized, Brook points towards spiritual warfare’s structural dependency on the figure C. Heike Schotten refers to as the “death-native.” Reading settler sovereignty through Lee Edelman’s queer dissident polemic No Future, Schotten demonstrates that settler sovereignty relies on a logic of futurism that seeks to secure the perpetual survival of the (settler) body politic and continually produces scapegoats as the “displaced, villainized obstacles” to this survival. These obstacles represent “death”—the end of the social order and its capacity for endless reproduction—and are archetypally figured as the “Indian,” who represents the limits and destruction of the settler colony and whose domination (therefore) ensures its perpetuation. This creates a structural dependency, since the settler order is unstable it requires this obstacle as the receptacle for its instability, the “reason” behind its lack of fulfilment: “Settler sovereignty cannot . . . do without the death-native it brings into being; the native as death must exist in order to purchase life and survival for the settler.”⁸⁸ Schotten views this structure not simply in settler colonialism “proper” but in the War on Terror that is its heir. Linked by accusations of “savagery” and fears over a collapse of normative order, “terrorists” are paradigmatic of this death-native, “obstacles to empire [that] become projected versions of Indians, [just as] Indians become retroactively legible as the first or foundational examples of ‘terrorism.’”⁸⁹ Examining a theological substrate Schotten acknowledges but does not explore, however, allows us to view the “demon” as perhaps archetypal of such “displaced, villainized obstacles” conjured and condemned to ensure the survival and sanctity of sovereign order, among the first of objects “thrown across” (dia-bolos) the path of providential futurism to (vainly) contest its inevitability.⁹⁰

Read in relation to one another, the settler state’s dependency on the “death-native” and spiritual warfare’s drive for new demonological fron tiers—the discernment and dispossession of “death structures”—permits a reassessment of how US spiritual warfare is, as McCloud writes, “deeply involved in and largely dependent” on mission fields outside the United States itself.⁹¹ This dependence is due to the importance of these mission fields for developing spiritual warfare’s demonology, which by constructing nonevangelical traditions and figures as “actual demons or the abodes of demonic presence”⁹² become fonts of data for its unified field theories. Reframed through Schotten’s analysis of settler sovereignty, this dependency appears more structural, revealing how spiritual warfare discourses must ceaselessly seek out (thereby producing) demons as embodiments of the death of orthotaxy, demons who it must then continually dominate—spiritually, but not only spiritually—to secure its futurity. To mask its structural instabilities, orthotaxy’s failure to secure its own integrity, incontestability, inevitability is displaced in the inscription of new demonological frontiers whose inhabitants are demonized as obstacles to eternity. In the process, the lifeworlds of demonized subjects are flattened, their diversity and complexity effaced and their resistances recuperated to make them comprehensible to and assimilable by a demonology whose operation here adopts a character of colonial worlding.

Worlding, or the “worlding of the world,” refers to those forms of performativity that “map universes of knowledge, practice, and power,”⁹³ and within studies of religion is often used to conceptualize the cultural and material work (stories, rituals, transactions) believers engage in to shape their realities.⁹⁴ In Martin Heidegger’s work on art from which the term derives, worlding refers to “a saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their strife and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods” that is how “a people’s world historically arises” as the “unconcealedness of beings” and, simultaneously, “the earth is preserved as that which remains closed.” Ranjana Khanna explains, describing worlding as “an act of strife between being and nonbeing . . . an event through which the participants are brought into temporality and history, or, conversely, excluded from these and concealed timelessly into the earth.”⁹⁵ Working with the violence inherent to Heidegger’s formulation of “strife,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has refigured worlding in the context of colonialism as an act of “epistemic violence” by which imperialism inscribes itself onto colonized “space” through the “colonial presupposition of an uninscribed earth” upon which they could write the cartographies of their own world.⁹⁶ Drawing on Spivak’s reframing, Khanna sees worlding as a “profoundly ideological” event that projects certain elements into existence (world) while simultaneously “remainder[ing] others as earth.”⁹⁷ It is a process of naming as epistemic violence that both exhumes and entombs, renders some objects visible and utterable while consigning others to the realm of the unsayable. Khanna uses worlding to analyze the constitution of psychoanalysis within coloniality, to unearth “what was made possible and impossible to think in the projective saying”⁹⁸ of psychoanalysis, and I wish to engage in a similar project regarding spiritual warfare.

Spiritual warfare, in its discursive construction and materialization of a conflict over “who will control reality, heaven or hell,” operates by worlding, deploying discourse and ritual to reshape reality, rendering specific epistemic formations possible, desirable, permissible, speakable; others impossible, undesirable, impermissible, unspeakable. Its worlding is a colonial worlding. Through a heliopolitics animated by a settler imaginary, spiritual warfare figures nonevangelical worlds as “uninscribed earth” before violently rendering them legible and unconcealed as “world.” Indeed, quite literally so, as kosmos. Demonology here reveals itself as a strategy of legibility in the sense described by James Scott: “a condition of manipulation.”⁹⁹ Masking its epistemic violence with appeals to a revelation of objective truth—the illumination of the hidden truth of demons, of demons as active in history and of the mechanisms of history itself—the worlding of the world of spiritual warfare consigns nonevangelical traditions to the earth, to Hell (the etymology of Hell names, after all, the hidden, the concealed under the earth). Although nonevangelical worlds are, much like those of the colonized, “far from mere uninscribed earth,”¹⁰⁰ spiritual warfare’s imaginary constructs a sovereign subject (the spiritual warrior) as having the authority to overwrite those worlds with his or her own. The discourses this subject articulates, however, do not simply seek to replace nonevangelical worlds, but rather transform them into the base matter, the earth, from which to shape their own.

In accepting the partial validity of nonevangelical worlds, by making them real but not true, these transformations are visibly palimpsestic, perhaps necessarily so—as the disconnect between worlds facilitates the conjuration of demons as willfully deviant, legitimizing the plundering of one reality for the epistemic perfection of another. It is in relation to these colonial dynamics that spiritual warfare’s positioning of the illegality of archai as the commencers and commanders of nonevangelical traditions and territories must be situated. To dethrone an arche requires and results in the rewriting of its archive, its worlding and its earthing. As the organizing principles, the principalities, of passing orders, archai are figured as masquerading as what they are not: evil passing for good, illegitimacy for legitimacy, darkness for light, chaos for order. From the apex of regional hierarchies, archai pass orders down chains of commencement and commandment, ostensibly bringing ruin to inhabitants of their territories. For spiritual warriors they must thus be systematically deposed, the traditions they inaugurated effaced, overwritten with “a conception of ‘the good’ that [is] consistent with the will of God.” This heliopolitical worlding both feeds and feeds on a narrative of enlightenment embedded in—to draw on Talal Asad’s summary of its more secularized repetitions—“the idea that ‘freedom’ and ‘America’ are virtually interchangeable—that American political culture is (as the Bible says of the Chosen People) ‘a light unto the nations.’”¹⁰¹ But there is violence in this light, a violence embedded in the structures of Paradise and the soteriologies of modernity/coloniality that lead back there.

“The transparency of light,” Althaus-Reid once wrote, “which carries with it the clarity of imperial logics and the white axis of its racial supremacy, gives a global identity to demons.”¹⁰² The discourses of spiritual warfare introduced in this chapter epitomize this transparency, since its heliopolitics encode and enforce paradigms of racial hierarchization and (settler) colonial power in order to (re)produce a vision of reality that appears unitary, transparent, and naturalized as what “just is,” or perhaps—given the centrality of declension narratives—“should be.” However, the demons explored herein are not merely global but distinctly American. Or rather, they are global precisely because they are American, because they emerge from the anxieties of a settler-state-turned-global-imperium as it seeks to world itself over territories and traditions that will always be more than uninscribed earth. Summoned in the conjuncture between racial capitalist settler state and global empire—between what Nikhil Pal Singh succinctly calls America’s “inner” and “outer” wars¹⁰³—the figure of the demon both ensures and unsettles regimes of racial ordering, sexual normativization, and colonial expropriation. It is what the settler state requires and fears, what Paradise must and cannot guard against. As such, the demon troubles and justifies regimes of securitization and stabilization—the quest for new frontiers, physical and philosophical—that permit the discernment and dethroning of that “present darkness operating with evil intentions concerning our nation’s future.” It is this present darkness, which unsettles the heliopolitical worlding of the city on the hill by secreting finitude and contingency into the ostensibly eternal edifices of Paradise, that later chapters explore.

Raising Hell

Frameworks of spiritual warfare juxtapose a paradigm of correct order—orthotaxy as God’s will and rule—with a legion of heterogeneous orders, each commenced and commanded by demonic powers working through ad hoc networks of cooperation and competition. While Satan ostensibly exists at the pinnacle of these structures, the Prince of Darkness is decentered in spiritual warfare texts. Rather, with practices of deliverance, spiritual mapping, intercessory prayer, and political activism, spiritual warriors attempt to discern and defeat his “CEOs” or “five-star generals”—the “other powers of darkness,” the archai. Archai operate as spiritualized personifications of hegemonic ideologies. Perceived as ruling over geographical territories, from homes to nations or continents, they condition the worldviews of a region and activities of lesser demons, shaping systems of authority, sociocultural dynamics, and the lifeworlds of those under their dominion. Expropriated from nonevangelical worlds, each arche manifests an archive that gives form and function to the architectures it is seen to rule. These archives are multiform, encapsulating histories, folklore, art, architectural patterns, music, culture, religious rituals, and ideas. The task of the spiritual warrior is to map these archives, interrogating them to discern the identities of the entities they enthrone. Such discernments may at times prove inaccurate, requiring fresh revelation and revisions of old knowledges. Ultimately, however, they will feed a growing demonological corpus, creating ever more detailed taxonomies by which the other may be named, comprehended, and exorcised in defense of the self.

In their attempt to create ever more accurate databases about the identities, tactics, and weaknesses of the Old Enemy, spiritual warfare’s demonologies operate through a simultaneous expansion and solidification of borders enmeshed in the discursive structures of US settler sovereignty. The aim of spiritual warfare is to expand the kingdom of God on Earth. To this end, spiritual warriors attempt to discern the territories of darkness, reveal the truth of their diabolic natures, and ultimately “settle” them in light’s name. This expansion is predicated on a radical differentiation between territories of light and of darkness, between an “us” that is frightened or threatened and all that which it must expel, exclude, and eliminate to defend itself. This process is not unique to spiritual warfare today. Rather, it is part of the strategies of spatiotemporal dominion exercised in historical Christian demonologies, the messianic imperialist projects of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America, and the overarching structures of modernity/coloniality. Yet spiritual warfare unites and exemplifies these trajectories. It operates through the conquest of physical and conceptual territory, requiring the systematic dismantling of alternative orders and the lifeworlds they sustain. These orders are not—cannot be—fully erased, however, and so they are overwritten, consumed by spiritual warfare’s orthotaxy, where their ascribed errors become the nutrients of its assumed truth, the earth of its heliopolitical world.

This pursuit of more perfect demonologies and the victory such perfection will ensure is driven both by a set of distinct orthodoxies (e.g., the existence and spatiality of demons) and orthopraxies (e.g., intercessory prayer, spiritual mapping). However, what animates and drives spiritual warfare is a concern with order. This concern is manifested in multiple different but overlapping ways, in a fixation on proper pattern recognition, on taxonomical formulation, and the working-out of spiritual warfare’s “unified field theory” that would explain the organization and operations of the material and spiritual worlds. The clearest example of this concern, however, is in the attempt to create a system of “right order” through the territorial and temporal instantiation of God’s rule—a (re)making of place and history as consistent with divine will—and the construction of myriad “architectures of evil” that spiritual warriors oppose to it and constitute it in opposition to. Although both contain ensembles of beliefs and practices, neither God’s rule nor the demonic hierarchies and hegemonies contrasted to it are identical with them. Instead, in the spiritual warfare imaginary each represents an order, a pattern or arrangement: a taxon. Each taxon encompasses structuring and hegemonic concepts, the systems of authority they legitimate and the sociocultural dynamics these in turn foster. Ultimately, they constitute the horizon of a lifeworld, arranging bodies through affective and discursive linkages into particular modes of being, believing, belonging.

Energized by the discursive and material structures of American exceptionalism (more and less disavowed), the telos of spiritual warfare is to enable the “proper” ordering of reality. It is this mission to properly and perfectly order reality that leads me to classify spiritual warfare as an “orthotaxic” religiosity. Rather than “only” being concerned with the policing of proper beliefs and behaviors, spiritual warfare is chiefly concerned with the correct arrangement of reality. Proper beliefs and behaviors both emerge from and enable this arrangement; similarly, improper beliefs and behaviors emerge from and enable other arrangements.¹⁰⁴ Dethroning demonic archai is among the chief concerns of spiritual warfare because it is only by transforming its organizing principles that proper ordering of a territory can be realized. Delivering people from minor demons, while necessary, will bring but temporary respite if the structures that enable them remain in place. To this end, spiritual warriors must chart the territories and traditions of other orders and work to reveal the hidden truth of their Hell, to world what is concealed in the earth—to expose their “lies,” their ontological status as “lie”—and thus unmake and replace them with “truth,” to make their errant realities conform to the architecture of sovereign will.

As I have begun to explore, spiritual warfare’s orthotaxy is constituted by three core characteristics practitioners see it as possessing: integrity, incontestability, and inevitability. Orthotaxy is constructed as the end of the historical process, one the rightfulness of which cannot be questioned and which thus constitutes the closed space within which (and only within which) unity, moral goodness, and human flourishing are not merely attainable but possible at all. It is important to state that these may not be the only qualities orthotaxic modes of religiosity operate with, merely those most visible in spiritual warfare. Nor, crucially, is it that spiritual warfare’s orthotaxy “truly” possesses these qualities: rather it is constructed as doing so, and its normative supremacy over other orders is justified based on this possession. Spiritual warfare’s orthotaxy is not only opposed to such alternatives, however, but is (therefore) dependent on them. The demons it conjures are the raw materials from which it shapes its world. But demons are by nature willful subjects. They contest the consolidation of sovereign will and the systems of order it maintains. Named, comprehended, and conjured to enable the defense of order, the demons of spiritual warfare are “rebellious spirits,” who “expose and accuse” the architectures of sovereign power “of being constructed and not natural.”¹⁰⁵

Orthotaxy is simultaneously dependent on and destabilized by its demons, who trouble its assumed integrity, contest its right to rule, and reconfigure its ends. These demons reject its “unflinching attempt to name,” comprehend, and thus command and control them, and it is by excavating this willful refusal to simply stay buried, under world, that it becomes possible to critically (re)world them, to unearth the narratives of dissent entombed within proclamations of decline. Worlding “involves a creation of strife,” Khanna writes, “understanding worlding involves an analysis of that strife—critically worlding the processes of the previously earthed, thereby seeing the historical, political, and economic dynamics of strife through its unconcealment.”¹⁰⁶ Critically unearthing the infernal currents that circulate under and inside, support and subvert, the foundations of spiritual warfare’s world, the following chapters commit themselves not to bringing to light, which would only reproduce the epistemic violence of a colonial heliopolitics, but to raising Hell.