Demons be gone: meeting America’s new exorcists
There are only three things you need to get Satan out of your life: a bucket, a pen and Brother Mike’s two-page questionnaire. Unlike those megachurch preachers and their plastic smiles, Brother Mike Smith doesn’t make outlandish claims – not in his mind, at least. He’s not peddling “crap”, he says. As the leader of a modest ministry he calls Hardcore Christianity in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, he only claims that he can set you free from demons 100% of the time – if you follow his instructions to the letter.
Step into his headquarters, and you’ll see a dusty trophy cabinet displaying the evidence of his work with people who fought their “demonic infections”: packets of Marlboro cigarettes, empty bottles of liquor, an asthma inhaler, medical certificates proclaiming good health.
Brother Mike practices deliverance, also known as spiritual warfare. Ask most people what they think about casting out demons, and you’ll probably get cinematic references to spinning heads and flaming crucifixes. But among evangelical Christians, deliverance is serious business – and it’s big business too. Commercially minded megachurches getting in on the act is a reliable indication that it has gained real popularity, and books on the topic are now mainstays in the $1.2bn religion publishing industry. A deliverance map put together by the California preacher Isaiah Saldivar shows 1,402 practitioners operating in the US alone – an impressive feat for a concept that only reached mainstream Christianity in the 1980s.
Deliverance warriors believe that problems such as illness and poverty are the result of spiritual sickness, not earthly afflictions. Healing is sought through people like Brother Mike and his band of volunteer acolytes, who often have no theological training but welcome souls from all over the country.
Not hailing from the tradition myself, but having spent the last few years writing about Pentecostals around the world, I had some sense of what I was getting into. Because I’m an agnostic, and therefore an outsider, I was tolerated rather than welcomed with open arms, a potential soul to be saved among a broad cross-section of people who desperately wanted help.
I was a world away from the staid Catholicism I’d grown up with – and, as I came to discover, that’s entirely the point.
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Most spiritual warriors preach the idea that demons occupy “strategic” places and institutions, such as school boards and, of course, the Democratic party. Not Brother Mike. Instead, he focuses on the evil spirits inside the individual.
The concept of spiritual warfare was brought back to the US by the late prominent theologian C Peter Wagner after his time as a missionary in Latin America. Wagner is the godfather of the Neocharismatic Pentecostal movement, which kicked off in the 1980s and claims to use the powers of the Holy Spirit to take on the darkness, transforming Earth into God’s kingdom as