Conclusion: Paradise Refused
The Conclusion recapitulates the ways that orthotaxy both depends on and is deconstructed by its demonized others. Turning to the present, in which a revanchist religious nationalism is seeking to reclaim the territory, time, and truth of America, it unpacks how ideas of orthotaxy seek to ensure supremacy by denying all others the possibility of creating sustainable worlds, condemning them to Hell. Exploring spiritual warfare’s narratives of the demon’s resistance to this end, the Conclusion draws on decolonial and queer theory to posit that spiritual warfare unintentionally casts its demons as symbols of effective resistance: fragile and fractious communities bound by a shared passing and precarity into ad hoc networks of subversion, solidarity, and survival—diverse communities that may demonstrate the radical kinship necessary when confronted with the omnipresent and seemingly-omnipotent force of sovereign power and violence.