Introduction: Paradise Has Walls

Taking point from a post-9/11 spiritual warfare narrative in which models of asymmetric war are used to reconceptualize the demonic, the Introduction argues that figures of the demonic are both consolidating and deconstructive of systems of power, particularly those tied to sovereignty, identity, and empire. Weaving together two definitions of demonology, by Bruce Lincoln and Marcella Althaus-Reid, respectively, it demonstrates that demonology operates as a rubric of knowledge aimed at the classification, comprehension, and control of nonhuman and dehumanized others—the demonized—who simultaneously unsettle those rubrics of knowledge by exposing their categories as constructed and not natural. Mobilizing queer and critical race theory, it then situates the demon’s deconstructive quality in its figuration of passing and counterfeiture, which unsettle territorial boundaries, stable identities, and linear models of temporality.

Nations unto Light: Spiritual Warfare as Orthotaxic Religiosity

This chapter is a detailed introduction both to “spiritual warfare” discourses in contemporary America and to the concept of “orthotaxy.” It unpacks how spiritual warriors construct a vision of order through a temporalizing and territorializing imaginary based on conflicting hegemonic ideologies that are figured as either divine (legitimate) or demonic (illegitimate). Drawing on critical race and settler colonial theory, the chapter focuses on spiritual warfare’s concept of the demonic “territorial spirit” or arche, which is understood as ruling over geographical spaces and conditioning the (illegitimate) ideologies dominant within them. Drawing on Derrida’s theorization of the archive and his notion of “heliopolitics” and Spivak’s concept of “worlding,” the chapter unpacks how spiritual warfare’s demonologies operate as attempts to establish mastery over both space (land, bodies) and time (history, the archive) through interwoven claims to territorial and moral integrity, incontestable sovereign right, and historical inevitability

Jezebel Assemblages: Witchcraft, Queerness, Transnationality

This chapter explores demonologies of one the most ubiquitous demonic spirits in spiritual warfare literature: the Jezebel spirit. It argues that the figure of Jezebel comes to unify anxieties over the breakdown of “proper” relations between personal and national bodies, conjuring transnational, affective assemblages of religious and political forms that threaten the integrity and reproducibility of a white, cisheteropatriarchal America. It outlines the role of the Jezebel spirit as a gendered nexus uniting evangelical discourses of anti-feminism, anti-abortion, queer- and transphobia, antiblackness, and xenophobia that is enfleshed in “willful” (queer, racialized) subjects. Exploring the image of Jezebel’s witchcraft and her queer partnership with Babylon as symbolizing queer transnational and transcultural bonds “forged” between porous and nomadic non-sovereign bodies, the chapter ultimately frames Jezebel as embodying anxieties over process and flow that unsettle singular concepts of (white, settler) “sovereign man” on which sovereignty is grounded.

Leviathan’s Wake: Demonology and the Passing of Order

This chapter uses decolonial and settler colonial theory to analyse the spirit of Leviathan. Imagined both as a singular spirit and the sum of all demons, Leviathan is used to conceptualize ideas of chaos and counterfeit order. As chaos and counterfeit, they embody the base matter from which sovereignty makes order and all “illegitimate” forms of that order. Reading spiritual warfare’s demonology through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the chapter traces conjurations of Leviathan in images of primordial chaos, the neoliberal state, resurgent socialism and grassroots protest groups, and revitalized indigenous religions. It contends that Leviathan unsettles teleological narratives by embodying alternative possibilities that sovereign will has deemed over, but which ceaselessly pass into and as “right” order. The repetition of these passings means that—absent an apocalypse that ends all possibility of an otherwise—sovereignty must always reinvent itself in reaction to Leviathan’s passings to disguise (thereby actualizing) its own passing.

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.