Modern demonology: the discernment of spirits in the theatre of colonial modernity

ABSTRACT

This article analyses contemporary Charismatic evangelical ideas of ‘discernment’ in the context of US ‘spiritual warfare’ demonologies to argue that these demonologies are distinctly modern. Through a critical examination of spiritual warfare texts, it first demonstrates that discernment situates spiritual warfare demonologies in wider modernist projects of taxonomic classification, intertextual referentiality, and empirical observation. Then, drawing on post- and de-colonial scholarship that has shown European modernity to have arisen through the mechanisms of colonialism, the article contends that narratives of missionary encounters with the demonic replicate this relation between modernity and coloniality. Spiritual warfare reduces vibrant non-evangelical lifeworlds to objects of demonological knowledge, raw data that can only be properly interpreted and systematised by evangelical discernment. This systematisation permits the assimilation of these lifeworlds into a soteriological narrative of modern progress through religious conversion and (thus) socio-economic development. By demonstrating discernment’s inextricability from modernist methodologies and modernity’s foundational and enduring relation to coloniality, the article argues for understanding contemporary Charismatic demonology as distinctly modern.

KEYWORDS:

• American evangelicalism
• discernment
• spiritual warfare
• colonial modernity
• modernist epistemology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number GOIPD/2018/416).

Notes on contributors

S. Jonathon O'Donnell

S. Jonathon O’Donnell is Visiting Scholar in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their research explores intersections of religious demonologies and political dehumanisation. They are author of Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare (2021) and articles in journals such as Religion, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Political Theology. CORRESPONDENCE: School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, University Road, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK.