Mapping the spatial limbos of spiritual warfare: haunted houses, defiled land and the horrors of history

ABSTRACT

Through an examination of spiritual warfare handbooks, this article hopes to make material both Third Wave Evangelical imaginings of physical space and their rituals to purify it, activities that might be described as attempts to fix the interstitial into position, to name it and claim for it a classification and moral assessment. Spiritual warfare manuals teach Evangelical readers how to exorcise (“deliver”) people, objects and places from the unwelcome demons who have taken residence in them. Specifically, I focus on two spaces and places that garner a great deal of attention in this literature: “haunted houses” and “defiled land.” I argue that these locations, in the Third Wave Evangelical imaginary, may be described as “spatial limbos”—interstitial and contested no-man's lands in which the sins of history materialize in the form of demons. Such sites are spiritual battlefields that, far from being empty, are over-determined with ambivalent meaning and significance.

Keywords:

• spiritual warfare
• Third Wave
• Evangelicalism
• Demons
• spatial limbos
• haunted houses
• defiled land
• deliverance