Possessed or Obsessed?
Many Christians say they are in need of deliverance but some may be giving demons more than their due
Agnieszka Tennant | posted 9/03/2001 12:00AM
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Demonic Revival
Christians weren't the first to confront evil spirits. In ancient Mesopotamian cultures as well as Judaism and other religions, banishment of evil spirits was also believed to end human suffering. Indisputably, the prototype of Christian deliverance was established by Jesus Christ and the apostles. Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian described dispossession in the second century, and Origen wrote in the third century that "the name of Jesus can still remove distractions from the minds of men and expel demons and also take away diseases and produce a complete change of character." Even John Foxe, known for his Book of Martyrs, freed a law student from "no less a demon than Satan himself" in 1574, writes Kathleen Sands in the February 2001 History Today. Church historian Richard F. Lovelace told Christianity Today that the Devil seemed to have taken a plunge after the 1692 witch trials, shyly reemerging in North America in the 20th century when Jessie Penn-Lewis wrote War on the Saints. With the expansion of overseas missions, Americans also began hearing about demon confrontation from missionaries to non-Western nations. But a true demonic revival didn't arrive in the United States until the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Exorcism prior to the late 1960s was virtually dead and gone in the United States, a fading ghost long past its prime," says Michael W. Cuneo, author of the recently released American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (Doubleday). "And then in the early to mid-'70s, untold numbers of Americans, many of them staunchly middle class, the kind of people you might chat with at the supermarket checkout counter or bump into at a local mall, became convinced that they or their loved ones were suffering from demonic affliction."
Supply followed demand, and 600 evangelical deliverance ministries—"quite possibly two or three times this many"—have sprouted by this year, Cuneo told Christianity Today. The Fordham University sociology and anthropology professor spent two years investigating the demonic revival and witnessed over 50 mass and individual exorcisms, dismissals, or deliverances. Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox experts in demon expulsion have admitted in conversations with Christianity Today that they too have noticed an upsurge of the demonic—or at least perceptions of such—in U.S. churches in the last two or three decades. The number of official Roman Catholic exorcists climbed from one or two in 1995 to 15 to 20 now, and the number is expected to rise, Cuneo says. Plus, it's easy to find "maverick" exorcists who will fill in for the desperate who cannot get the official exorcists' services, he says.
"People are more willing to entertain the possibility of the spiritual," says theologian Robert Barron, a spokesman on exorcisms for the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. The tendency to explain everything through reason has been eclipsed by explanations that go beyond what reason can grasp, he adds.
Clinton E. Arnold, professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, has also noticed that a naturalistic worldview no longer seems as compelling as it used to. "There is a broader yearning for spiritual experience," he says. "There seems to be a correlation between this yearning and some of the rise in deliverance ministry in the church." Thus the popularity of books by Neil T. Anderson, C. Peter Wagner, Mark I. Bubeck, Frank E. Peretti, C. Fred Dickason, and Arnold.
Perhaps G.K. Chesterton was right in saying that when people cease to believe in God, they don't begin to believe in nothing—instead, they will believe in anything. In the psychedelic '60s, Americans began to believe in anything. Consistent with Chesterton's words, this relativism encouraged unorthodox spiritual searches. Man's first steps on the moon, flower power, sexual freedom, peace marches, Woodstock, the Beatles, and the Vietnam War, as well as women's and gays' liberation movements, were the context in which American society opened up to exploring unconventional spiritual answers. Doctrinally indecisive at the time, many Protestant churches didn't steer people away from modern superstitions.
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