“Either we surrender to the demonic forces … or we defeat them in a landslide,” said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a 2024 rally in Waco. Texas. Such partisan “conspiratorial demonology” contributes to Americans’ perennial “demon problem,” says a new book.
Religion scholar Michael E. Heyes has devoted his academic career to claims about demons and devils. He says there’s “nothing new” about Americans demonizing their opponents, but that doesn’t mean such talk is harmless.
Michael E. Heyes
“We live in a nation that would not exist in its present form without the demonic beliefs that built it,” Heyes writes in Devils of Democracy, but “failing to understand the political demonic could spell the downfall of our democracy.”
One danger is that spiritual warfare will tend toward actual warfare, as apparently happened with Vance Boelter, a zealous Christian who believed God wanted him to eliminate evil Democrats. Boelter dressed up as a policeman and took guns to the homes of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman, killing Hortman and her husband and injuring Hoffman and his wife.
“All over the country today, the gap between spiritual warfare and actual warfare and violence is beginning to narrow,” Heyes warns.
He presents a fascinating historical overview of what American Christians have believed about demons and how those beliefs have affected their faith, their politics and the ways they see their neighbors.
Biblical Demonology, a 1952 book by Dallas Theological Seminary professor Merrill F. Unger, taught readers to “see the whole world as a demonic playground.” For Unger, the “career of the drunkard, the criminal, the libertine, the harlot, the dope fiend, the demented, the gambler and the suicide” were all indicators of “a deeper demonic reality.”
Others blamed demons for homosexuality, promiscuous sex, pagan worship, drug abuse, alcoholism, chain-smoking, hatred, lying, sadism, indecent exposure, a violent temper, blaspheming, swearing and covetousness. The 1973 book Pigs in the Parlor showed how one believer had “cast out the demon of heart attack.”
Unger and evangelist Billy Graham insisted communism was demonic, providing “a never-ending font of demons to which conservative Christians can always point.”
“Either communism must die or Christianity must die,” Graham claimed.
You can expect similar rhetoric to grow louder in the remaining month before November’s midterms, which feature a handful of Democratic Socialist candidates.
In recent decades, Christian leaders have offered new twists on how to battle demons, including territorial spirits “holding sway over distinct geographical and cultural areas,” and “strategic-level spiritual warfare” designed to target evil leaders or nations.
Seven Mountain Dominionism — the claim that Christians should rule all areas of culture — provides new opportunities for demons. In the eyes of “Trump prophet” Lance Wallnau, “every mountain that isn’t controlled by Christians is dominated by Satan.”
It’s only natural that politically partisan Christians will echo such talk.
Last month when Vice President JD Vance went to Michigan to rally support for Republican Senate candidate Rep. Mike Rogers, he called his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, “evil.”
“I realize that there’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” Vance claimed without clarifying whether he was objecting to El-Sayed’s politics or Muslim faith.
I asked Heyes if calling someone evil is the same as calling them demonic. Not always, he said, but it’s a possibility with Vance, who said on a recent podcast that he would “not (be) shocked if the antichrist was walking among us.”
Heyes concludes with suggestions for addressing “conspiratorial demonology,” which “often goes hand in hand with an indifference to other people’s suffering.” The antidote to indifference and demonization is empathy, a feeling for others that some conservative evangelicals are trying to stamp out, he says.
Heyes warns of a movement among some conservative Christians “that attempts to get their fellow Christians to see empathy as a kind of sin. I cannot overstate the danger of this belief.”
Promoters of this belief include Allie Beth Stuckey, the brash conservative influencer who wrote Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, and Focus on the Family, which warns that the “weaponization of empathy” can lead to “a reckless, irresponsible and misleading framing of the issue” of Trump’s immigration policies.
Devils of Democracy follows Heyes’ book from last year, Demons in the USA, which provided a detailed history of some of America’s recurring “Satanic panics” and a lengthy chapter on Mike Warnke and other Christian hucksters who built careers around the blatant exploitation of people’s fears about Satan.
Heyes says he wanted Devils of Democracy to be more accessible and to “point out the dangers to democracy that the modern demonic movements represent.” But he isn’t hopeless.
“As long as we keep in sight that this isn’t the end of days — just the end of another day — then we’re going to be all right,” he said.