New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones says she’s familiar with the faction of modern Christianity that creates a hazy, hidden word of invisible demons and evil spirits.
Alleged political assassin Vance Boelter, for example, shares a religious “lineage” with Eric Rudolph, who bombed Centennial Olympic Park, a gay nightclub, and two abortion clinics before temporarily evading law enforcement.
“Adherents do have some core beliefs: namely that the people of God are caught up in dramatic spiritual warfare with the forces of Satan,” Jones writes. It is a world of hard-to-prove mystical forces that use people like tools.
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“I don’t think spiritual warfare is an innocuous belief,” writes Jones. “It is apocalyptic in character and profoundly conspiratorial because it adds a demonic dimension to worldly tensions.”
Jones points out that long before QAnon and Pizzagate, Christian author Frank Peretti published a popular novel called This Present Darkness, with angels and demons battling over a small college town through “human proxies.”
“A liberal professor is working for Satan, and there’s a redheaded angel with a Scottish accent,” Jones recounts. “In a more serious turn, demons force women and children to make false accusations of sexual abuse.”
Jones points out that scholar Julie Ingersoll argued “we all inevitably play a part in the looming and raging cosmic battle.” That view extends further than the mind of the author, Ingersoll claims. Decades after This Present Darkness, Ingersoll warned of a rise in “violent rhetoric” and of “an increasing number of Americans willing to engage in violence against fellow citizens in the name of an apocalyptic ‘alternate reality.’”
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A gun, said Jones, is more tangible than an angel, so “for authoritarians, spiritual warfare is a useful notion.”
“Their political opponents aren’t simply misguided; they’re agents of the devil, and their humanity is questionable. Boelter’s Christianity did not force him to kill, but it did give him permission to act,” Jones said. She then cited a CNN report of Boelter texting his family after his shooting spree. “Dad went to war last night,” he’d said.
For most adherents, the work stops at prayer, but sometimes Jones warns there’s a man like Boelter, “who decides that prayer is insufficient and that voting is no good as long as liberals can still do it.”
Read the full Intelligencer report at this link.
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