Demon talk seems absurd. But it’s deadly serious.

An angel fights Satan as a dragon in a stained glass window at Notre-Dame of Geneva basilica, Switzerland. (Getty Images)

If you believed far-right rhetoric, you’d think America is swarming with demons.

Conservative elected officials, religious leaders and MAGA influencers in recent years have regularly ascribed aspects of society they don’t like to the work of demons. They don’t mean it figuratively. They think actual demons — real evil spirits, such as a child might imagine them, except conjured by people who in other ways qualify as grown-ups — are at work on a wide range of what they perceive as bad things, from elections they don’t win to the existence of gay people.

It’s easy for reasonable folk, when they hear fantastical accounts of demons, to laugh like it’s a joke. On the surface it’s very comical. Think of a person gravely asserting that society’s ills were all the fault of Lord Voldemort or Gozer.

But all the demon talk reflects a dark quality of the Trumpist program to reshape society and trash republican government. Its adherents intend to cast opponents not as adversaries in a political contest but as enemies fit only for destruction. They are out to demonize those who don’t agree with them and create an environment in which abuse and violence are permissible, even necessary.

Take the example of Andrew Wommack. Founder of a sprawling ministry based at Charis Bible College in Woodland Park, he is a leading proponent of the Seven Mountains Mandate, which says Christians should rule over all aspects of society. He is closely tied to the New Apostolic Reformation, a Trump-warrior dominion movement led by self-identified “prophets” who, as journalist Jennifer Cohn wrote, “teach that believers possess supernatural gifts, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, faith healing, and the ability to cast out demons (exorcism).”

Wommack is a demon aficionado. Five days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, a violent attack undergirded by Christian nationalist rage, Wommack posted a video in which he said, “We’re fighting against demonic powers, and you have to get violent, angry against the devil, you have to resist the devil.” He cautioned listeners that they should not “fight people,” then immediately undercut that humane stipulation: “Now sometimes if a person is doing the devil’s bidding a hundred percent, it may be impossible to separate the evil that is motivating that person from that person.”

The listener is left with the message that believers have a divine mandate to correct people they find irredeemably bad through violence.

Much of the Christian right’s preoccupation with demons can be traced back to early NAR leader C. Peter Wagner, who died in 2016 shortly after endorsing Donald Trump for president. His wife published a book called “How to Cast Out Demons,” and the two of them founded a “ministry of deliverance” devoted to casting out demons.

“There are people … who are directly affected by demons, not only in politics, but also in the arts, in the media and religion in the Christian church,” Wagner told NPR. Asked how one can tell if a person is possessed by a demon, Wagner said they might manifest “unhuman behavior,” and he claimed his wife conducts a medical doctor-like process to make a determination: “So she actually does diagnostic work on people to discover not only if they have demons, but what those demons might be.”

The recent crop of demonbusters is far less exacting. Joe Oltmann, the election-denying Colorado podcaster evidently assumes anyone who disagrees with him politically is a demon. One of his recent segments was about how “demons say removing Trump is democratic.”

Far-right Colorado media personalities, members of the state Legislature, officials in the state Republican Party and other Christian figures have reinforced the notion that differences are due not to human variety but rather to wiles of Satan.

Demon talk is especially ominous coming from Oltmann, who has suggested on various occasions that scores of people should be executed, including Gov. Jared Polis and President Joe Biden.

Some lost souls are so into demons they’ve made a profession of it. Chad Ripperger, a priest in the Archdiocese of Denver, is an “exorcist.” In a video that’s been viewed more than 1 million times, he described one of the scariest exorcisms he’s performed.

“There was a full-blown, preternatural manifestation right there, and the demon was screaming,” he told an interviewer. “If that doesn’t strike the fear of God in you nothing will.”

Ripperger in another interview talked about how “demons” are ascendent in our world, evidenced in part by Hitler, “homosexuals” joining the clergy and “tyrannical behavior.”

“It seems to me that we’re living in a period where there’s been a retraction of grace and then at the same time, because of what men were doing, God allowed, because of the sinfulness of man — we haven’t gotten our act together — God has allowed evil people to start having much more influence.”

Far-right Colorado media personalities, members of the state Legislature, officials in the state Republican Party and other Christian figures have reinforced the notion that differences are due not to human variety but rather to wiles of Satan.

Much of what they most object to is rooted in anti-LGBTQ bigotry. This was succinctly expressed by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins.

“This whole thing with LGBT is the zenith of man’s rebellion against God,” he said in an interview. Care to guess the culprit? “Demonic spirits.”

It’s eye roll-inducing stuff, but we dismiss it at our peril.

Wommack has urged his followers to “take back Colorado” from the “demon-possessed” left, and in fact he has helped orchestrate plans to control local government bodies. As journalist Logan M. Davis has documented, a Wommack-aligned set of candidates took over the local school board, infusing the district with biblical overtones. Now he’s associated with a parallel campaign to control the Woodland Park City Council. If the Wommack-tied candidates win in Tuesday’s election, “He will have taken over Woodland Park,” Logan wrote.

The threat of a Christian theocrat effectively ruling a Colorado town from his pulpit is a microcosm of present threats to the nation, where white Christian nationalists are bent on putting a fascist autocrat in power.

They might be possessed by delusions, but the damage they could do is diabolical.

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