Modern demonology: the discernment of spirits in the theatre of colonial modernity

Abstract

This article analyses contemporary Charismatic evangelical ideas of ‘discernment’ in the context of US ‘spiritual warfare’ demonologies to argue that these demonologies are distinctly modern. Through a critical examination of spiritual warfare texts, it first demonstrates that discernment situates spiritual warfare demonologies in wider modernist projects of taxonomic classification, intertextual referentiality, and empirical observation. Then, drawing on post- and de-colonial scholarship that has shown European modernity to have arisen through the mechanisms of colonialism, the article contends that narratives of missionary encounters with the demonic replicate this relation between modernity and coloniality. Spiritual warfare reduces vibrant non-evangelical lifeworlds to objects of demonological knowledge, raw data that can only be properly interpreted and systematised by evangelical discernment. This systematisation permits the assimilation of these lifeworlds into a soteriological narrative of modern progress through religious conversion and (thus) socio-economic development. By demonstrating discernment’s inextricability from modernist methodologies and modernity’s foundational and enduring relation to coloniality, the article argues for understanding contemporary Charismatic demonology as distinctly modern.