Evil spirits up your arsehole

Christian Life Books of Shreveport, Louisiana, has come through with Graham Dow’s little pamphlet on deliverance, which is the polite term for exorcism. Here is a partial list of the practices that the Bishop of Carlisle believes are caused by, or symptomatic of, evil spirits. They are all verbatim quotes taken from pages 34-37 of “Deliverance explained” published in 1991 by Sovereign World of Chichester.

• Involvement in religious cults or sects which deny that Jesus is the one true God and died for our sins

• Use of some alternative medicines, for example, homoeopathy or acupuncture. It is where those treatments are associated with a life force that the danger comes. There is openness to spiritual powers other than the Holy Spirit of God

• Any occult practice by the person or their ancestors and relatives. [my italics]

• Irrational dislike of God’s ministers or feeling persecuted by them

• Repeated choice of black for dress or car; markedly unrestful schemes for dress or house decor.

• Addiction, eg, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, eating (or not eating. Anorexia, I believe, usually involves a destructive spirit.)

• Immovable bondage to temptation and sin such that real attempts at repentance appear to make not impression on the problems, for example, in the areas of sexual lust, deviant sexual practice, criticism, unbelief, unforgiveness, bitterness, anger and deceit.

• Spirits are indicated by a person’s attraction to occult practices and powers, eg, witchcraft, spiritualism, occult books, horror films, horoscopes, masonic practice.

You may wonder what a deviant sexual practice is: the bishop gives us a helpful footnote:

“There is a view that both oral and anal sexual practice is liable to allow entry to spirits”

Note that the bishop has personal experience of a rather less dramatic wrestling with a demon — God forbid that he should ever have had a blow job — “I have myself experienced a spiritual sickness which appeared to have no life-span and did not follow the usual pattern for an infection (a mild stomach disorder).”

Two things are worth noting, apart from the obvious one that this man believes without any irony that the cure for unbelief is exorcism. The first is that African roots of all this. Simon Barrington Ward, the bishop who contributed a rather embarrassed foreword to the booklet, explains that he came to belief in all this through experience as a student chaplain in Nigeria. “The sense of powers of evil at work in the daily detail of life is common to many cultures outside our own”. The second is that Dow is — by the standards of most demon believers — a dampish moderate. Though he quite seriously believes that having had a Mormon grandmother might give you a hereditary demon, he does not like to speak of ‘possession’, preferring to regard demons as a kind of psychic flu. “Demonised need mean no more than having a demon, and certainly does not necessarily have the implication of being taken over by the spirit, a concept which we understand by the word ‘possessed’.”

I this, he is notably more moderate than, say, the New Zealander Bill Surbritzky, whom he cites in his bibliography, and whose book, ‘Demons Defeated’ is quite beyond parody.

In case you think I’m making it all up, here’s a little story scanned in from page 15 of Dow’s pamphlet.

Frances is a woman who became a Christian eight years ago, but only when she married did a strange irrational desire to despise and verbally to attack her husband become apparent, a desire that she did not wish to have. Her mother was a dominant controlling person who had once gone for three years without speaking to her husband and always had one member of the family with whom she was not communicating.

In the final ministry time Frances, and the two people praying for her, independently received through spiritual gifts pictures of a black stone, a ritual chalice, and the words ‘devil worship’. Her grandmother had practised fortune telling. As we prayed we became aware of witchcraft rituals and devil worship in Frances’ ancestry. Renouncing these acts proved hard for her, but she managed to do this calling ‘Jesus, help me.’ As we gave her Holy Communion something in her desired to attack me, but deliverance was accomplished and the spirits were thrown out. The irrational desire to attack her husband was now gone.

The fact that two of these particular examples involved witchcraft in previous generations is not to be taken as indicating that witchcraft is frequently involved.