Passing Orders
Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare
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Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon O’Donnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order.
O’Donnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies—models of the “right ordering” of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figures—Jezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.
This beautifully written, sophisticated analysis of spiritual warfare writing illuminates much about the colonial, white-supremacist state of the contemporary United States. S. Jonathon O’Donnell takes us into this genre of apocalyptic thought and compels us to pay attention to its deep political hold. Drawing on insights from critical race theory, decolonial theory, and critical theory, O’Donnell shows how prophecy writers try to fend off difference yet are ultimately compromised by, or implicated in, the very uncertainty and oppression that they seek to forestall. A must-read for those seeking to understand the influence of apocalyptic thought on U.S. politics.---Erin Runions, author of The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty
A well-written and engaging examination of American spiritual warfare texts that provides a compelling theoretical intervention, one that reveals the fissures cracking the formative logics of U.S. nation-state sovereignty and its binaries of good/evil, insider/outsider, and pure/impure.---Sean McCloud, author of American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States
Passing Orders re-deploys queer theory concerns with sovereignty, ontology, and futurity by applying them to neocharismatic Christian demonology literature, that which demonizes queer, black, indigenous, and colonized bodies as integrally, inevitably, and incontestably other.
---Society and Space
O'Donnell... spin[s] the gold of profound political and theoretical insight from the straw of an apparently nonsensical literature in this remarkable text.---Politics, Religion & Ideology
...this book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the social construction of demonology and the study of religion in the US. It reveals in great detail the intricacies of the ideology of US evangelical spiritual warriors and is bound to become a reference point for any future research on this sub-group.---Journal of Contemporary Religion
Introduction: Paradise Has Walls | 1
1. Nations unto Light: Spiritual Warfare as Orthotaxic Religiosity | 23
2. Jezebel Assemblages: Witchcraft , Queerness, Transnationality | 52
3. The Islamic Antichrist: An Eschatology of Blowback | 81
4. Leviathan’s Wake: Demonology and the Passing of Order | 109
Conclusion: Paradise Refused | 141
Acknowledgments | 159
Notes | 161
Bibliography | 193
Index | 211
