How to make friends and exorcise people
People often wonder why so many charismatics make such a big fuss about otherwise indiscernible ‘satanic influences’ around them; as for example when they refuse to eat at an Indian restaurant because there is a tapestry of Ganesha on the wall. Even other Christians marvel that they have such a low opinion of the power of God as to think their souls endangered by the presence of a piece of coloured cloth. Theologically speaking, this is indeed Dualist heresy, but this behaviour is not actually caused by any conviction that there are two equally matched deities. Nothing so dignified; it is simply a game of one-upmanship, in which victory goes to the one who displays the greater and more obscure sensitivity. That is, if Tom thinks it OK for him as a Christian to eat underneath a picture of Krishna, and Dick points out that Krishna is a demon or satanic illusion, then Dick has demonstrated his superior discernment and commitment vis-à-vis his weaker brother in the Lord.
That St. Paul would have classified Dick as the weaker one, because he is hung up on trivial externals and lacks faith in his own salvation, will probably have escaped their notice; not least because this sort of game is played most by insecure people whose excitability greatly exceeds their erudition. In other words, the same sort of people that St. Paul was addressing in the first place. Rather than quote Romans, however, Harry may try to trump Dick in his turn by finding something offensive in the name or décor of the latter’s own choice of restaurant.
People who can see the SS thunderbolt in the mane of My Little Pony can find anything they want to; and the reason they want to is because it scores them points and propels them up the ladder. Anyone detecting Satan in something where the others failed to detect him wins points, and anyone in whose hobbies Satan can be detected loses points, lots of them. This is actually quite dangerous, as the player with least points gets Prayed Over and even used for up-and-coming exorcists to practice on. Strategy therefore demands pre-emption. We used to see the same dynamic in communist party meetings: the slowest to condemn or the last one to call for bloodthirsty measures got labelled a revisionist or even a counter-revolutionary. The situation is somewhat like that of the two hunters who surprise a grizzly and have to run for their lives; when asked why, since no man can outrun a bear, the surviving hunter replied, ‘I didn’t have to run faster than the bear, I just had to run faster than the other guy’.
An Englishman was once at a multinational religious meeting where a visiting American was describing how every nation had a sort of ‘patron demon’ that inspired its characteristic national vice. What might the proprietary sin of England be? he enquired. Homosexuality, she said. Well, it was true that England was then a more tolerant place for gays than the Bible Belt, and that a mind that enjoyed prejudicial classification might well find some ammunition in its single-sex schools, in its writers and artists, in its campy popular entertainment, and in Tory Party sex scandals, but there appeared to be a bit more to it than that. For, despite the fact that he was not gay, did not appear particularly gay and had not mentioned the subject previously, she replied to him with an extremely ‘meaningful’ look that clearly said, ‘YOU should know better than anyone’. He says he expected to be exorcised on the spot.
What was happening here was a game of one-upmanship, in which she set up the board and waited for a sucker to be dumb enough to ask the question. She could then name the national sin of the mark’s birthplace with an implication that he was himself consumed by this evil; it could equally well have been the Demon of Smelly Socks who afflicted Outer Rhubarbia, and then everyone would look at the poor Rhubarbian and sniff. One up to her, one down to him. Everyone was now looking at the poor Englishman as if they expected him to start buggering them on the coffee-table; any remark to the effect that he wasn’t actually homosexual himself, however, would probably have triggered Round Two of the game, involving her charismatic gift of Discernment of Spirits that said, ‘Neener neener neener, you are so a homosexual, you have the characteristic English demon without knowing it’.
I myself heard another Christian fundamentalist happily engaged in listing the demonic influences on the world. One of these was homeopathy. It may legitimately be argued that homeopathy is a scam, but then the same can be said of a host of other ‘alternative medicine’ practices, none of which appeared in the speaker’s demonic list. I wondered whether the speaker knew what homeopathy actually was, or whether he had jumped to conclusions from the resemblance of the word to ‘homosexual’. Perhaps he would have been equally happy condemning the Demon of Homeostasis and exorcising engineers.
For ‘happy’ is very much the operative word; anyone who has ever listened to a group of such fundamentalists discussing demonic influences will know that there is not only an element of competition, as described above, but also joy of the classifier. Great pleasure may be derived from imperiously dividing all the phenomena of the world between the kingdoms of the Lord and Satan, namely the heady wine of being ‘like gods’, as the Serpent promised Eve; although as the example above suggests, quite innocent of the factual knowledge one might expect from gods.
And so it comes to pass that individuals who in the official hierarchies of wealth, social status and political power are complete nobodies, may in their fantasies sit in judgement on the entire universe, airily pronouncing on how this, that and the other thing, and most particularly everything that their prosperous and well-adjusted non-Christian acquaintances hold dear, is of the Devil. No wonder they sound happy.
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