Reclaiming the Language of Spiritual Warfare for a World on Fire

And doesn’t it haunt us? And doesn’t it loom, with its endless invisible fingers, a rich tapestry of lack, each warp and weft threaded in disguise as abundance? And doesn’t it ask us to feed ourselves to its appetite? To give up limb and liberty? Doesn’t it cauterize, through extinction, the long lineages of life itself? You know, of course, of the being I’m speaking, that usurping power: O, Hand Invisible, what, in earlier times, we may have had sense to recognize as demon. Deliver us, Lord. We are possessed by what we possess …

It may be an inauspicious time to leverage the language of demonic possession when thinking theologically about the climate crisis. For those of us living in the United States, we have witnessed the language of spiritual warfare exploited to further Christian nationalist theopolitical projects across the country. As a queer Christian whose spiritual formation began in charismatic and Pentecostal churches, I am particularly sensitive to the ways that the invocation of invisible, malevolent powers and entities has been weaponized against LGBTQ+ people in the church. The multi-year hate campaign against transgender people, which seeks to eliminate their presence from public life, often describes trans people as under demonic influence. 

My hunch is that almost no one I’d ask would believe themselves to be suffering from possession. I certainly bristle at the idea that my life and actions are not my own. But I have come to believe that in fact, all of us, myself included, are, to varying degrees, possessed by the Spirits of this Age. 

And yet, as someone who wants to take seriously both the challenge of human-driven climate change and the words of Scripture, I wonder if Christian theological reflection dismisses the language of possession too quickly. More personally, I fear that Christians, myself included, neglect the dire possibility that the climate crisis reveals just how vulnerable we remain to possession by powerful and oppressive forces, forces that would like nothing more than to enlist us into our own unfreedom. 

A Great Derangement?

Let’s look at our position: global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to climb, despite the warnings of a scientific consensus that these emissions threaten the long-term viability of a livable planet. Global investment continues to allocate double the amount of capital towards fossil fuels compared to low-carbon energy sources. Our way of life, our retirement funds, our endowments, continue to bank on the continued profitability of emissions-heavy fossil fuels, investing $1.00 for every $0.48 cents in clean energy.[1]If fossil fuel companies make good on existing fossil fuel reserves, reserves they already own and will extract unless radical change to climate policy or regulation intervenes, we will see total emissions triple beyond the atmospheric carbon thresholds that would keep the earth from surpassing +1.5 degrees Celsius of excess warming. This would devastate the planet’s climatological system:[2] capital’s demand for return on investment spells the end of a livable future. Yet, we continue to buy, to burn, to fly, to emit, to track our Roth IRAs and 401ks, and carry on as usual. We seem to be suffering, to borrow the language of Indian author and climate thinker Amitav Ghosh, a “great derangement.”[3]

These are not the actions of rational consumers making choices in service of their own interests. In whose interest is a world at +4 degrees Celsius of warming? It is impossible to look at the accelerating crisis of climate change, the turbocharged storms, droughts, fires, and extinctions, and not suspect that maybe we are all in fact stricken by a malevolent power whose will is being done on earth over and against any human or more-than-human flourishing. We are acting as if possessed.

Understanding Such Powers

What would it mean to be exorcised? And just what, or who, is our adversary? Yale Divinity School is lucky to have faculty members whose scholarship might get us closer towards an answer, offering accounts of the nature of these powers that seem to govern the economic, moral, and ecological dimensions of our lives. In particular, Kathryn Tanner, Willie James Jennings, and Matthew Croasmun each have published research pointing towards our dilemma, and in distinctive ways each invites us to see our derangement, our possession, for what it is. 

For Tanner, writing in her book Christianity and The New Spirit of Capitalism, our surrendered agency in the face of climate change might be understood as the result of finance capital’s demand for total commitment, even to the point of self-evacuation, whereby all human desire and human will is abandoned at the demand for profit and optimization. We are cannot work towards our own interests because we no longer have them; our desires and longings have been superseded by those of capitalism’s totalizing spirit.[4]

For Jennings, “possession” is understood as part and parcel of white colonialism and supremacy. As he argues in After Whiteness, the spectral power of the plantation and its masters, including the vision of white male self-sufficiency, haunts our imagination, even in places of theological education. Living in the aftermath of European colonization, we still hear Satan’s “plantation cadence” luring us in absolute pursuit of mastery, property, and control. The structures and systems the shape our institutions, from classroom to boardroom, retain the ectoplasmic residue of the plantation, and, if we lack vigilance, they will continue to discipline us into perfected, colonial agents who see the world as something to exert our will over for the sake of maximal profit.[5]

Croasmun’s book The Emergence of Sin connects contemporary philosophical and scientific frameworks—in particular, the theory of emergence[6]—to the portrait of sin painted in Paul’s letter to the Romans, helping us understand sin as a volitional cosmic entity, a “person” who emerges from our sinful condition and exerts its will upon us, even as we ourselves help constitute it through our participation in systems of evil. In his framing, for “Sin” we might substitute “Capital,” or “the Market,” “Profit,” or “Growth,” and understand these too as non-human agents, powers with specific goals, aims, and logics that enlist and coerce us into idolatrous obedience.[7]

“We Need Deliverance”

Totalizing self-evacuation. Spectral haunting. Emergence and supervenience. As I read them, each of these are models of possession that direct our attention to the susceptibility of human beings to influence by outside forces. Together, they point us to a reality where the adversary, as Paul writes in Ephesians, is not “flesh and blood” but “the cosmic powers of this present darkness … the spiritual forces of evil.”[8] To the degree that we are deranged in this ongoing ecological crisis, we are victim as much as we are culprit. To paraphrase Paul, we do not know what we do and we do what we would not. And we do these things because we have been brought, however unwittingly or unwillingly, under the thumb of forces that are not reducible to, not synonymous with, specific individual human agents or persons. 

My hunch is that almost no one I’d ask would believe themselves to be suffering from possession. I certainly bristle at the idea that my life and actions are not my own. But I have come to believe that in fact, all of us, myself included, are, to varying degrees, possessed by the Spirits of this Age. We suffer collectively under the crushing yokes of oppressive economic and political systems that have possessed us, and bend us to their own ends. We need to be freed. In the language of spiritual warfare, we need deliverance. 

The Whole Armor of God

As I have begun pastoral ministry, understanding our world as possessed helps me remember where to direct my opposition. It helps me lean into the advice of the late commentator Michael Brooks, who said, “Be ruthless with systems; be kind to people.”[9] If Christianity is to be of any service to the flourishing of this world, it must work to exorcise the agentive power of capital, or perhaps, “Capital,” which has set our society careening towards epochal disaster. The finitude of Creation and a world system of endless quarterly profits and forever growth cannot be reconciled. If we are to work to preserve the former, we must rebuke and banish the latter. It really is that simple, and that stark: forever growth and short-term profit, or a livable earth. 

And, because our adversary is not our neighbor, but is that which possesses us and our neighbor, we can more easily resist the temptation to demonize others, and instead perceive them rightly as human beings whom God loves and saves. Friends, my invitation is to put on the whole armor of God, and continue the good work of exorcising until the only Spirit that governs is that which hovered over the water at the beginning, that which rested on Jesus in the Jordan, that which animates our lives as Christ’s Body. Amen. 

Luke Scott Stringer (he/him) ‘18 B.A., ‘23 M.A.R., is a writer, poet, and artist from Oologah, OK. He currently lives in Des Moines, IA, where he serves as Associate Pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church through their Transition into Ministry pastoral residency program. You can follow him on Instagram @stringer_things and see more of his work at lukescottstringer.com.