It started at the hardware store. That’s where you see the truth about a nation, not in marble buildings or conference halls, but in the fluorescent aisles between plumbing fixtures and duct tape. I was there to grab a window for the farm house when I saw a young lady working there, no older than twenty, with hair the color of cotton candy, streaked in blue and pink, and her eyelids painted like Japanese animation. The holes in her pants were large enough to expose fresh cut marks, carved into her thighs. Oddly, it was the only part of her not covered, leading me to wonder if she wanted the world to see the cuts as a sign of help, or if her britches were just fashionable and her entire body was covered. I’m not sure, because I’m not up on britches fashion.
The marks were fresh. Precise. Surgical. The signs of a private religion written in blood.
It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t even fashion. It was worship. There’s something ritualistic about those cuts, a communion of despair and self-hatred, a sacrament of the damned. The demons of our age don’t shriek in tombs or foam at the mouth. They take selfies, wear Hello Kitty socks and headphones, and they hum Taylor Swift lyrics while bleeding into the sink. They’re gay little demons these days, but just as bloody as they were in the days of old.
And the devils aren’t hiding anymore. They’re holding parades. You see them gyrating in department stores dressed like fever dreams of Babylon, chanting about pronouns and pride, desecrating language itself until it bleeds meaning. You see them on the corner, unwashed prophets of the new faith, eyes like burnt holes in paper, muttering incantations to a government that will never save them. You see them in the mirror when you realize how numb you’ve become to madness.
This is not metaphor. The spiritual realm is not a myth. The apostles didn’t spend half their ministry confronting make-believe. America is demon-haunted, and the proof is in our psych wards, our morgues, and our middle schools. Teenagers bleed for likes, mothers sacrifice children for convenience, and men in dresses demand worship from the weak. This is not politics, but possession. The same foul spirits Jesus expelled in Galilee have merely changed their wardrobe.
And what are evangelicals doing? Mostly arguing about denominational branding. The hyper-cessationist crowd dismisses all of this as metaphor, safely contained in the first century like a museum exhibit. They’ll exegete the grammar of Mark 5 until the Devil himself gets bored, but they will not look into the eyes of the possessed. They call deliverance ministry sensational, “charismatic nonsense,” as though the Lord of Hosts retired after Pentecost. However, much of it is - in fact - charismatic nonsense.
But not all of it.
THE EARLY CHURCH
The early church would not have recognized this paralysis. For them, exorcism wasn’t spectacle; it was proof that Christ had risen and that His kingdom had broken into the world. Justin Martyr, writing in his First Apology, boasted to the pagans, “For numberless demoniacs throughout the whole world and in your city, many of our Christian men... exorcising them in the name of Jesus Christ... have healed and do heal.”
Tertullian taunted Roman officials in his Apology: “Let a person be brought before your tribunals who is plainly possessed by a demon. The spirit, commanded by any Christian, will confess itself to be a demon.” In my experience with exorcisms and with the dozen or so I’ve conducted, this is always true. They will confess it.
Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, went further, declaring that “those who are truly His disciples... in His name perform miracles... and truly drive out devils.” To the fathers, deliverance was not superstition but the battle standard of victory itself, the visible triumph of the cross over hell’s garrison. This was not ritual. This was war.
When a catechumen prepared for baptism in the early centuries, the church exorcised them daily. They believed no man should approach the font carrying the scent of Satan. The bishop would breathe upon them, lay hands, and command the unclean spirit to depart. The language was not polite. It was legal; binding and absolute. Baptism was a verdict of eviction. The reason exoricism was so closely associated with Baptism is that the early church presumed most lost people were possessed. I don’t think that’s that crazy an assumption. Most? Probably not. Many? Yes.
Origen of Alexandria mocked pagan exorcists who relied on spells. He said the difference between magic and the Christian rite was authority. The magician invokes; the Christian commands. The demon obeys not the man but the Christ in the man. Augustine said the same thing centuries later. When the sign of the cross was made over the possessed, the demon “confessed himself vanquished.”
MODERN UNBELIEF
Today, evangelicals roll their eyes at this. They prefer PowerPoint to power. They’d rather have a statement of faith than a spiritual fight. When they read about Jesus casting out demons, they spiritualize it until it’s meaningless. The demoniac becomes a metaphor for “mental illness” or “social alienation.” But the Gospels are not parables about psychiatry. They are dispatches from a battlefield.
Demons haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve just adapted to the culture. In first-century Judea, they threw men into fire and water. In twenty-first-century America, they drive girls to carve up their bodies while therapists call it “self-expression.” They whisper into the ears of senators drafting laws that mutilate children and call it care. They sit in church pews, comfortable and unbothered, because no one threatens them anymore.
If you want to see how far the church has fallen, consider this: the earliest Christians treated exorcism as a mark of the true faith, while today’s Christians treat it as a sign of fanaticism. The fathers knew that deliverance was a gospel work, not a circus act. The modern evangelical, embarrassed by the supernatural, has surrendered his sword.
FLASH FORWARD
When I watched that girl at the hardware store, I wasn’t angry. I was sad. Not for myself, but for the church that has forgotten how to fight. The Devil doesn’t need to infiltrate denominations anymore; he only needs to wait for us to deny he exists.
If Justin Martyr were alive, he’d challenge our seminaries to bring forth one professor who could drive out even a housefly by faith. Tertullian would laugh us out of court. Origen would ask if we’d misplaced the name of Christ. Augustine would weep that the city of God now trembles before the city of man.
There was a time when the church’s enemies were the ones who feared her voice. Now it is the demons who laugh while pastors tweet. The early post-apostolic church shouted with authority “In the name of Jesus Christ, come out!” The modern church whispers, “Let’s not get weird.”
The girl in the anime makeup will not be freed by hashtags, counseling sessions, or SSRIs. She will not be healed by the sentimental moralism of evangelicalism. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can break those chains. And that gospel, when spoken with authority, still sends demons screaming into the abyss.
We live in a nation infested with ancient spirits wearing modern masks. You can hear them in the schools, see them on the streets, and feel them in the static hum of a culture drunk on madness. The early church called it possession. We call it progress.
That’s why I’m writing this. Because the church must remember what it once knew: the Devil is real, his kingdom is active, and Christ has given His people authority to confront it. We are not psychologists with prayer cards. The demons aren’t the ones afraid anymore; but they ought to be.
THE RITE AND THE RUIN
By the fourth century, what had once been a spontaneous contest of spiritual authority became a managed ritual. The early Christians who reached the name of Christ into the face of darkness were slowly replaced by clerics reading from scrolls. Exorcism was bureaucratized. Where once a fisherman or housewife could rebuke a demon and send it fleeing, now one needed permission, protocol, and a procession of candles. The living power that terrified Rome was institutionalized into liturgy. What had been a weapon became a rite.
The shift came subtly. As Christianity ascended from persecution to power, its leaders began to treat exorcism less as warfare and more as a sacramental formality. As I mentioned above, catechumens seeking baptism were routinely subjected to minor exorcisms to symbolically cleanse them before initiation (as I explained the weekend before last, early Protestants, especially Lutherans, combined exorcism with their baptisms so this combo lived on). The act was not seen as a confrontation with real spirits but as a ceremonial washing of invisible dust. By the time of the Rituale Romanum (the official Catholic exorcism manual first compiled in 1614) he entire practice had been fossilized into a book of formulas. The early church’s authority-driven command, “In the name of Jesus Christ, come out,” became a string of scripted Latin invocations, the priest imploring rather than commanding.
It would be wrong to deny that some Catholic exorcists have shown bravery. Their persistence in a skeptical world deserves a degree of respect. But the power they seek to wield is hindered by the very institution they serve. For centuries, Rome’s theology of mediation has taught that divine authority flows through priests, not directly from Christ to the believer. This misplaced confidence explains why so many exorcisms under Rome fail or drag on for years. Without faith in the immediacy of Christ’s name, they are reduced to verbal ceremonies, shaking incense at enemies who only mock. The famous case of Father Gabriele Amorth, who reportedly performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, ends up proving the point. If the same demons must be expelled repeatedly, what kind of authority is that? Christ never struggled for hours or months. He spoke, and they left (in any exorcisms I’ve done, they’ve lasted less than 20 minutes).
The pattern is not new. Acts 19 recounts the seven sons of Sceva, Jewish exorcists who tried to invoke “the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” The possessed man turned on them, beat them bloody, and sent them fleeing. Their failure was not in their words but in their lack of relationship to the authority they claimed. They invoked a name they did not belong to. So it is with Rome. Having substituted the authority of the priesthood for the authority of Christ, they repeat the syllables but not the faith. Their demons do not tremble because their confidence is in the Church instead of the Lord of the Church.
Protestants, of course, have their own problems. Modern evangelicals sneer at exorcism altogether, regarding it as medieval superstition, while Catholic priests still practice it as medieval ceremony. Yet between those extremes lies the truth. The Catholic rite became impotent because it trusted ritual over regeneration. Protestants abandoned it because they trusted intellect over power. Neither looks much like the apostolic pattern.
Still, one hesitates to mock the Catholics too harshly. At least they recognize there is a war. They may fight it poorly, but they fight. Evangelicals, meanwhile, are busy pretending the battlefield does not exist. The priest with his book of prayers may be half-blind, but the theologian who insists demons no longer operate in the world is stone-dead. The irony is that Rome’s flawed exorcists, for all their errors, still acknowledge the unseen realm their Protestant critics no longer believe in.
The lesson is simple: Christ did not give us a liturgy to read at the darkness; He gave us His name to command it. When the Church traded authority for ritual, it lost its roar. When it traded prayer for paperwork, hell stopped flinching. The early Christians conquered the empire with nothing but Scripture and the Spirit. The medieval church tried to do the same with incense and Latin. The result speaks for itself.
COMING THIS WEEKEND: THE FORGOTTEN PROTESTANT RITE
The story doesn’t end here. What the Church Fathers knew, what Rome corrupted, and what the modern evangelical world has forgotten entirely, I very much want to see recovered. This weekend, in a series of paid-subscriber-only posts (there’s no way I’m opening myself up to ridicule if they aren’t already I2I supporters), we’re going to walk through the lost Protestant rite of exorcism; not a theatrical display or Hollywood séance, but the sober, Spirit-filled exercise of authority every believer has been given in the name of Jesus Christ.
I’m not speaking theoretically. Over the years, I’ve stood in living rooms, parking lots, and sanctuaries where the darkness was not symbolic. I’ve seen it rage, speak, and scream (and I’ve seen it flee). I also have some of the recordings, tucked away for years (like the one below).
And they left not by my name, but by His. These next posts will tell some of those stories. I’ll explain what to expect, how to discern the counterfeit from the genuine, and how to prepare both heart and mind before walking into that kind of fight.
If the modern church has lost her power, it’s because she’s lost her nerve. The Holy Spirit still indwells the saints. The authority of Christ still breaks chains. And yes, Christians, ordinary Christians, can still cast out demons. You do not need a collar, a crucifix, or a Latin script. You need faith, prayer, and the courage to wield the name above every name.
So, if you’ve ever wondered whether deliverance ministry was real, or if you’ve sensed something dark in your home, your family, or your town that no therapy or self-help book can touch, then don’t miss this series. We’re going to drag the darkness into the light, show you how to stand your ground, and recover the kind of militant faith that once made hell tremble.
Subscribe. Read closely. And get ready to remember what authority really sounds like. Click the button below for a 25% annual discount.
