5 Things Writers Should Know About the Language of Demons, Evil, and ‘The Enemy’ in Politics

Like a lot of Americans these days, I often wonder how we got to where we are politically. To be sure, there are a lot of reasons: Our country has a past of systemic racism, we’ve been rocked by three recessions, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic took its pound of flesh (and patience) from us all. These and a host of others catapulted an unlikely candidate into the presidency not once, but twice (three times, if you ask him).

(Things Writers Should Know.)

Among those reasons, I wouldn’t have expected to find that people believe in political demons. As a professor at a small liberal arts college who teaches a mix of the medieval and the modern, I tended to think that demons belonged more to the former than the latter. But as the 2024 election cycle picked up, I started finding more mentions of people’s ardent belief in demons and their supposed behind-the-scenes political machinations.

That discovery drove me to write Devils of Democracy: America’s Love Affair with Political Demons from the Revolution to Today (Broadleaf Books, 2026), and if you’re interested in the political ship being righted, there are some things you need to know.

Let’s get this one out of the way: When people talk about demons, it can be a metaphor. We can “wrestle with our inner demons,” “exorcise bad habits,” or feel “possessed” by certain states of mind. Our anger and rage, hatred and prejudice, self-doubt and pain can all be discussed metaphorically using the language of demons.

That is not what many in the United States are doing, but they will hide behind this conventional language. When people refer to “demonic” Democrats or the “principalities” that control Washington, DC, it can be an easy pivot to suggest that they were speaking in metaphor.

But for those who engage in this kind of double-talk, demons are very real entities. For instance, the much discussed “Seven Mountain Mandate” is a political demonology. When people like the late Charlie Kirk, Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain, or the politically influential televangelist Lance Wallnau talk about “reclaiming mountains,” “occupying” areas of influence, or exerting “dominion” they are talking about reclaiming centers of human activity from the demonic forces that they believe occupied them.

That last term—dominion—is also on a lot of people’s minds these days. If it sounds ominous, it should. The term starts to emerge from a variety of different sources in the 1980s as a way to package a variety of different political-theological positions. The movement gets its name from Genesis 1:28, where God blesses humankind with “dominion… over every living thing.”

Members of this thought-world imagine that God is commanding Christians to subdue the earth according to their theology, a task which will require them to take over governments. As one of the most influential voices I know, C. Peter Wagner, wrote about it in his work Dominion!, this need not be an aggressive takeover. Instead, it only requires convincing a determined group of voters that their way is right. The rest will fall in line.

Moreover, this takeover is necessary since Wagner claims in Dominion! that “Satan has polluted the land and cursed it. Satan has deployed high-ranking demonic powers to darken the spiritual atmosphere over society and to block the freedom of heaven flowing to earth” (206-7). To take back the United States, those who agree with Wagner must “Do whatever it takes!” (158).

“But what about the separation of church and state?” some might ask. For many in the movements I study, this is an element of the United States that must be undone. Many of them overlap with the Christian Nationalist movement and believe that the United States was founded on “Christian principles.” They imagine a shining golden age of American history when everyone was devoutly Christian, a kind of holy past that warrants God’s blessing of the coming United States. They not only fail to realize how nebulous “Christian principles” actually are (“Aren’t Christian principles any principles we agree with?”), but also that the Bible represented an easily recognizable repository of anecdotes, ones that could have both religious and secular meanings.

For them, the separation of Church and State is a mistake. According to them, America is fundamentally a “Christian nation.” As Lance Wallnau, the aforementioned televangelist and self-described Christian nationalist, wrote in his 2016 book God’s Chaos Candidate, “America plays a huge role in the world as a force for freedom and the preaching of the Gospel. So much so that Satan considers taking this nation down to be his number one priority. With us removed, hell can advance against the church globally” (143). If you ardently believe such a thing, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to the idea that the separation of Church and State is not only a mistake but an idea that is poisoning the nation.

But that’s not the only poison. Ideas about demons don’t emerge from nowhere: They coalesce around the things that make us most uncomfortable, the things we feel are most different from ourselves or our in-group. Race, sexuality, gender roles, class disparity, political affiliations, fears: when any of these things don’t align with a group’s idea of “self,” they come to represent the “other.” Since we tend to consider ourselves and our groups “good,” it becomes easy to push these representations of the other so far outside of the human that they can become enshrouded in demonic form.

In my book I talk about “the Jezebel Spirit,” a being that is often painted by believers to be an ancient demon. In actuality, no one appears to mention it before evangelicals threw their political weight behind pro-life movements in the 80s. Since then, the Jezebel Spirit has continued to demonize pro-choice stances, but has also mutated to represent crises of masculinity, women rising to political power, non-heteronormative relationships, and trans men and women.

If we use the idea of the Other here, then its sudden appearance and transformation make sense: The Jezebel Spirit emerges to represent a political stance that evangelicals had rejected, one created along sexual themes. As more sexual issues emerged for the movement to reject, the Jezebel Spirit’s “portfolio” simply expanded into similar areas.

It’s not the first time the idea of political demons has plagued the United States. While I think it’s important for us to understand the present-day use of demons in politics, it’s equally important to realize that Americans have done this from before America really existed to today. From the Papal Beast of the Revolutionary War and a supposed shadowy conspiracy of demon-worshipping Spiritualists gathered around Lincoln, to the Satanic Panic of the 80s when the United States entered a politically tough time, Americans tend to think with demons.

That means two things. First, we can’t assume that because some Americans are thinking with demons that we have entered an unprecedented time in American politics. That only drives more extreme political thinking on both sides of the aisles. Second, this won’t be the last time demons enter politics.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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