“It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”

— Carl Jung

Last October, I wrote about biblical witchcraft—not the cartoonish version we project onto tarot cards and Halloween decorations, but the actual manipulation, misdirection, and spiritual enslavement that Scripture warns against. The punchline? Most American Christians would be guilty of practicing it.

A year later, after more recovery work, reading, and confronting the voices in my own head, I’m saying the quiet part louder: the current demonological doctrines dominating American Christianity are themselves a near-enemy. It’s a distortion so close to truth that it becomes the very thing it claims to oppose, and thus demonic. It is scapegoating, and thus a direct violation of the Gospel, and has produced Satanic effects within Christendom.

Demons come from and are sustained by humanity, more than anything else. Be warned, this is a longer piece. 😈

From Charismatic Confusion to Sober Clarity

My relationship with “the spiritual realm” was complicated, until recently. Before, when I preached on the Holy Spirit, it was a subject I didn’t know quite what to do with. I could teach it plenty and understood enough, but there was cognitive dissonance and some imposter syndrome. That’s not the point, but the spiritual side of doctrine was more ambiguous and emotionally weighted than many other aspects of Christianity.

From my first exposure to charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs through my years at a Calvinist-leaning C&MA church, then Restoration Bible College, a Baptist internship, and secular university classes, I was adamant that I was simply a “Christian.” There were doctrinal points I differed on or remained unsure about, and the spiritual realm was always a fuzzy area. Creation, end times (eschatology), and atonement theories were other examples.

After a few years of recovery, copious reading, journaling, CBT, DBT, prayer, and meditation, I see contemporary demonological worldviews as a misdirect — a scapegoat mechanism that functions exactly like the “witchcraft” it claims to combat. As I’ve come to understand it, witchcraft is about misdirection, manipulation, enslavement, and nullifying human agency. Demonology, when weaponized, does precisely the same thing. It vilifies another and degrades them without just cause, trial, a judge, or jury. It is one of the most prideful and rebellious acts against God, and to pretend to be Him, it exposes hypocrisy and the true atheists and false-believers, as well as false gospels and preachers.

Screwtape need not ask advice from Wormwood — C. S. Lewis was just describing behavior we’re all familiar with anyway.

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without sign-posts.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The Demons I Actually Had to Face

On my spiritual journey, the mystical side of Christianity didn’t arrive as curiosity; it ambushed me. I had to figure out how to live with it, how to integrate it. By no means is it done, and it can be miserable some days because I’m a 40-year-old recovering male just starting to get his feet under him and his head out of his ass (it still slips back in). Now, after more “step work,” self-honesty, and growth, I have plans to create Christian tarot decks with instructions, which is one of the more “tame” ideas that would make old-school Protestants uncomfortable.

Mysticism is real, and can’t be contained in mathematical equations that are trademarked and marketed by institutional organizations with human leadership structures. This was the mystery that was unleashed on the earth two thousand years ago.

When I was reading The Immortality Key over a year ago, it felt like I had found the missing puzzle pieces. The evidence from my recovery, CBT, nerdy-ass neuroscience and psychology notes, excessive writing and processing, and then the theological implications of it — well, there’s a blog post about it. I was in an “Eureka” moment for a couple of weeks, processing it all.

From AA and recovery, psychology to philosophy and mythology, to modern research becoming so easily accessible, after a lot of personal practice and slow work, I’ve come to see “demons” entirely differently.

My demons weren’t the entities that evangelical deliverance ministries cast out in dramatic performances. They were patterns — archetypal forces, psychological complexes, internalized voices, and systemic powers that held me captive far more effectively than any red-horned cartoon villain. If I boil it down, it was my fear and pride being trapped by something “other,” and whatever that “other” is, is a demon. That has meant a lot more than blaming the “Enemy” for every time I doubt or have a mental health crisis. It has meant sugar, nicotine, narcissism, attachment disorders, brain injuries, bad habits, toxic traits, tons of counseling, and a whole freaking “passion project” to vent all of this into.

My issues were of my own making and not from the Church. There is no one to point a finger at but me, and I have bankrupted my allowance of excuses and apologies a long time ago. The point, however, is that I was plagued by demons and false gods. And ultimately, to be possessed or influenced by a demon, whether literal or psychological, is still up to the possessed to give in and surrender to.

It is still the person who is the possession and tucked in the back of the car, an analogy we’ll come back to. It is up to them to get out of it ultimately. This post, however, is not about individuals who are possessed or playing with the toy-model demons that are easily projected onto. We live in America in 2025, and Christianity is no longer a fringe minority.

In fact, if we can step back enough, we can see how these existing doctrines can become pathological and bring the “demon” inside believers.

Socrates’ Daemon, IFS, and the Holy Spirit

“There are no bad parts, only parts needing healing.”

— Richard C. Schwartz

Consider Socrates’ daimonion — the inner voice he described not as evil but as a guiding presence that warned him away from error. Greco-Roman and most ancient cultures had different relationships with demons, angels, and gods than we Westerners like to put under microscopes and describe in systematic theologies, while shouting at our neighbors through social media posts and ghosted texts. Went off there, didn’t I? The Greeks and others sought the Divine, as they also did Truth and survival. Read some history for the not-pretty parts of it all. Socrates was sentenced to death because he was unwilling to reject his inner voice, his “daemon.” In the Greek texts, we can read plenty about “daemons,” and I doubt the base population had their personal daemonology (spiritual psychology?) figured out and composed like Socrates did.

The Logos (word/logic) was the ordering principle of reality for much of Greek philosophical debate. It became a key principle in Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius often refers to the “logos” as both his mind and the unifying mind of all Reality in his Meditations, which was in the second century AD. In John 1, we’re introduced to “the Logos,” and by chapter 3, Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit “from above.” This is the same daemon of Socrates and the logos of Marcus Aurelius, in some sense.

BTW, I’d pay money to see those three talk, and throw in Buddha, and one celebrity pastor just for fun.

“To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Back to the topic at hand, the New Testament speaks of “testing the spirits” (1 John 4:1), the Holy Spirit as guide and comforter, and how through this process we are transformed and our minds renewed (Romans 12:1–3). We’ve discussed before how this path requires the initiation and discipline of ego-death, and that the Royal Command of Jesus becomes the metric of truth and heresy. Through this, a spiritual awakening naturally “teloses,” as we do our part and God His, and the Holy Spirit is further awakened within as we surrender into it. It’s a mystical thing that involves our actual neural wiring, behaviors, and relationships. These aren’t competing frameworks but describing the same psychological and spiritual territory from different angles.

Modern psychology has given us Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, which recognizes the multiplicity of the psyche: the various “parts” of ourselves that carry burdens, protect us, and sometimes hijack our behavior. IFS was something I came across in sobriety and started practicing. It helped with panic attacks and PAWS. You and I can and do talk and relate to ourselves in different ways, even if we’re not aware of it. This is what IFS helps with, and how it can help people overcome a lot of stuff. We’re going to skip a lot to get to one thing: in IFS, there are firefighters, managers, and exiles. There are also NBAs: Non-Benevolent Agents, a term used informally to describe entities or forces that seem autonomous, external, or spiritually charged rather than ordinary “parts” of the psyche.

IFS doesn’t posit literal spirits, demons, or external beings. Everything, every voice, impulse, protector, or exile, is understood as an internal part of the psyche. Even very dark, violent, or alien-feeling presences are viewed as parts that have been burdened by extreme experiences, traumas, or introjected beliefs. Healing involves bringing Self energy (calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, etc.) to those parts so they can unburden. After decades of gathering evidence and training thousands in IFS, Richard Schwartz is still adamant that there are “no bad parts.”

“Happiness [eudaimonia]¹ is a good daemon or a good thing.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Strong Man and Exorcisms: Binding the Accuser

In Matthew 12, Jesus confronts the established power structures and their interpretation of spiritual authority. Following a fascinating Sabbath context, especially for those familar with the thesis of my book, Jesus heals “a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute” (Matt. 12:22). The Pharisees, viewing the event through a lens of rival power, immediately accused: “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons” (v. 24).

Jesus, preempting their defensive posture, quips back with a foundational strategic truth: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?” (v. 25-26).

It is from this setup that Jesus delivers a passage of stunning theological density—a moment, I imagine, where He erupted, leaving His accusers momentarily stunned (their subsequent request for a sign in verse 38 suggests as much). We include the full passage, recognizing it contains loaded statements that have fueled centuries of debate. However, a key unlocks some ambiguity if we remember the thesis that “the son of man” is a title for humanity as God sees us, humanity in divine union and full at-one-ment, the meaning suddenly creeps into your subjective conscious holon².

I posit that our biggest danger is not the presence of demons, but the vacuum left by their absence. The “house,” in Jesus’ analogy, is the “car” from before. A host of complex issues can be a “demon,” and merely making empty shells will allow a person to be possessed by something else (as Jesus Himself later warns in the same passage, referencing the unclean spirit returning with seven others). This is a cycle of spiritual bypassing, and it is not what God desires. “The glory of God is man fully alive,” and it was for this full, unburdened humanity that Jesus came:

“But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”
— Matthew 12:28-32

The theological imperative here is clear: If it is the Spirit of God working here, and the strong man must be bound for the plunder, the restoration of the human, to occur. Jesus was about making people whole, not slaves or empty shells. This points not merely to an inner metaphysical entity, but to the structural reality of accusation, pride, and false authority that establishes dominion within us and our systems. Jesus reveals that true power is not found in spectacle, but in aligning with the Spirit, which is the necessary precondition for personal and systemic freedom.

With that, moving on.

Patterns, Powers, and the False Gods We Worship

“In sum, when Paul writes in Ephesians 6 that our battle is against the principalities and powers, he’s not just talking about demon possession, he’s also talking about our struggle with political powers.”

— Richard Beck

Lilith, as a “demon” diety, and as understood in mystical contexts beyond witchcraft, offers an interesting case study to see how this plays in “god-work.³” Lilith is an archetypal force that represents an integrated shadow or rejected feminine power (for reference, see The Redemption of Lilith and Beyond the Problem of Evil: God-work, Integration, and Daring to Be Human). The problem is not so much demons, but us. For “true believers,” demons should be nothing more than a bad nightmare and child’s play.

The roles of entities and powers, influences and purposes, become clearer when we stop treating “demons” as external invaders and start recognizing them as:

• Career paths and economic security that become idols, consuming our identity and demanding sacrifice
• Generational cycles and parental voices that fracture our psyche, haunting us with internalized criticism
• Any addiction, whether chemical or something deeper, which any recovering person knows intimately as a possessing force
• Digital facades and social media masks
• Relational and sexual patterns that derail and enslave
• Political ideologies and tribal identities that override conscience and dehumanize others
• Religious narratives and their archetypal figures wielded for control and justifying apathy
• The motives and powers we fall into or become part of — systems bigger than ourselves
• Distractions, pleasures, comforts, power, success, honor — the liturgies of empire

With neuroscience and psychology research, it’s easy to see how people can be pulled apart like Orpheus trying to keep up with the Joneses, when the Joneses are already living an excessively schizophrenic life⁴. In the Western world, it’s easy to start pointing out the upside-down, shallow, scapegoating, and egoic delusions spinning around us.

So, here’s the trap: if we stare at or ignore it, we can lose ourselves to it. As Nietzsche warned, stare too long into the abyss and you might become the monster. The inverse applies: monsters get bigger the more we ignore them. When we point fingers, we become the very thing we accuse. When we ignore and comply, we allow monsters to spread and pathologize. We’ve all seen how identity and ego can become toxic and fractured, cancerous and out of control.

Satan: The Inner Accuser

“Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one.”

— René Girard

In Scripture, Satan means “accuser.” Satan is in us. He is the liar, deceiver, manipulator, and demon hiding behind our optic nerves. I’m still okay if there’s a metaphysical entity named Satan⁵; if that’s the case, I’d actually love to meet him. It would be easier than the slow progress of wrestling with myself. There is only one of him, and I had to learn to live with myself and control myself. In our modern world, if demons are real, they can take it easy. James reminds us that we are the ones tempted and the ones who give in to our own desires, and that God does not tempt us with sin (James 1:14).

The work of reckoning with Satan as an internal, accusatory principle is a process informed by serious theological and personal excavation. For over a decade, Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted has been on my Amazon wishlist, but I’ve heard enough of his interviews and engaged with the ideas enough during my initial wrestling match with the concept of Satan as a personification of humanity’s evil to cite it here.

Beck’s major contribution is the argument that in our disenchanted world, when we deny the structural reality of evil, we simply convert spiritual warfare into political warfare. He writes: “When we jettison belief in the devil and demons, we don’t stop fighting… we just start fighting people… The devil you don’t believe in is the opponent you demonize.” This trap—the substitution of a metaphysical devil for a human one—is the ultimate scapegoat mechanism, and thus, demonic.

This framework of structural evil and the seductive power of projection became a foundational piece for my own personal practice and theological studies (I got notes and receipts, yo!). Beck shows us the structural reality of the Accuser that drives us toward rivalry and accusation; my book, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening, provides the lived, psychological, and relational path for confronting it. The true “coming of the Son of Man” is the constant, disruptive pattern of ego-death, a direct and necessary confrontation with the self that seeks to accuse, scapegoat, and maintain the false self. This is when God shows up and breaks through. He has a way of doing it anyway.

Revelation 12:10 names Satan explicitly as “the accuser”: “Now salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” Exegetically, Revelation places accusation at the center of cosmic conflict that began in Genesis 3. The accuser functions as a prosecuting voice, one that converts human failure into eternal indictment. But Revelation also announces defeat: the accuser is thrown down.

The theological point matters for pastoral, personal, and public life. The accusing voice is operative in experience; we feel accused day and night, but the Gospel reframes that experience: accusation is not the final word because the victory of Christ has already undermined the accuser’s authority. Read that way, “Satan” names an accusing logic we all carry, and the Good News is that his accusations are delegitimized by salvation.

Satan is the inner accuser we all wrestle with, or surrender to, and become. When Jesus called Peter “Satan” (Matthew 16:23), He wasn’t diagnosing demonic possession but naming the accusing voice, the tempter, the deflector from suffering and transformation. Satan is personified in Scripture so we can wrestle with this force personally and overcome it. Demons are archetypal and take advantage of our egos and shadows. We are as much the demons as they are us.

Demons, then, even if they are external autonomous entities that possess us, we have had the teaching and means of dealing with them for two thousand years, and we, ironically, should really take it seriously. Even the algorithm possesses us now. As Christians, we’re promised power over Satan and sin, spiritual transformation, and healing. But we’ve outsourced that inner work to external warfare—binding and loosing invisible entities while ignoring the beam in our own eye.

We become Satan when we justify hatred and unforgiveness, when we accuse without accepting and understanding. We become demonic when we scapegoat and inflate our pride. We become the things we surrender to and then embody with our subconscious. We are the fruit that we bear. So we’d best be careful what we become and embody.

The Professions of Spiritual Warfare

We already have the tools and the people who can help us do the work the old revivals promised but rarely delivered: therapists, counselors, recovery programs, spiritual directors, social workers, teachers, case workers, and more. Those professions meet the messy, concrete places where the accuser does his damage: relationships, brains, families, systems. “Testing the spirits” means testing the voices in those places, and it means using the disciplines that actually change us: confession, repair, accountability, therapy, healthy practices, prayer, and slow interior work. That is spiritual warfare that works.

The point of naming demons is not to manufacture enemies; it’s to recognize patterns that falsify love and then refuse them. Girard showed us how scapegoating binds tribes. Jung showed us the shadow that lives in each of us. Scripture shows us the remedy: the cross and resurrection that reframe accusation and break cycles of violence. Those three things together give us both diagnosis and treatment—analysis and practice—so we can stop baptizing the very mechanisms Christ came to destroy.

So, to be clear about what is actually demonic in our life and churches: using fear to control instead of cultivating love; projecting our shadow onto the world while protecting abusers inside our institutions; spiritual bypassing that valorizes performance over confession; dehumanizing anothers story to perserve our form of “truth,” making people into images of ourselves instead of God; tribal scapegoating dressed up as discernment; weaponizing Scripture to keep power; greed baptized as blessing; purity that ruins bodies; belief sold as commodity in exchange for identity; nationalism baptized as faith.

Say those out loud. Name them. They are not abstract. They are the behaviors, policies, and choices we can change tomorrow.

A Theological Reframe We Could Use

“Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.”

— Dallas Willard

If we want a theological reframe, here it is: following Jesus is not a set of positions to defend. It’s a way of becoming—a reformation of desire. Dallas Willard said plainly that the goal is not doctrinal assent but actual change. That means doing the interior work that makes accusations lose their seat at the table. It means breaking the need to be right at the cost of being loving. It means practicing resurrection, little deaths to the false self, so the accuser has less to accuse.

This Halloween, see through the masks. Put on your spiritual armor—take up truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6). But do it without the theater of condemnation. Enjoy the neighborly weirdness, the candy, the costumes, the small-town chaos, the pop songs, the weird alt-prayers. Celebrate in faith, hope, and love. Engage your neighbors with curiosity, not with accusations. If you’re keeping vigil, keep it in love. If you’re handing out candy, hand out kindness. If you’re staying home or doing another spiritual tradition, do it with inner work rather than the outer show.

The demons we should fear are not witches, trends, or strangers. They are the comfortable rationales that let us scapegoat, the systems that reward cruelty, the sermons that shield abusers, and the private voices that tell us we are better than others because of our tribe. Those are the spirits to test. Those are the things that crucify Christ in His siblings.

The only exorcism that matters is the one we perform on ourselves—daily, ruthlessly, with the help of the Spirit and the body. Not to be perfect, but to be honest. Not to win, but to love.

Everything else is demonic.

“The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.”

— René Girard

Footnotes:

1. The term “happiness” is the Greek eudaimonia, which is more accurately translated as “human flourishing,” “living well,” or “the highest human good.” Rooted in the phrase eu (good) + daimon (spirit/guide), eudaimonia literally means “having a good guiding spirit.” In the context of the Logos/daimon argument, this state is defined as the lived result of structural atonement: the condition where the conscious holon achieves full, integrated at-one-ment and manifests the promised “fruit of the Spirit.” ↩︎
2. The use of the terms “conscious holon” and the subsequent interpretation of the “son of man” as representing the full, integrated state of humanity in divine union (at-one-ment) are the central tenet of Every Human’s Journey and my book, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality ↩︎
3. “God-work” refers to the dedicated, often ritualized, psychological and spiritual practices common in certain schools of magic, mysticism, and alternative spirituality. It focuses on engaging with integrating, or transforming archetypal forces or facets of the divine, including one’s shadow elements, rather than simply worshiping an external deity. It specifically refers to the internal process of recognizing and working with these forces to achieve integration. ↩︎
4. The comparison to Orpheus being torn apart (sparagmos) by the Maenads is an allusion to the Greek myth in which the poet Orpheus, who worshiped the orderly god Apollo, was violently dismembered by the ecstatic female followers of Dionysus (the Maenads) after he rejected their rites. Psychologically, the sparagmos is used here as a metaphor for the violent, self-inflicted fragmentation of the psyche (the “conscious holon”) that occurs when an individual attempts to repress or ignore the chaotic, primal, or shadowed aspects of the self (the Dionysian forces), leading to internal dissolution rather than integration. ↩︎
5. The argument regarding structural evil and the Accuser is critically informed by René Girard’s mimetic theory, where scapegoating is the foundational mechanism that binds human communities, as well as Richard Beck’s work in Reviving Old Scratch. Beck argues that denying the structural reality of the Devil/Evil simply redirects the fight, substituting a metaphysical enemy for a human one (the opponent we demonize), thus trapping the Church in the very cycle of accusation and violence it is meant to transcend. ↩︎