As a teenager, I was convinced that a spirit of false prophecy had attached itself to my neck. This spirit's name—according to one of our youth group leaders—was Python, after the Pythia, or Oracle of Delphi. I did not think that the Python, the great serpent of the earth's navel slayed by Apollo, had deigned to visit itself upon me. But I believed that one of its ilk had wrapped its serpentine body around my spine to whisper vaticinations into my ear. You see, I had the spiritual gift of prophecy—as a multiple-choice questionnaire I filled out at church assured me—and it was only natural that the Enemy should seek to subvert the Lord's work. Occasionally, when in prayer or at worship, I would feel a tightening in my neck, a quick little spasm reminding me of Python's presence.
“I bind you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,” someone would say over me, anointing me with frankincense oil. “By the power and authority of his blood I cast you off.” Sometimes I would attempt to cast Python into the sea or the abyss. I could do this, of course, having been granted with all other believers the power to bind and to loose, to trample serpents and scorpions. And I should add that, having been sealed by the Holy Spirit, I was not possessed but merely oppressed. This was nothing so dramatic as exorcism proper—just your workaday spiritual warfare.
Back then I attended a largish, mostly healthy nondenominational church in small-town Indiana. We were garden-variety Evangelicals and not part of the Pentecostal, Charismatic, Renewalist stream in American Christianity. We believed in the charisms of the Spirit, of course, but speaking in tongues during a worship service would have earned removal by an usher rather than a chorus of “Amens.” The Pentecostals were the people with the big white church on the north end of town who had spent tens of thousands of dollars to erect a fifty-foot-tall cross that bathed the highway in red neon at night.
How then had my church's spiritual imagination been colonized by the taxonomies of Pentecostal demonology? The answer, I believe, is Frank Peretti. This was the early 2000s. By then the Evangelical consciousness had been thoroughly saturated by This Present Darkness, Peretti's 1986 debut, which has since sold more than 2.5 million copies. A slew of Christian thrillers followed in its wake. Even though Pentecostals and Charismatics made up only 23 percent of American Protestants at the time, Peretti's popularity had mainstreamed their theology of “deliverance” in the same way sales of Scofield Reference Bible had mainstreamed dispensationalist eschatology nearly a century earlier. Today's booming demand for exorcisms, investigated recently by The Atlantic, is due in part to Peretti's influence.
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