Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical spiritual warfare demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon ODonnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order.
ODonnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxiesmodels of the right ordering of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figuresJezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and LeviathanPassing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.