American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States

Stories of contemporary exorcisms are largely met with ridicule, or even hostility. Sean McCloud argues, however, that there are important themes to consider within these narratives of seemingly well-adjusted people who attend school, go shopping, watch movies, and also happen to fight demons. American Possessions examines Third Wave spiritual warfare, a late twentieth-, early twenty-first century movement of evangelicals focused on banishing demons from human bodies, material objects, land, regions, political parties, and nation states. While Third Wave beliefs may seem far removed from what many scholars view as mainstream religious practice, McCloud argues that the movement provides an ideal case study for identifying some of the most prominent tropes within the contemporary American religious landscape. Drawing on interviews, television shows, documentaries, websites, and dozens of spiritual warfare handbooks, McCloud examines Third Wave practices such deliverance rituals (a uniquely Protestant form of exorcism), spiritual housekeeping (the removal of demons from everyday objects), and spiritual mapping (searching for the demonic in the physical landscape). Demons, he shows, are the central fact of life in the Third Wave imagination. McCloud provides the first book-length study of this influential movement, highlighting the important ways that it reflects and diverts from the larger, neo-liberal culture from which it originates.

About the Author :
Sean McCloud is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies and Communication Studies Faculty Affiliate at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He teaches, publishes, and researches in the fields of American religions and religion and culture. His publications include Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993 (2004), Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (2007), and a co-edited volume, Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics (2009).

Review :
"Religious studies scholars will find much to appreciate in American Possessions American Possessions would make an excellent supplemental text for an upper division undergraduate/graduate religious studies or sociology of religion course. It is also an important scholarly contribution for examining lived religion in the American context."--Nova Religio "A very important book for American religious studies."--Sacred Matters "Sean McCloud has long been a gifted analyst of discursive formations of 'religion' in American culture, and American Possessions is his strongest, most ambitious work yet. He engages the important but misunderstood presence of Third Wave spiritual warfare literature, subtly and creatively describing its intersections with and dependence on Gothic tropes of haunting, neoliberal conceptions of agency, and the ethos of the therapeutic. Historically nuanced, theoretically probing, and stylistically distinctive, this book will be deservedly much-discussed." --Jason Bivins, author of Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism "Like wars on drugs or terror, the spiritual warfare advanced by Third Wave Christians is ever-expanding and never-ending. In this excellent book, Sean McCloud places contemporary Christian struggles against demons in the context of a range of American habits from personal therapy to economic rationality. Concise, compelling, and animated by vivid stories and reverberating connections, American Possessions casts light on what is at stake in the war on demons in America." --David Chidester, author of Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture "Sean McCloud's compelling study of spiritual warfare manuals written by Third Wave American evangelicals is the first of its kind. McCloud carefully examines literature that focuses on cursed objects, spiritual mapping, protective battle prayers, generational demons, and prayer walks to uncover the extraordinary and ordinary aspects of deliverance beliefs and rituals. McCloud reveals how seemingly medieval religious practices are made sensible in the modern world. A fascinating and understudied topic." --Amy DeRogatis, Associate Professor of Religion and American Culture, Michigan State University "Highly recommended." --CHOICE