Demons in the USA: From the Anti-Spiritualists to QAnon (Routledge Studies in Religion)

Demons in the USA argues that the discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination. The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed.As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this "anti-Spiritualist" paradigm to condemn the movement.This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through the film The Exorcist.The author considers how the success of the film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, entangling it with entertainment, science, and politics such that it influences psychology, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the contemporary QAnon movement.This entanglement points to the broader argument of the work: While we may wish to think of a film as "entertainment" (and thus, having no bearing