THE HEALING HAS BEGUN

How to Fake an Exorcism

In rural Minnesota, where I grew up, I knew a kid in my high school who started dating a girl whose family belonged to a church whose pastor healed the sick by casting out unclean spirits from their bodies. The girl’s father, a local doctor, invited the boy to join his family one Sunday at special healing service. The boy felt obliged to go, but he was nervous. He doubted he’d fit in at a church that forbade its members to see movies and even frowned on TV magic shows, such as the David Copperfield special that the father once caught his daughter and the boy watching in the basement rec room. The father turned off the set with the remote and explained to the boy that Copperfield’s illusions were a form of “necromancy,” a cultic practice frowned on in The Bible. 

The boy paid close attention at the service, determined to behave appropriately.  After the sermon, the congregants lined up to have their demonic maladies expelled by the pastor’s touch. They filed up one by one and stood before him as he pressed one hand against their forehead and raised his other in the air while crying out to heaven for assistance. The boy, not a believer, just seventeen, was startled by what happened next. Upon receiving a blast of healing energy, or what appeared to be one, each congregant would go rigid for a moment before toppling backwards in a kind of seizure into the waiting arms of two large men. The healed person, limp, would slump there for a moment, until the pastor commanded him to rise and go forth restored and revived into to the world. 

The boy grew panicky as his turn approached. He didn’t know what to expect from the experience. He worried about the jolt of holy energy. He feared that men might not catch him when he fell. He also feared that he might not fall at all, which would make him the only person that day who hadn’t. What would it mean if the healing failed in his case? That his demons were strong and couldn’t be dislodged or that the pastor’s powers weren’t quite as advertised? The church, the boy sensed, wouldn’t like that second notion. It would like even less the outsider who raised it. Then the boy had another troubling thought. If the pastor’s purifying blast failed to knock him off his feet, the church might imagine he’d defied the lord out selfishness and pride, perhaps in the arrogant belief that he, alone among them all, was healthy, innocent, and demon-free. 

His turn came at last. He faced the scowling pastor, his arms at his sides the way the others had held them, his chin slightly raised. He closed his eyes on cue. He felt the pastor’s fingers on his skull and listened as he beseeched almighty God. The boy knew that this was the moment when the jolt should come, but he felt nothing. Not a twinge. Confusion swept through him, numbing his arms and legs. Was this the sensation of a demon fleeing? Honestly, it didn’t seem to be. It felt like plain old fear, the kind he experienced in school when asked to stand up at his desk and report on a book he hadn’t read. Behind him he sensed the watchful congregation, heard its breathing, felt its pulsing mass. Two bony fingers stabbed his forehead, hard.

He had a decision to make. 

***

The other day, while indulging my bad habit of wallowing in alarming online flotsam as a way of avoiding doing dishes or spreading rock salt on my icy sidewalk, I watched a strident propaganda video posted by the thriller writer Don Winslow that called for a fierce ideological cleansing of post-Trump American society. This coming purge, the video explained, would target a massive undercover army of “domestic terrorists” purported to include “your children’s teachers,” workers at “malls and supermarkets,” and even “police and soldiers.” Because these radicals disguised themselves as figures from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, unmasking them would not be easy. It would require a stealthy, online effort powered by telecom and computer tech and run by amateur vigilante spies. These hero snoops were depicted in the video hunched in front of glowing screens, gazing hawk-like at unsuspecting prey. The narrator compared them to the agents who tracked down Osama Bin Laden so soldiers could kill him.

The mission of volunteer “citizen detectives,” as the video gloriously called them, was not to launch commando raids themselves but to rat out to “the authorities” anyone whose statements or behavior marked them as possible dangers to the state – or, as its self-styled guardians like to call it now, “Our Democracy.” Notably, the video’s narrator seemed confident that ODs legal arm will welcome an onslaught of poison keyboard letters teeming with rumors, denunciations, theories, and digital evidence of seditious leanings. As the work of civilians toiling at home and stressed by the suspicion that the enemy may be as close as the nearest Footlocker, these damning dossiers can be expected to contain tips of widely varying quality. Picture screenshots of dubious Pinterest Posts: We made this Don’t Tread on Me Flag from pasta noodles and hung it above the gun-rack in our RV.”  Imagined covertly recorded barroom talk: My uncle had Covid and wouldn’t lick the flap of the envelope with his tax-return inside, but I said you already touched the thing, just lick it; me, I’d wipe my ass on it. The authorities tasked with reviewing such material may be among the purge’s first casualties. Some of them are sure to go insane.

The people calling for Citizen Detectives are insane already, like religious fanatics who fancy themselves knights. Their presumption of backing from state and corporate power for an essentially doctrinal crusade has a medieval, theocratic quality, evoking a war on heresy and blasphemy rather than a crackdown on real crime. The internet is well-suited for such a holy war. It is, after all, a disembodied realm whose denizens may come to feel more like angels than mortal beings, weightless, swift, composed of light, not flesh, and prone to the delusion of omniscience triggered by having a search bar at the ready. The writer who posted and endorsed the video has this avenging angel air himself. The audits, interrogations, No-Fly-List orders, snap inspections, license revocations, and other official that are sure to issue from the program outlined in his favored video don’t appear to trouble him at all, any more than does the Bin Laden comparison. He seems to crave a full-scale inquisition.

That one is coming, garbed in sacred rhetoric and certain to destroy the lives of innocents as vigilante actions most always do, seems likelier by the day. Not long after the election, former CIA director John Brennan – who once aspired to the priesthood but settled on a career in espionage, suggesting a kinship between the two vocations that is a topic for another time – announced that it was not enough for supporters of the departing president to disavow him if they wanted “redemption.” Only “total denunciation” was acceptable. But who will accept or reject these recantations and in what forums will they be delivered? Courtrooms? Cathedrals? Google Hangouts? Also, will they be compulsory or voluntary? And what about folks who, for whatever reason, may not desire or feel they need redemption -- or believe that Brennan’s ilk has it to grant? Will they be left alone or must they forever fear the quiet tread of citizen detectives?

***

The boy at the healing service was under pressure. In his face, the stern pastor. At his back, the crowd. His options were only two. He could politely step away unhealed and face derision, hostility, or worse, or he could do what, alas, he chose to do: fling himself backward in a showy spasm as people cried “Hallelujah!” and “Amen.” When he told me the story, his voice was light, amused; he didn’t seem ashamed of his decision. In fact, it had taught him something about humans that he might not otherwise have learned. “I realized as I went to sit back down and looked at people’s faces, at their eyes, that it wasn’t just me, that they’d all done it too. And now I was in on their secret, I’d learned their trick. Everyone throws themselves backwards in that church. Maybe they’re scared of the pastor, I don’t know, but once one person did it, they all had to. And now they’re stuck. It kind of made me sad.”

The exorcist is standing at your door. He says he’s been told by a neighbor that you need him. Of course you don’t have to let him in the house but chances are you will, because it’s the first step toward making him go away. Whatever will make him go away, you’ll do it, whatever you have to confess, renounce, or vow, and whomever you have to send him to see next, just as your neighbor sent him to see you. You wish he’d never come, but here he is.

You ask him in. You are in for a long night.