Territorial Spirits Concept in the Church Fathers This interpretation of the "prince of Persia" of Daniel 10 as an example of doing warfare against territorial spirits in some fashion is not a recent innovation, but has a long record in church history. Spiritual mapping is the process of determining the forces and circumstances that hold a territory in spiritual bondage. Consequently, the spirits need to be dislodged through warlike strategies of intercession, binding and loosing, direct rebuke or command of spirits, and spiritual mapping. SLSW teaches that there are ruling demonic spirits, often called "territorial spirits," assigned to geographical areas, such as the "prince of Persia" of Daniel 10. The concept of "strategic level spiritual warfare" (SLSW) involves collective or corporate strategies of doing spiritual warfare, not merely on the level of demonic deliverance of individuals on earth, but dealing with principalities and powers in the heavenlies. In the many ironies of this clash between the political afterlife of a slave uprising with the political afterlife of biblical scripture, Haiti becomes a nation held in captivity, and Satan becomes the colonial power who must be overthrown. It argues that the confluence of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution with the political contest around President Aristide’s policies, the growth of the neo-evangelical Spiritual Mapping movement, and of the Internet, produced a new form of mythmaking, in which neo-evangelicals re-signified key symbols of the event-an oath to a divine force, blood sacrifice, a tree, and group unity-from the mythical grammar of Haitian nationalism to that of neo-evangelical Christianity. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a “blood pact with Satan.” This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then to the neo-evangelical rewriting of this iconic moment. Native prayer warriors are using spiritual warfare prayer to assert a privileged place for themselves in Christian life as heirs of God’s authority over the stewardship of North American land and as central to the project of repairing sinful pasts both on and off the reservations, reconciling present racial conflict, and defending the land in spiritual battle against new immigrant invasions by foreign, demonic forces.Įnslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Despite their hyper-aggressive rhetorical and ideological stance, members of this network in fact practice self-sacrificial rituals of fasting, holiness, and submission to the Holy Spirit. The work draws on ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive spiritual warfare boot camp organized by a group of Native Americans who have founded a training base in Oklahoma dedicated to training recruits in the theology and practical strategy of spiritual warfare. They have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of rituals for doing “spiritual battle” and conducting “prayer strikes” on the “prayer battlefield”. Against the backdrop of the rise in military spending and neoliberal economic policies, spiritual warfare evangelicals have taken on the project of defending the United States on the “spiritual” plane. To understand this process, I focus on the articulation between militarization and aggressive forms of prayer, especially the evangelical warfare prayer developed by North Americans since the 1980s. This article examines how militarism has come to be one of the generative forces of the prayer practices of millions of Christians across the globe.
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