Passing Orders

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, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies : models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines 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.