Month: October 2013

If you are prone to pessimism I am about to give you some ammunition.  The future of Christianity is not looking so good, at least in America.  Researchers from the American Religious Identification Survey have compiled some alarming stats. College students today fall into three categories: 1) one-third true believers, 2) another one-third “spiritual” but not religious (read that unbelieving and narcissistic), and 3) 28% who care nothing for God or His purposes. Here’s where it gets really bad. Of the one-third who believe, only 70% of those claimed to be “Christian.” The majority, two-thirds-plus declared themselves to be, what are now known as, “nones” – no religious identity of any kind. It seems that the real challenge isn’t the college crowd rushing toward atheism but rather the majority who could care less about transcendence or morality. No longer are those outside traditional religion merely “unaffiliated,” as in the past. They are now non-theistic, totally humanistic. To make matters worse, many of this group formerly attended church but lost interest.

Pages could be written analyzing why and how this happened. I have zillions of thoughts on this. But one fact stands out. First Corinthians 1:18 states:  For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God (KJV). College students are having their beliefs challenged in a secular environment without having seen the “power” of God.  The church in America has exchanged the “power” of God for the “message” of God.  We hear the message all day long on Christian radio and TV, in conferences and seminars. What we are missing is the witness of God’s power. Deliverance does that.  Exorcism makes it unmistakable.  The Early Church needed the demonstration of God’s power and so do we. As Paul said in 1 Cor. 2:4, My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

Yes I do remember where I was that day in 1963: a fraternity house at the University of Nebraska.  I was walking down the hallway when a fraternity brother talking on a pay wall phone (remember those?) shouted out what someone on the other end of the line had told him: President Kennedy had been shot.  Days later I watched mesmerized as Jack Ruby fired a shot into Lee Harvey Oswald, killing the assassin and destroying our chances to ever know why he really did it. But a new book entitled The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union by Peter Savodnik gives a pretty good idea. Enchanted by utopian visions of the Communist Empire, Oswald managed to eventually wend his way into a disenchanting, several-year sojourn behind the Iron Curtain.  According to Savodnik, Oswald’s mind was “filled with fantasies of a country [the Soviet Union] that had never existed.” Once Oswald figured that out, he slit his wrists in a Minsk bathtub filled with cold water. He survived, thanks to the KGB who was spying on him.  Even after the suicide attempt he declared, “In the event of a war, I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government.” But the Soviets considered him a liability, a crazy man they didn’t want as a comrade. Oswald married a Russian woman and tried to live a normal, communist life; eventually he returned to the America he hated, to kill its leader in cold blood.

“Why?” is a question never fully answered, but there are clues. Strip aside his leftist leanings and you find a soul, portrayed by Savodnik, as someone who “hoped to find what his mother had never provided for him: a home, a stable landscape of friends and neighbors.” The anger and instability from his troubled upbringing led Oswald to externally scapegoat capitalists as the misdirected focus for his internal bitterness toward a father who died before he was born and a promiscuous mother who jumped from one man to another.  What really led to the killing of Kennedy was not political ideology but rather Oswald’s curse of abandonment, rejection, and emotional instability. Had he been raised in a two-parent, Christian home, that dark day, 50 years ago, November 22, 1963, might never have happened. Oswald didn’t need another country; he needed what he never got: unconditional love, a heart turned to Jesus instead of Lenin, and healing prayer for his hurts.

What would you do, if as a potential home buyer, you were told that a prospective house was haunted? Or that it had been used for satanic rituals? Or that a terrible crime had been committed inside? You might be inclined to back away from an offer for the demonic property, unless your real estate appraiser was Randall Bell. The Las Vegas businessman has made stigmatized dwellings his specialty. Even when a residence has been invaded by thrill-seeking Satanist who carved upside-crosses all over the interior of the house (an actual case) Bell doesn’t flinch. He specializes in evaluating the worth of places such as murdered Nicole Simpson’s condo (her ex was O. J. Simpson) and the Rancho Santa Fe mansion were 39 adherents of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide. What Bell tries to determine is how long the bad reputation of a house will linger, all for $375 an hour.

In one case a vacant house was filmed for a reality TV show about haunted houses. The program warned of evil spirits that lurked inside. Satanists followed, vandalizing everything in their path in an attempt to contact the demons. The devil worshipers even built a fire inside for a ritual. The house eventually sold for about $200,000 less than it’s estimated worth before the show aired.  But to Bell such losses don’t hold up over the long run. He says that people eventually forget about what happened in buildings like the Benedict Canyon house where Charles Manson’s followers killed actress Sharon Tate. Twenty years later it sold for full market value.

So what should you do if you’re about to buy a house with a reputation for demonic activity inside? Some serious prayer is in order. And in addition to the standard due diligence of having a contracting specialist search for operational issues, such as plumbing and heating, you should also engage someone who understands spiritual warfare. The house may need some fixing up, but the most serious remodeling endeavor is spiritual – using an exorcism to drive out the evil that may have been there. (If you honestly feel that your residence is haunted or demon possessed, I make house calls – click here to find out more)

The stairs that Father Karras fell down to his death were fake. They didn’t exist in the real house located in the Georgetown area of Washington, D. C. To make the building conform to filming requirements for the horror classic “The Exorcist,” the producers built an extension with a false front that made it possible for the priest to jump to his death. It was that sacrificial act, allowing him to be possessed by the demon Pazuzu that provided the climax to the 1973 movie. But the contrived circumstance of the holy man’s suicide isn’t the only error in the William Friedkin (director)/William Peter Blatty (novelist) classic. Even more glaring miscues shed the wrong light on exorcism.

First, we never really know the legal right that permitted the possession of actress Linda Blair’s character, Regan MacNeil. The movie suggests that a Ouija Board was an instrument of the devil, but it’s never fully explained. Perhaps Blatty didn’t know which is understandable. But by that omission a critical issue of demon possession is left in a confusing state. Second, the movie ends with Karras’s death as the only way the demons can be overcome. The priest sacrifices his own sold to the demon as the means of exorcism. That may sound noble on the surface, but it has no relationship to reality – the actual case on which this story was based. No responsible exorcist who understands the deliverance process would ever do that. Unfortunately, this error lends credence to the false idea that exorcism is dangerous.

“It was not a promotion for the Catholic Church but definitely a story about the power of Christ and the mystery of faith that continues to this day,” director Friedkin says today. To that I can add a somewhat qualified “Amen.”

NOTE: A 40th anniversary Blu-ray version of the original movie is being released this week. It includes an added scene with priest Father Merrin saying of the exorcism, “The girl is not the target. ‘The girl is us, every one of us in this house, and the purpose is to make us feel vile, bestial, rotten and corrupt so that even if there were a God, he could not possibly love us.”

Cover of latest issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine.

New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back.

The November issue of Bazaar contains an essay that pop star Madonna has written about herself, a reflection on her 30 years in show business. Known legally as Madonna Louise Ciccone, the singer-songwriter, now 55 and counting, writes about her arrival in New York City in 1977.  Today she is the best-selling female music artist of the 20th century with a gross of 300 million records worldwide.  Raised Roman Catholic, she has often been at odds with her childhood faith. That faith was first shaken when her mother died from cancer. Madonna was just five-years-old at the time. This lead to a childhood of heartache and fear, terrified her father would also be taken from her.  As a teenager she became rebellious and grew to hate her father. As a wildly successful pop star she pushed the moral envelope as far as possible, mocking virginity, the Catholic Church, posing nude, and performing in a dominatrix outfit while surrounded by topless dancers.

It’s the quote above I want to focus on, her admission of a violent rape at the genesis of her career. This terrible trauma, alone with the fear and abandonment she felt as a child, fits a pattern often seen when ministering to women who have suffered repeated violations of their personal safety. Admittedly analyzing this from afar, I can nevertheless conclude that some things about Madonna’s life conform to a paradigm of demonic attack. Death, rebellion, anti-Christian anger, sexual exploration, bitterness against God, sexual abuse/violence, and the ultimate assumption of a Jezebel persona to fight back. Does Madonna have demons? Who could say for certain? But based on my decades of experience spiritually helping women with similar scenarios (although much less famous and financially successful) the clues are clear. I feel sad, in a way, for Madonna because inside there is a terrified, lonely and hurting child who is trapped in the body of a publicly sensuous woman; a woman who assuages her inner torment by outwardly controlling everyone and everything in her life. Classic Jezebel. She certainly needs inner healing and likely an exorcism.  Not because she’s a bad person, though much of her performing behavior has been morally reprehensible. She needs help because much of the emotional makeup of her pain wasn’t her fault. She was a victim. What’s sad is that she never returned to the roots of her faith, but instead made more moral victims vicariously through her flaunting of indecency and mocking of Christianity.