Damned Ecologies

Abstract

AbstractThis article uses a queer ecocritical methodology to analyze constructions of the environment and subjectivity in American spiritual warfare demonologies (discourses about the reality and activity of demons) published in 2008–18. There has been a surge in critical research on evangelical climate skepticism, the ecological thought of far-right movements, and the growing influence of Christian nationalism and charismatic evangelicalism on the US political landscape. Spiritual warfare, which constructs reality as a battle between divine and demonic forces, is a key part of this landscape. This article shows how spiritual warfare demonology operates as a tool for the construction of entwined social, political, and environmental ecologies, combining notions of deviant nature and deviant culture. Such ecologies both reinforce and destabilize biopolitical hierarchies that enshrine a normative (white, settler, cisheteropatriarchal) model of the human over both other (racialized, queered) humans and the nonhuman world. Critically rereading spiritual warfare demonologies through queer ecology, the article shows that such texts frame the fights against climate change and for queer and racialized subjects as prongs of a demonic assault on the futurity of white Christian America. Such texts reveal spiritual warfare demonology to rest on an ecological ultimatum: that nature will be normative or it will not be at all.