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This chapter discusses how Third Wave deliverance manuals register modern therapeutic discourse with a Gothic twist, and complicate neoliberal/late-capitalist notions of individual agency by focusing on how the handbooks explain the demonization of individuals through willful sins, family inheritances, and traumatic experiences. The chapter first points to the shared idioms between Third Wave manuals and the larger genre of self-help literature. Second, it briefly places the movement’s conceptions of haunting and demons into conversation with the growing scholarship on ghosts and the supernatural in American culture. It then moves on to examine the ways in which Third Wave handbooks assert how people can become demonized, discuss spiritual warfare rituals to expel demons, and consider how deliverance narratives constitute a discourse about human agency that wavers between choice and imposition.

This chapter examines Third Wave concerns with demon-possessed consumer objects and places. First, spiritual warfare manuals contain a plethora of demon-inhabited objects, “possessed possessions” whose purchase or gifting leads to supernatural dangers. Third Wave theology asserts that “demonic spirits seem to crave a material presence” and that “there is often an invisible spiritual force behind a visible object.” In Third Wave literature, demonic desires for materiality lead to objects becoming possessed. When this occurs, material objects become demonic subjects that act in the human world. But it isn’t just the cravings of evil spirits that foment such possessions. Human desires, family histories, and even the nature of a material object itself can lead to demonic habitation. Similar to possessed objects, in spiritual warfare manuals, the defiled land can be demonized by past injustices and cries out for repentance.

This chapter begins by examining—through case studies of sexual desires and human and divine intercession—spiritual warfare conceptions of free will, autonomy, control, and agency. Third Wave theologies of desire and action are complex and seemingly contradictory in their simultaneous insistence upon the powers of individual human choice, demonic compulsion, and the forces of history and family inheritance. The vacillation between autonomous free-will individualism and external compulsion is not particular to Third Wave evangelicals, but it is a typical and persistent theme across vast swaths of contemporary America. After suggesting this, the chapter examines the shared and exclusive elements between spiritual warfare and the contemporary social imaginary known as “neoliberalism.” The chapter describes how—in addition to touting the reality of a human self that is autonomous and possessing free will—the Third Wave theology of biblical economics, its legalistic language of property and individual rights, and its belief in the force of spirit over matter mirror neoliberal ideas. Yet, at the same time, spiritual warfare’s demonologies suggest that the forces of history, materiality, and the social world continue to ghost the present and propel individuals into activities and lives not of their own choosing.

The conclusion points out that, in Third Wave manuals, economic recessions, school shootings, individuals’ problems with poverty and addictions, Haiti’s social and environmental problems, and Japan’s resistance to Christian missionizing are not the result of historical factors and contexts. Rather, people in those situations and countries have taken actions—sometimes wittingly, sometimes not—that have given Satan and his demons legal rights to control the physical territory of each country. The first response from some observers to such supernaturalist explanations is to dismiss them as marginal viewpoints from socially and theologically marginal people: prayers over social actions, the individualization of social problems, the demonization of certain forms of economics, politics, and people. But none of this is much different from late-modern neoliberalism’s denial of the powers of history and the existence of the social. And they don’t just resemble each other, they are intertwined.