Tag: possession | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Hillary Clinton Accused of Possession

Note: This is NOT a political post. In no way am I supporting a candidate, trying to influence your vote, or change the way you think about any politician or political party.)

A short time ago, a friend of mine posted a video [link no longer works, so it was removed] on Facebook of Hillary Clinton having an awkward moment. I watched the video and didn’t think much of it. I figured that people who live 24/7 in the public eye are bound to have many weird moments that are caught on tape.

In an attempt to bring some smiles to those in the conversation under the post, I stated, “I wonder how long it will be before someone starts saying it’s a form of demonic possession?”

My question was answered the very next day when an Apostolic preacher posted [link from Rayford Strange no longer works] his thoughts on the video, calling it demonic.

Did Hillary Clinton have a seizure? I don’t know. Did she have a strong reaction to the noise of the reporters surrounding her? I have no idea, but it’s possible. Was this a sign of some sort, signaling to everyone that she has, at some point, been possessed by something demonic? I don’t see how that is possible. In fact, why would one even think that in the first place?

I’ve tried to understand how this episode was determined to be “demonic.” If it’s demonic, where is the evidence? I read his thoughts on the subject, but I can’t agree with him. I don’t see what he sees. Could it be if one wants something to look demonic, eventually, he is going to find something that fits his definition of demonic?

Why do things which are different and unusual come under attack as being something demonic? Why is there so much misunderstanding within the Apostolic movement?

Apostolic leaders have been known to tell a person there is “demonic influence” in his or her life, especially when directed to young people. To them, it seems anything could become a “demonic influence,” but some of the more common examples are art, music, people of other cultures and their heritages, people who look different, family members who haven’t been born again via Acts 2:38, movies, comic books, politicians, even certain church members – and the emphasis seems to be on that “evil” influencing members away from their churches.

Much of this thinking may come from the acceptance of bad theology. People may have a better understanding of the traditions within their churches than an understanding of actual scripture. Sadly, many traditions will also cause people to look at illness in the wrong way. Have you ever seen someone having a seizure being prayed for, then hear someone say, “I rebuke this demon!” while praying?

I have. It’s scary. People can really be hurt from this. In some instances, the heart of the individual was in the right place; sadly, the head wasn’t. Bad theology is bad theology, no matter how you look at it.

Cult ministries purposely over-emphasize “demonic influence/possession.” Why? This is one way the spiritually abusive leader will use fear to control and/or to keep a person “safe” within the confines of their influence and “ministry.” Talking about demons and evil can be a scary subject. Corrupt leaders will use that fear to influence people into doing what they want. Sad, but true.

Cult ministries also use this fear in an attempt to limit one’s ability to grow intellectually. A constant theme within this very movement is how often leaders talk about the spiritual danger of seeking higher education in public universities, and sadly, even Christian universities outside of their own theology.

Now, a difficult thing for me to process among all of this bad teaching on “demonic influence” is that I do believe in demons. The Bible talks about them. I don’t know of any other way to look at and understand specific scriptures within our Bible. I do believe there is some sort of evil that works against people of faith – but, I often don’t see it the way the “spiritual elite” see it.

Getting back to the Facebook post above, it’s my opinion that the author is using “demonic influence” as means to sway voters away from supporting Hilary Clinton in this upcoming Presidential campaign.

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Exorcism

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

There was one side affect to being “possessed” that I liked. When my Mom was addressing me (and not the demon) she was more kind than she’d been in a long time. Also, she paid more attention to me than she had in a long time. Watching over me took priority over her best friend’s daughter for the first time since they came into our lives. Of course, she was watching me and spending time with me to “make sure the demon in me didn’t hurt anyone”, but it was still nice to have my Mother back. Because of this, I started lying. They would ask me if the demon was speaking to me or if I was feeling rage, confusion, etc. and I lied and said yes because I wanted to keep receiving attention from my Mom and preference over the her friend’s daughter. As I kept saying yes to everything they asked me about what was going on with me, they decided they were going to have to cast it out as soon as possible. I don’t remember what the reason was for ever waiting.

So one weekend we go to Mom’s best friend’s house for the specific purpose of getting the demon cast out of me. My parents, Mom’s best friend and her husband, and their teenage daughter all participated. Their son wasn’t considered “spiritually stable” enough to help since the demon in me had come from him. They took me into a back room of their house, the farthest away from neighbors. They said that we might get loud and they didn’t want anyone calling the cops thinking that someone was getting hurt.

When we got in the room, they put me in the middle of the floor and gathered around in a circle. I can’t remember a lot of what was said, but there was a lot more describing of what the demon looked like, what it was “saying” to them about me, etc. At one point, they made me lay down and they each took an arm and a leg and held it tight to the floor. They said that if the demon got mad, it might give me extra strength. Sometimes I pushed my arms and legs against them to see if I did have super-human strength, but I was never stronger than my 9 year old self. Ha.

This went on for hours, my Dad got disgusted pretty quick and left the room. He was still pretty emotionally disturbed over his brother dying recently (which I wrote about here) and didn’t like what he was seeing them do to me. They also had just asked me if I’d had thoughts of suicide, and like I had been doing lately, I answered yes even though it wasn’t true. There was a lot of screaming at the demon to come out, and sometimes all the people holding me down and yelling in my face these awful descriptions got so scary that I screamed. They then said that “it was close”, so I started screaming more to try and bring this awful episode to an end. I don’t remember what was the deciding factor, but eventually someone yelled “It’s out!!!” and then my Mom grabbed me and hugged me.

I was so happy, I thought that I wouldn’t be scared at night anymore in my bedroom. I thought the demon talk and visions would be over. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

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Finding God in Spite of Men

My dad became the co-pastor of the church my grandfather pastored, and it was here that I spent the rest of my childhood. It is my understanding that they had the agreement all along that this would be the way that my dad would take over the church when my grandfather wanted to retire. This was to make sure there was no opening for the district to try to put in a pastor or influence the members.

It was during this time that I received the Holy Ghost, speaking in other tongues. I was eight years old, and had been “seeking” for a couple of years. The weekend before this happened, another little girl in the church had received the Holy Ghost, speaking in other tongues at a youth rally. I figured if she could do that, I could probably get it too. For me, there was nothing negative about this experience. It was wonderful in every way!

A few months before I had asked to be baptized, but my parents talked me out of it because they felt like I was just doing it because my friends were doing it. However, after that experience, I was allowed to be baptized. My grandfather baptized me in the name of Jesus. I know that I felt wonderful after being baptized!

However, even though we were little children, we were expected to pray for people in the altar, pray a full 30 minutes before church each service, and live “good holy lives.” It seems that before this point, I was not aware of the stipulations and rules about performance. After I received the Holy Ghost and was baptized, that burden begin to get heavier and heavier, as I slowly became aware of all the things “God expected” of me.

I remember one night during a very emotional service, my friend and I were falling out in the floor and rolling back-and-forth, because we had heard about the “old days” where people were “holy rollers.” Everyone was always “wanting to go back to the old paths in the old days.” I guess in our little minds we felt this was very spiritual. I remember one night during this time my dad “shouted”, which he rarely did, but when he was dancing, he turned over one of the pews on which a little boy was asleep. The child was not hurt, but did get dumped unceremoniously into the floor.

I remember one lady had difficulty giving up her cigarettes, even after being baptized and speaking in tongues. Several members of the church, including my parents, (which meant I was there too) stayed and prayed with her for hours, trying to help her “get the victory” over those cigarettes.

During those days, it was more common to have someone come to church who was “demon possessed“. When this would happen, and they would be trying to rebuke the devil out of this person, all of us children were sent into another room, presumably so the devil wouldn’t come out on us.

Very loud worship was encouraged, and if it was a really good service with a “real move of God,” people were usually dancing, having a “victory march”, “shouting”, or someone got the Holy Ghost. It happened a lot during that time.

I recall my dad getting frustrated with my grandmother, because during the long preaching, she would draw pictures for us on a tablet of paper and let us copy them. Once, my dad called her name out from the pulpit to rebuke her for drawing for us. It was not uncommon for him to call out certain children or teenagers who were not behaving during his preaching. Embarrassment seemed to be something he felt was effective for dealing with these kinds of problems.

As a shy child, I lived in fear of being called out in this way. It was very mortifying for me to have attention drawn to me negatively. I was very sensitive as a child, and a simple rebuke in private could bring me to tears. These public humiliations were a nightmare for me, and I did my best to avoid them at all costs.

Eventually my grandfather handed the church over to my father. He and my grandmother moved to another city to retire, and attended the church of my uncle, who was not United Pentecostal, but independent Oneness Pentecostal.

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A New Family In Our Church

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

Eventually, Dad came back home and back to church. The painful questions from members stopped after awhile, and things were pretty good. Then a new family came to church.

It was a husband and wife and two teenage kids. The husband and wife were preachers, and the teenagers (a boy and a girl) both claimed that they’d been ‘called to preach’. About half the church welcomed them with open arms, the other half stayed aloof from them. Friendly, but not friends. I remember my Great-Grandma (who helped build the church building) saying that her spirit just didn’t recognize their spirit.

My mom and the mom of this family became ‘best friends’. We started spending a LOT of time with them. Our whole family would go spend the weekend at their house almost every weekend, and during the week they were at our house all the time. Once again, things started changing.

The woman in this family told Mom how they’d all been Satanists before coming to God, and that she believed occult was infiltrating the church. They started buying tons of occult/witchcraft instruction books and comparing the practices outlined in these books to things happening in the church. Their conclusion was – demons were running rampant in the church and possessing the believers of the Truth in an attempt to thwart God’s Oneness revival.

My family was always the first ones to arrive at the church building, lots of times the doors weren’t even unlocked yet when we got there. This other family started joining us in arriving extra early. Mom and this woman and her daughter would go into a Sunday School room and ‘pray’. Often you could hear them ‘praying’ all over the church, other times there was silence. A few times Dad asked me to go in and get Mom for one reason or another. The times I went in they were sitting at a table talking, and stopped immediately and Mom angrily asked why I interrupted them. After a couple of those instances, they started locking the door.

Some things from this time that I heard them state: They could literally ‘see’ demons running around inside the church building. They could see demons when they looked in the eyes of some of the male preachers in the church. The pastor was ‘obviously’ demon possessed. The people who didn’t come to church as early as them to pray were ‘spiritually bound’ by evil, if not actually possessed.

Gossip started about their ‘prayer sessions’ and the questioning of me started just like it did when my parents had separated. “Why does your Mom go in there to pray with those women? Why can’t she pray out in the open? Why do they spend so much time in there? If they are actually talking to God, there’s no reason they should have to lock the door.” People seemed afraid to say these things to my Mom and the other women, so they said them to me, a child about 8 years old. Several of the men in the church started saying things like “locking the door gave an appearance of homosexuality more than prayer”. At one point the pastor actually asked them to stop going in there. They refused. He didn’t feel that it was right to “force” people into things, and didn’t want to start making rules about use of the church building, so nothing else official was done beyond his personal request to them to stop.

Mom’s behavior at home got more and more strange. She started giving away my things to the teenage girl in this family. I was tall for my age and she was short, so even though we were about 10 years apart we were pretty much the same size. A lot of times when I got new clothes she would ‘suggest’ that I give them to this girl. (Side note – we were poor, and new clothes were a rarity so I not only wanted, but needed to keep them.) Also, mother-daughter time had ceased to exist. This girl was 18 and out of school, so she spent a lot of weekdays at our house. Mom would send me outside to do my homeschooling with instructions to watch over my 4 year old sister at the same time. On days that they didn’t come over, she spent hours on the phone with the girl and her mother.

If my Dad, my sister, or myself complained, we were hindering her ministry. She would state things such as “I have a call from God to ‘clean up the church’ and if you stand in my way you’ll be judged with blasphemy. Do you want to go to hell and burn forever? Is that what you want? You kids don’t go bother your Dad at his job, don’t bother me while I’m doing mine.”

I started to act out against these things. Since I was a child, I acted out in very childish ways. I cried and would run away and hide whenever Mom would announce that we were seeing these people again. I intentionally started messing up my schoolwork hoping to force Mom to spend time with me. I tried to run away from home. I spent as much time at relatives houses as I possibly could. Soon, I noticed Mom and these other women watching me with a look of suspicion and hatred that scared me – badly.

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