“The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent, who is called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”
AFTER STEPPING OFF THE BLUE LINE in Rosemont, Illinois, just outside Chicago, I walked down River Road, a corridor of convention centers and hotels. Entering the Hilton, I asked the concierge, a bit awkwardly, “Can you tell me where the curse-breaking seminar is?”
He pointed me to the elevators, instructing me to take them to the second floor and hang a left. There I found a small lounge with a square of couches and chairs. I stood near a young couple across from a middle-aged woman who looked very worn and tired. But there was a glimmer of hope in her face.
“Have you ever been to one of these?” she asked in our direction. The young couple and I shook our heads. “Oh, you are in for an experience. Yes. Yes. The best thing to do, if you feel them manifesting, is go with it. Just go with it,” she told us, shimmying her shoulders.
A couple minutes later, the elevators went ping ping and a man walked out, followed by an entourage. “We’re getting a little bit of a late start, but we’ll get going in just a minute here!” said the seventy-year-old Rev. Bob Larson, dressed in a tan suit, blue shirt, and striped yellow tie. There was gray showing through an orange dye job on his thin hair and beard. He and his staff disappeared into a conference room down the hall.
Rev. Larson calls himself “the Real Exorcist” and says that just the mention of his name can bring the fear of God into demons. He claims he has done thousands of successful exorcisms, casting out demons and sending them hissing and scurrying back to the bowels of hell. He has a devoted following in his current home city of Phoenix (he was based for a long time in Denver), where he is head of the Spiritual Freedom Church, as well as satellite groups, the Do What Jesus Did ministry, around the country. He also has an active ministry in war-torn Ukraine.
Others say Rev. Larson is not a great religious warrior but a con man who preys on the vulnerability of emotionally disturbed people. I made several attempts to e-mail Larson, followed by a phone call to someone who said I needed to e-mail, then I sent another e-mail and got no answer. I had subscribed to Rev. Larson’s newsletter by this point, and it mentioned he was touring and would be in Chicago on May 9, 2014.
“Thank you, we had a little delay. Come on in, folks. How are you? God bless you, good to see you.” Larson was in the doorway, shaking our hands as we entered. “Thanks for waiting. God bless you, good to see you. How are you?”
Inside the room were several rows of chairs with an aisle dividing them down the middle. Loud, soaring Christian rock was pumping out of a single speaker. As people settled, Rev. Larson walked to the front of the room. I had worried I might stand out, so I had dressed in the most nondescript business casual clothes I could find. As it turned out, the focus would be not on me but on three young people in the first row. They were all wearing a heavy Goth style. One of them had a swoop of dyed black hair, lots of piercings (including some kind of animal vertebra hanging from his ear), lots of jewelry, leather pants, and a Blood Ceremony (a Canadian doom metal band) tank top. Tattoos from the Egyptian Book of the Dead ran up his arm. Larson approached them.
“You look like you’re all together,” he said, staring at them and smiling sharply. “Whose idea was this? Your idea? What are your names? Adam, Jerome, and Ashley. How do you know about me? YouTube? Can I ask you something? Are you a Satanist? You are? He’s with you. She’s with you. Are they with you?” Larson asked, pointing at a couple a few rows away. They had a punk rock look and smiled sheepishly at being pointed out.
“They’re not? How did you find out about me?” he called over to them.
“YouTube.”
Moments after starting his seminar, Larson asked for a show of hands of how many people had seen him on YouTube. Most of the room, about fifty people, raised their hands. There was an interesting mix of people—a middle-aged Ukrainian couple and their elderly parents, an entire Asian family, a wide age range of African Americans together in a group, and a few lone individuals. They were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
“I tell people I have one of the biggest mega-churches in America. I call it YouTube. We’ve reached over three million people with our videos. So technology has an upside and it has a downside.”
I stumbled across Rev. Larson when I was searching for a news report I had seen about the Vatican stating that the Catholic Church needed to train more exorcists. An Internet search for “Exorcism School” brought up Rev. Larson, who is the founder of the International School of Exorcism®, an online correspondence course that will train you in the art of demon fighting at three different levels: Apprentice Level ($995), Warrior Level ($1,795), or Exorcist Level ($2,495).
Larson’s website also advertised Bob Larson’s Exorcism Channel, and I soon found myself sucked in, stupefied by the spectacle in front of me. The first video I watched was titled The Demon of Hate Didn’t Have a Chance with Exorcist Bob Larson.
The video opens with a man in glasses and a white button-down shirt, identified as Jeff, held by his arms by two men. Larson stands in front of them, staring at Jeff intently, with a large silver crucifix and a Bible in one hand and a microphone in the other. Three young women, also armed with crucifixes, flank Larson and Jeff to the right. These are the Teenage Exorcists, Larson’s eighteen-year-old daughter Brynne and her friends, sisters Tess Scherkenback, seventeen, and Savannah Scherkenback, twenty.
“I do have a very adventurous life!” Brynne wrote on her profile on the trio’s website. “Between casting out demons, keeping up with demanding schoolwork, and travelling all over the world, I have had some crazy experiences!”
Larson assembled this Charlie’s Angels-style squad to give a young, photogenic face to exorcism; there were hopes they would get their own reality show, but an attempt by a production company to launch it fizzled.
“Satan, you keep toying with this man,” Larson says on the video, shaking his head while looking at Jeff. One of the Teenage Exorcists holds her crucifix to Jeff’s forehead.
“I don’t like it. He really wants to get free.” Larson whacks Jeff in the chest with his Bible. “I strengthen the spirit and I smite you with it! You let him go!”
Jeff begins to writhe around and hiss. “Who are you!” Larson demands, and Jeff flails his arms, trying to break free of the grasp of Larson’s assistants. “Hate!” he growls.
“Well, what age did you get him, Hate?” Larson demands. “When? When did you get him!”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Jeff whispers hoarsely, a whistle in his voice obscuring the words.
“What?” Larson asks, turning to the Teenage Exorcists.
“He won’t tell you,” one of them interprets, disgusted.
“You won’t tell?” Larson says, stepping backward and tilting his head back to gaze down the microphone at Jeff in defiance.
“Put Bibles on him,” he says to the Teenage Exorcists, with a swooping motion. The three women press their Bibles against Jeff. Larson swings around and joins them, and Jeff is no longer visible in the tangle of exorcist arms and Bibles. “We torment you,” Larson says into the mic in his free hand. “We torment you with the word of God.”
Jeff grunts, growls, and hisses.
I watched more videos, people thrashing and hollering, screaming and writhing, growling in demon voices, their faces contorted.
I clicked on a video titled Bob Larson Faces Jezebel and Lucifer Head On! and watched as a young woman named Tamara snarls at Larson, then screams at the top of her lungs. A little tired of all the screaming, I hit the mute button and watched as she collapses to her knees, still screaming, apparently pushed down by the might of Larson’s crucifix on her forehead.
I tried to weigh the options as they pertained to what I saw on Bob Larson’s Exorcist Channel, and I came up with three of them.
One: Larson and certain members of his church are “in on it.” They have discussed the staging of the exorcism, and although it may be improvised instead of literally scripted, it is a premeditated performance.
Two: Larson’s congregation believe they are possessed or believe that demon possession and subsequent exorcism is how they must fit in to be a member of the group. It is a group manifestation that has become real in their minds. The ritual is part of their fellowship.
And, I suppose, to be fair … Three: Larson’s congregation is actually getting possessed by demons at an alarming rate.
“Great to be here in Chicago!” Rev. Larson told us, speaking into a microphone turned up a little too loudly. The room was hot and stuffy.
“Before we get started, let’s take a minute to give a hug and a handshake to someone sitting next to you.” Loud music blared on the PA again, and Larson quickly walked to his staff to confer with them, looking toward the Satanist in the front row.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the hand of a young blonde woman sitting to my left.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the hand of a middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt, jeans, and baseball cap sitting directly behind me.
Larson returned and decided to call up two women he had had personal exorcism sessions with in Chicago to deliver testimonials. One of them was named Michelle, the woman out in the waiting lounge who had asked if we had attended previous seminars.
“Now, when I talked to Michelle, I was thinking, like with a lot of African Americans, that the curse might go back to African witchcraft. That makes sense—that’s where your ancestors are from.” Larson believes demons are passed down from generation to generation, an ancestral curse that can go back hundreds of years. Larson will sometimes match this idea to race. A Hispanic person, he’ll say, might have an Aztec or Mayan curse on them. African Americans are cursed by voodoo or African witch doctors. Even more controversially, he received a lot of negative press when he banished the “Demon of Homosexuality” from a person.
Sometimes when these demons manifest, they’ll even give Larson their age when he demands it. “How far does this curse go back? How far!” he would scream at a possessed person. “Ten generations,” it would hiss back.
“Wherever this thing was hiding, it was causing me a lot of pain,” Michelle explained to us solemnly, while Larson stood next to her, his hand on her shoulder, his microphone tilted toward her. “Every time I went to the doctor, they said, ‘No, you’re OK.’ So I was like, The devil is stealing my money, because every time I go, I have to pay out a copay. There was nothing wrong with me. Well, except the demons.”
Larson then got into the exorcism itself. “This started out fairly calmly, and then this thing comes out and screams in my face! It startled even me!” he said. “Do you remember what it said?” he cued Michelle.
“It said, ‘I don’t like you,’ but it didn’t say it nice like I am now,” she said, smiling and letting out a short laugh.
“It told us it went back one hundred generations,” Larson said slowly. Audience members murmured in awe. “I said the word ‘Egypt,’ and about twenty minutes later we’re talking to a whole host of angry Egyptian gods.”
“I wouldn’t even have thought of that,” Michelle said, shaking her head.
“Ra, Horus, Osiris, Isis …” Larson said, listing the visiting Egyptian deities.
“I just want to encourage people,” Michelle told us. “I didn’t know what was in there, but I knew I needed to let it go.”
Larson was about to get into the meat of his seminar, but on taking another look at his Satanist contingency in the front row, he decided to make a spectacle of the situation.
“I know you’re sitting there and I want your full, undivided attention,” Larson said, waving his hand across the room. “I know some of you can’t resist staring at my slightly strange friends here in the front row. I’m going to give you one chance to stare, and then you can’t stare anymore. C’mere!” Larson gestured for the young trio to join him. “This is Adam—my friend Adam—and Ashley, and this is Adam’s boyfriend, Jerome. Adam here is a Satanist, these other two we aren’t so sure about.” Ashley later said she was an atheist, Jerome an agnostic. The audience was completely pin-drop silent.
“You know about me, you’ve seen my YouTube videos?” Larson said, then flicked his mic toward Adam.
“Yup,” Adam replied.
“You’ve read my blog?”
“Yup.”
“What happens when you go to the shopping mall? Does everyone stare at you?”
“Oh, well … I don’t go shopping that much.”
“Why all the piercings? The bones?”
“It’s like having a Christmas tree around all year, I guess.”
“And this—here he has a patch,” Larson said, pointing to Adam’s knee and looking at the audience in shock, “that depicts Anton LaVey, the founder … of the Church of Satan … himself!”
“Zeena, if this new Satanic century truly does come into being, if your numbers increase in the Church of Satan and, as you hope, the number of Christians decrease and suddenly you are the people of the new social order, describe to me what that social order would be like.”
Challenging Satanists is old hat for Rev. Larson.
“Well, I think it would take on its own momentum. What we would see is nature taking its course, because that’s all we stand for is to let nature dictate what our actions are, whether it’s a moment-to-moment or gut-instinct level …”
“Can you be more specific?”
That was Larson in 1989, debating Satanists Zeena and Nikolas Schreck. Larson is wearing a similar suit, but his orange hair and beard is fuller, his face more youthful.
Zeena, dressed in black, with pulled-back blonde hair, ruby red lipstick, and high arched pencil eyebrows, at the time was known by her maiden name, LaVey, and was the daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey (d. 1997). At the time of the debate, Zeena LaVey was the Church of Satan’s high priestess, and her husband, Nikolas Schreck, also dressed in black, with a widow’s peak and missing an ear from an assault, was leader of a different group, the Werewolf Order. They were the “First Family of Satanism,” as Larson dubbed them, selling a VHS of the debate under that name.
The year 1989 was in the thick of a period in the 1980s and ’90s known as the Satanic Panic. This was when Satan and his minions, we were told by Larson and others, were everywhere and looking to capture children with their claws. They were in heavy metal music, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, and Hollywood movies. Wild, unsubstantiated stories of a mass Satanic network kidnapping and sacrificing children during black masses spread and were treated as fact.
It was a Renaissance period for Larson, a former musician who played in a band called the Rebels before being reborn. Larson had already been promoting the dangers of the occult, starting with his 1967 book Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion, followed by 1969’s Hippies, Hindus and Rock & Roll. In the 1980s Larson began challenging Satanists to meet him face-to-face to debate.
The debate caused a sensation—wow, real Satanists!—and Larson repeated the act by routinely having heated confrontations with Satanists on his call-in radio show, Talk Back!
Guests included the likes of Glen Benton, of the Satanic death metal band Deicide, and members of Mayhem, GWAR, Obituary, and Napalm Death. Soon it became a little too routine. But then Larson had another idea. Instead of interrogating this parade of black-clad, dreary Satanists, why not try challenging the demons themselves to debate?
“So you don’t do any of the rituals, you just look strange?” Larson asked Adam the Satanist. He was doing kind of a one-man good cop/ bad cop routine on Adam and his friends.
“Don’t you think he looks strange?” Larson challenged Adam’s boyfriend, Jerome, who was wearing a suit and skinny tie and had a floppy black wave of hair.
“Exotic,” Jerome responded.
Larson asked if he could say a prayer for the three. They agreed. Larson reached for a container of holy oil. “I anoint you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” he said, sticking a thumbprint of holy oil on Ashley’s forehead. He then repeated the process on the other two.
“I’m not doing this for a theatrical reason,” Larson said, turning to us. His voice had become really soft and tender. “I genuinely care about these young people. And you know what? They’re here. And I’m grateful for that. So I want the devil to know something: I claim these young people for Christ.” He turned and looked deeply at Ashley.
“Interesting enough, Ashley …” dramatic pause, “you have the most demons.”
Ashley smiled, a little taken aback.
“If there were demons, I would probably believe that,” she said.
“People would think him,” Larson said, casually looking at Adam before returning his gaze to Ashley. “But you … they’re looking at me.” Larson grabbed a large silver crucifix and tipped the cross end onto Ashley’s forehead. She looked a little frightened now; her joke in attending this thing had gone too far.
“I bind you, Satan, for all the things you’ve done to hurt this young woman!” Rev. Larson said, staring intensely at Ashley’s face. “For all the pain you’ve caused her. In the name of Christ …” he removed the cross and stared at them silently for a second.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, softly again. “I want to say one more thing. I bless you. I bless you. I bless you.” He turned to the audience. “Does that surprise you? How many know that’s Biblical? Reach out your hands to these people.” Everyone in the audience reached their right arm forward and spread out their fingers. Some people did it with both arms. I awkwardly followed suit and extended my right arm with my fingers out.
“Repeat after me,” Larson said into the mic, while Adam, Ashley, and Jerome stood dumbfounded next to him. “We the people of God (we the people of God) bless these young people (bless these young people) with the favor of God (with the favor of God), and we pray (and we pray) that God will shine his favor upon them (that God will shine his favor upon them) in the name of Jesus (in the name of Jesus). Now I want you to tell them that you love them. (We love you.)”
“OK! Are you ready to break your curses?”
“All right! Amen!” someone called out behind me.
Larson offers a way for you to find out if you are at high risk for a demon possession. For a mere $9.95, you can take his Demon Test® and answer twenty-one questions that will calculate the odds for you from the comfort of your own computer. Determined to find out if I was possessed (and possibly showing a demonic journalistic bias), I paid up* and began answering the test questions as honestly as I could.
Number 2: “Have you ever experimented with two or more forms of the occult?”
Number 12: “Do voices tell you to commit illegal acts, blaspheme God, or indulge in illegal acts?”
And a follow-up: “Have you asked Satan to take your life in exchange for something?”
More questions dealt with abusive family members, failure at relationships, financial hardships, and substance abuse.
I clicked the SUBMIT button and waited and wondered as the Demon Test® worked out the results. To my surprise I was informed, “Your test score is 19. You are at low risk for demonic oppression/ possession.”
If you are oppressed (which is demons just harassing you) or possessed (which is when demons are actually living inside of you), the site recommends you set up a one-on-one session with Rev. Larson. If that is a bit out of your range, Rev. Larson again embraces technology, offering an exorcism session via Skype. Plug in, log on, and get your demons out. One-hour online exorcism session: $295 suggested donation. Other things you are able to pick up from Larson’s site for your demon battle include Larson’s Book of Spiritual Warfare ($19.99) and a replica of the same silver cross that Larson and the Teenage Exorcists use, blessed and anointed by Larson himself ($100).
“The Rev. Larson claims he is not profiting by doing these exorcisms, but Fox 6 takes a closer look. You’ll want to stick around because at ten forty-five we reveal what we uncovered,” news anchor Estha Trouw intoned in a 2006 report for Fox 6 San Diego.
“For several years, Larson has been dogged by finances and how they relate to his ministry,” the station’s investigative reporter, John Mattes, explained. He found Larson had gotten $142,242 in compensation for the year as well as $28,000 for his pension. When confronted with the financial report, Larson tried to say the money was used for travel, “but we found another part of the report that said the ministry paid for travel expenses,” Mattes explained, as the screen highlighted part of the report for travel—$186,683. Cars were also paid for by the church, and the report found that over $24,000 a year was being paid for food expenses.
“Is this the homeless you’re feeding, or you?” Mattes asked, pointing at Larson, with the report in his hand.
Larson smiled angrily. “I’ll be happy to answer questions, but these are gotcha journalism questions.”
“No, final question. Has the ministry treated you well? Financially?”
“Heh heh heh. You know, that’s one of those questions like ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’”
Larson was about to start the main portion of his seminar, having his assistants hand out pens and paper to those who needed them. But first he strongly suggested people buy copies of his book Curse Breaking, and they might as well buy copies of his last book, Demon Proofing Prayers, too.
“We make it available for fifteen dollars; if you want both books you can have them for twenty-five dollars. Now that’s a deal! Here’s what we’re going to do—now follow carefully. If you want just the Curse Breaking book, hold up one finger. If you want both books, hold up two fingers. If you want a slip to pay by credit card, make a letter C with your fingers.” Fingers went up, and Larson directed his assistants to step up.
“Quickly, who’s got the credit card slips? Mike, come to the front and work back, that’ll be more efficient! Envelopes, where’s the envelopes? Two books right here, quickly. Anyone need a credit card slip? This is not the offering, that’s later. Books, right here. I need you guys to keep up. Run! You never would have kept up with me in the Ukraine! Anyone didn’t get one? Get ready to hand the baskets. Anyone else need an envelope for credit card? This is not the offering, just to pay for the books.” After a whirlwind of book orders, Larson settled down.
“Turn to page thirteen—that’s where we’re going to start.”
Larson led us through a couple pages of Curse Breaking and explained how people get the curse of demons. He drew an illustration of a stick figure with a bird flying above it on a dry erase board.
“It’s like a bird flying around that wants to land on your head,” he explained, tapping out swirly dotted lines indicating the bird’s flight pattern. “It’s flying around waiting for you to give it permission to land on you. But guess who else can give it permission? Your ancestors. Your ancestor is promiscuous? You’ll marry someone who fools around. Dad’s a drunk? You’ll struggle with it. Mom’s an addict? You’ll become one. It’s a curse!”
Larson decided it was time to pitch enrolling in his International School of Exorcism, which, he explained, was having a limited time offer of a reduced enrollment fee of $200 per class level, all three levels for “just $600, now that’s a deal.” As testimonial, he called up an exorcism student, a giant, jolly-looking African American man with a bald head and a beard.
“I am so honored to have Pastor James Vivian here with us tonight. He pastors in Kansas City, one of my dearest friends. He has started Do What Jesus Did deliverance teams all over Michigan and Illinois and Missouri. He is just a mighty, mighty man of God. James, come up here and say hello to these people!” Applause. “If you’re a demon, you don’t want to mess with my friend James!” Larson added.
“Hello everybody! God bless y’all!” Pastor Vivian said cheerfully. “Oh Satanists, my heart goes out to y’all,” he said, smiling and gesturing to Adam, Jerome, and Ashley. “I got twenty-one grandkids, five great-grandkids, ten children, and they don’t all believe in it. I was in psychiatry, that was my field, and I didn’t believe in it, but now, demons don’t want to mess with me! So God bless y’all. We gonna be prayin’ for you on my team … we gonna whup demon …” he stopped himself from saying “ass,” covering his mouth and laughing.
“I love y’all,” he told the three, “but we come to whup demons!”
“God bless you!” Larson said, throwing his head back and laughing heartily.
“Get wild. Go with it. Go wild,” Larson told us at the conclusion of his talk on curse breaking. This was the big finale of the seminar, when Larson went headfirst after the demons. The tension in the room was rising.
“Some of you can already feel yourself getting fidgety—that’s good. As we break these curses, focus on the personal pain. Think about the worst things that have happened to you. The curse is attached to the pain in your life, not in the joy. They’re embedded in the negative stuff! That’s where the demons are. They live in it! They live in your misery! A lot of preachers will smile at you and tell you everything is all right. I’m here to kick demon butt! Are you ready?”
“Yes,” the audience murmured.
“I want you two up here ready to give me a hand,” Larson called to his assistants.
“I’m going to lead you in a prayer and tell the devil to leave you. Do you know in the Ukraine over half the audience manifests demons? It’s not that they have more demons, they are just more transparent before God. Americans are just too cool. Whatever you feel, just feel it. Honestly, if you came here with demons, don’t you want to get rid of them? Think about the pain. Focus on it.” Larson lifted his crucifix up to chin level and began walking slowly down the aisle, pointing the cross at various people in the audience. He led a long prayer in a firm voice.
“In the name of Jesus,” he started.
“In the name of Jesus,” the audience repeated.
“I confess (I confess) Jesus Christ (Jesus Christ) rose from the dead (rose from the dead) defeated the devil (defeated the devil). I want the devil to be defeated …”
Larson’s prayer did have an impact on the people around me. The young woman sitting to my left, whom I suspected might just be another fan of Bob Larson’s Exorcism Channel, suddenly burst into tears and began weeping. Michelle, two rows behind me, began speaking in tongues or perhaps ancient Egyptian.
“Ho dun tay ch chh chh,” she chanted. “Hooooooe!” she yelled out a few seconds later. A woman across the aisle began weeping, too. Then the woman directly behind me began wailing: “Oh please, God! Please, please help me! Oh help me, help me, please! Please, please, please! Help me, God, please! Please!”
“Move these chairs up here,” Larson instructed his assistants.
“Oh please, please, help me, God, please!”
“Ha cho hay ha ch ch.”
As this was happening, I realized I had been holding my breath, so I started breathing again. Larson walked up to my row and gestured to the weeping woman sitting next to me.
“Come here,” he said. Then he selected the young woman weeping across the aisle. “Come here,” he said. He led them to the chairs in front of the congregation.
“By the name of God I smite you for what you’ve done,” he said angrily, staring down at the two women. “You’re going to release these people and let them go! I release you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. I put the torment of God in you!”
Larson told the young woman who had been sitting on my left to stand up.
“When I asked people a moment ago to focus on some hurt, what did you focus on?”
“You had an abortion. OK. How old were you at the time?”
“Twenty-one or twenty-two.”
“Well, people make mistakes. Are you Christian?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve asked the Lord to forgive you?”
“Yes.”
The woman went on to tell Larson she was raised in a “terrible home” that she was kicked out of by an abusive father.
“What were you feeling back there?” Larson asked, pointing to the empty seat next to me.
“Pain. And hurt. And misery.”
Larson anointed her with holy oil. “Don’t try to figure out anything I do here, just go with it. And if you feel something evil inside you, let it rip. Look at me.”
Larson stared at the woman and began to angrily scold Satan for cursing her womb. He yelled at the demons Death and Murder. “Just let it overtake you, let it look at me—it’s evil. Look at me. You’re going to stop, Satan, you’re going to stop it now!”
No demons manifested. The woman just stood there, looking like she might be hyperventilating, with tears streaming down her face.
“You’ve got demons. You’re so terrified, you’re getting in the way of them. I understand; I’m not making a criticism, just an observation. Your terror is getting in the way of me getting to the demons. You need to relax and in your mind say, Lord, let me be in your presence so I can be healed.”
Larson switched his message back to the demons: “You won’t be able to hide forever, Satan! How long do you think you can hide? I know Death and Murder are there, I know my old nemesis Jezebel is there … who else? Well, if I don’t get you now, I’ll get you later. Do I just need to put you in torment? OK, you got that, Satan? Torment … torment!”
The woman just continued to stand there, weeping, frightened. With no demons manifesting, Rev. Larson explained that she should step to the side and he would return to her.
“OK, we’re going to get to this. It’s just right now you’re just so emotional about all this, it’s a bit of a challenge, but that’s OK.”
“I want you to come up here. C’mon. What’s your first name?”
“Kimberly,” said the woman who’d been sitting across the aisle from me.
“Kimberly? How old are you, Kimberly?”
Kimberly said she was thirty-one, single, and had three children. Larson led her through a curse-breaking prayer to ensure they were “bastards no more.”
“What were you so touched by out there?” Rev. Larson asked, pointing to her empty chair.
“Oh … I …” she said, beginning to sob heavily. “I …”
“Help me out here.”
“Since I was a uh … a little uh …”
“Since you were a little girl what?”
“It came in my room … at night … and I couldn’t move. And … it’s embarrassing.”
“What?” Rev. Larson said. Kimberly was so upset that Larson couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“What?”
“Embarrassing.”
“What? Nothing’s embarrassing. You were asleep and couldn’t move, and you felt like someone tried to have sex with you,* or touch you, or molest you?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, it happens to lots of women; it’s just no one wants to talk about it. Don’t feel badly. It’s not your fault! You’re not some kind of pervert. It’s just, there’s a curse somewhere that’s opened you up to this. It’s happened to a lot of women in this room. They’re just embarrassed to talk about it. Bring her a Kleenex. What other problems you got?” Larson asked, as she wiped her face with the tissue.
“I can’t sleep at night. I lost everything … because of my boy … friend,” she could hardly say the word.
“Who’s your boyfriend? Is he a bad dude?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad? Drug addict?”
“No, he’s abusive.”
“Abusive to you?”
Kimberly nodded, tears streaming down her face. “He got my house tear-gassed up.”
“He had your house tear-gassed?”
“The police.”
“The police came after him?”
“Yes.”
Larson led her through another curse-breaking prayer. No demons manifested there either, so he had her go stand by the first woman, then called up the woman sitting behind me, who had been saying “Please, please, God, help me” over and over. With the three crying women at the front and Larson with his dyed hair, clashing suit, and microphone, he looked like the host of a strange ’70s game show, Let’s Meet Your Demons!
“My opinion of Larson’s activity is that it is more akin to primal scream therapy than legitimate exorcism,” Father Jack Ashcraft told me. Father Ashcraft is also an exorcist and a Byzantine Catholic priest from Kentucky. He has embraced new technology like Larson has, maintaining a blog titled The Bare Fisted Cleric, but has used that forum to criticize Larson as “the unreal exorcist.”
“Suffice it to say that Larson is not considered a valid exorcist by any legitimate church, as he is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglo-Catholic, is not a priest, and has no formal training under a priest who has experience in this area of ministry,” Father Ashcraft blogged.
I asked him to explain what he thought was going on in Rev. Larson’s exorcism sessions.
“In all of the videos I’ve seen he appears to manipulate his audiences’ emotional hurts and perhaps religious predisposition to acting out (most of these appear to be from the fringes of the evangelical movement) and, rather than acknowledging the mental and emotional scars as psychological issues in need of pastoral counseling and perhaps psychological assistance as well, these people act out the trauma by assigning it a name (such as lust, fear, witchcraft, death) and emote dramatically,” Father Ashcraft wrote me. “This also may be a way for them to add some sort of affirmation to their faith by manufacturing a ‘religious experience.’ Do I believe he is actually performing exorcisms? No.”
“What’s the issue, Carol?” Larson was making his last-ditch effort with the last one he called up, the one saying “Please, please, God, help me.”
“Tormented by demons. It’s always attached to me, follows me. Terrible smells.”
“You stop following this woman, Satan! She doesn’t want you anymore! You get out of her life! I take the sword of the spirit and I pierce you with it!” Larson pressed his Bible against her.
But this woman, Carol, just stood there crying, too.
“All these demons are hiding tonight! I can see them. Let your fear out, get it out. Get out of this woman’s life!”
“Help me,” Carol sobbed.
“OK, I’m trying to help you, but let me tell you, here’s the problem. When you’re in a sense of despair, I can’t get to the demons. I mean, that’s just the way it works. You have to be in a fighting mentality.”
Larson, feeling he had exhausted his demon possibilities, decided to wrap it up and get to the offering. “It’s not uncommon to meet roadblocks like this,” Larson explained to us on the failed demon appearances.
“We’re going to take an offering. No one’s said anything about money all night. Not a word! Just teach, minister, help. Well, we got some bills to pay. I got a plane ticket to buy, and I need your help to do it. If a buck is all you got, that’s wonderful. We got to finance this thing … we need some of you to give $5 if that’s all you got, but I need some of you to give $500 or $1,000. And I don’t apologize for that. And for everyone who gives a gift of $100 dollars or more, I’m going to give you a cross, and I’m going to pray over it and anoint it, and you’re going to use it as an instrument to bash the devil!”
After offering more incentives—all the books and doodads on a list for $500 or more, Larson added, “I’m going to ask you to take out that checkbook, that credit card, and help us in a very, very generous way.” Larson was about to lead us in another prayer, when he was distracted by an audience member with a question. I used the opportunity to exit the room faster than I’ve ever exited a room in my life.
It was extremely hot and stuffy, and I gasped to breathe the secular air as I walked down the hallway. All of the yelling and crying had left me emotionally drained, too. I felt angry, like maybe one of those alleged demons had come to roost on me, like in Larson’s stick figure illustration.
As I walked back to the Blue Line, I thought of the name of Larson’s ministry: Do What Jesus Did. I had a hard time imaging Jesus flying from airport hotel to airport hotel in a plaid suit, hawking two-for-one specials on his books and screaming through a microphone at alleged demons hiding inside of hysterical, sobbing women.
* Probably the strangest thing I’ll ever claim as a business expense.
* There is a name for this type of demon—an Incubus. The female equivalent is a Succubus. These demons allegedly appear in dreams in the form of humans to seduce their prey into sexual activity.