Two people I love most now attend an independent Evangelical church that is modern and highly polished in most respects. The crowd is mixed in age and contains a smattering of non-whites, the rock 'n roll gospel music is talented without dominating the service, the preacher is poised and presents himself as with-it and modern (or at least be-soul-patched). They are not charismatic in the technical sense, and most of the lessons I've heard (or heard of) are focused on morality, salvation, and modern life, not crazy demon stories.
And yet...
The last time I visited, a mission trip had just returned from Africa, and the service was given over to testimonials by the church members who had gone. (By the way, this is something that some affluent American churches do these days: buy a bunch of discount penicillin and other meds in the USA, then travel to Africa and set up a week-long health and treatment camp ostensibly aimed at improving the lives of the locals. The price of admission is willingness to attend gospel services, baptism being the measure of success.)
During this trip, the local "witch doctors" (i.e. shamans, traditional healers, as you like it) had not taken well to the sudden arrival of Christian whites there to spread a new worldview and a new set of allegiances. They spread rumors that the medicine was poison, and there were some bad looks and other signs that the missionaries were not welcome. There were several instances of people falling into fits and showing seizure-like symptoms during particularly emotional Christian worship services. Odd cloud formations were also observed.
The take-home lesson for the missionaries was that they had been at war with Satan himself, conjured and represented through his servants the witch-doctors and traditional believers. The seizures were possessing demons leaving the bodies of Africans on the cusp of being saved. There was a great deal of self-congratulation for having won victory for Christ in a literal battle, as well as a focus on the foolishness and fallenness of modern rationalists who don't accept that Satan is real and that demons are at war with the church.
As far as I can tell, no one on the trip had the slightest knowledge of the local African history, religion, or customs. There was never an effort made to understand why or how the witch-doctors (whose social place and deeply held beliefs were being undermined, after all) might influence the locals socially and psychologically to resist the missionaries. There was no question that the fits and seizures were anything but actual, full-on demon possession. The whole episode was taken as confirmation that the folk cosmology of first-century Palestine, as it is glimpsed through the New Testament, is the most accurate and realistic ground and explanation of the human condition. Modern skepticism was much denounced as a lie of the Enemy.
Sitting in the pew, feeling creepier than at any time in my adult life, I found nothing glib to say about this. Probably I could have consoled myself with thinking about the economics of superstition (medicine and air travel, passports and ideology, things like that). But instead it just led me back to the sad sense that no one is ever convinced of anything but what they fear.
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