Are We in a Spiritual War?
Part One – The Battle for the Soul
By Gina Detwiler
It started with Sandy Hook.
Like everyone else who read about or witnessed that horrific event, I wanted to know why. How could a seemingly quiet, non-violent kid do such a thing? Many hypotheses were offered: bullying, bad parenting, lax gun laws, mental illness, psychopathy. But there seemed to me a spiritual component being overlooked. Humans are, after all, not only physical and psychological beings. They are spiritual beings.
I started doing research. Lots of it. Which led to the Forlorn series, a fictional exploration of spiritual warfare at work in our world. The first in the series, Forlorn, examined it on a personal level: people tormented by demons. The second book, Forsaken, examined the spiritual war in our culture, particularly in the world of rock music. The third book, Forgiven, dealt with it in the scientific and institutional realm, and the forthcoming book, Forbidden, presents spiritual warfare on a global scale.
None of this was planned. In each case, I responded to what I was seeing in the world around me. I was examining the reasons why there is evil in the world. Of course, I don’t have a pat answer for that one. But I do have a lot of clues.
If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil and demons. You can’t take one without the other. The Bible tells us the origin of evil, although modern psychology has tried to obliterate the term. An FBI profiler who worked on the Columbine shooting case was asked about this and replied: “We don’t use the word evil. That’s a spiritual term.
God is Dead
Our enlightened, rational world has abandoned God, therefore all biblical concepts of good and evil. What’s left is nihilism. All that exists are matter and energy. There is no intrinsic morality; therefore, anything is permissible. Just read a popular YA novel like Ready, Player One, and you will get the picture.
Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with promoting nihilism on the heels of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Since God did not exist, he said, nothing had intrinsic value. God created the world and said, “It is good.” But if He didn’t, then it isn’t. Nietzsche conceded that this worldview would lead to passivity and depression. After all, what is there to look forward to in living a life that has no moral purpose?
But Nietzsche offered a solution to the problem: don’t be depressed. Be empowered.
There is no God; there is only Will. And what does the Will desire? Power.
This is Satan’s calling card.
The Will to Power
The idea of the will to power (however misused) was hugely attractive to murderous dictators. In the wake of Nietzsche and Darwin, the intellectual offspring of the so-called Enlightenment, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao murdered over 100 million people. Stalin was more covert in his appropriation of Niezschian principles, but Hitler’s concept of the superior race was lifted straight from Nietzsche’s “Superman,” as well as Darwin’s “Origin of the Species: Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (Most people don’t know the full title, and therefore miss its blatant racism.) Hitler’s propaganda film was titled, appropriately, The Triumph of the Will.
This is Satanic by any measure. Yet Nietzsche didn’t believe in Satan any more than God. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were all atheists. Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, says the concept of Satan is merely an extension of consciousness. Even the founder of the Satanic Temple insists he doesn’t believe in Satan. But you don’t have to believe in Satan to do his bidding. All you have to do is reject God.
Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (Matt 12:30)
The Culture of Death
The Columbine shooters hated everyone. But most especially, they hated God. They wrote incessantly about their hatred for God in their journals, and they asked many of their victims if they believed in God before shooting them. They inspired a generation of mass shooters who worshiped them and tried to emulate them, which is precisely what they wanted.
Many of these killers were outspoken atheists and seemed to take a profound interest in targeting Christians. All were loners, obsessed with violent movies, video games, and heavy metal music. A few experienced bullying (who hasn’t?) and abuse, but many came from loving, two-parent homes. They all had a fascination with death and firearms. A few were diagnosed with mental illness, though it should be pointed out that therapies and drugs did little good. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that psychotropic drugs might have been a contributing factor to their violent behavior.
Kip Kinkle was a fifteen-year-old from a loving family who killed his parents and then went on a rampage at his school, killing two students and injuring dozens. This was a year before Columbine. Kinkle was also a professed atheist. During his interview with police, there is a chilling moment where he cries out, clearly in torment: “My head just doesn’t work right. God damn these VOICES inside my head. … I have to kill people. I don’t know why. … I have no other choice.”
After his arrest, a psychologist who examined Kip said he “believed that Kip murdered his parents and opened fire on fellow students the next day (killing two and injuring 25) under the influence of these hallucinatory voices. He described Kip recounting the voices to him: “‘My Dad was sitting at the bar [in the kitchen]. The voices said, ‘Shoot him.’ I had no choice. The voices said I had no choice.’ and later, after he killed his mother, ‘The voices said, ‘Go to school and kill everybody. Look what you’ve already done.'” During cross-examination, Bolstad stated categorically, “I think the primary thing that was operating in his feeling and need to kill … were the voices.”
Anyone who knows about demonism knows about those voices.
The Influence of Music
Kinkle carried out the murder of his parents while playing “Liebestod” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde very loudly on the home stereo. Wagner was a huge favorite of both Nietzsche and Hitler. (Hitler used Wagner’s “Rienzi” overture as the musical theme for his rallies.) Nietzsche was a gifted musician. He could play the piano by ear. He idolized Wagner, who was, in turn, a great admirer of Nietzsche’s work. Both shared the nihilistic worldview put forth initially by Schopenhauer, who viewed life as essentially tragic. He stressed the value of the arts in helping human beings cope with the miseries of existence and accorded pride of place to music as the purest expression of the ceaselessly striving Will that underlay the world of appearances and constituted the inner essence of the world.
A hundred years later, a boy listens to Wagner’s music before going on a murder spree.
No, I am not saying that listening to Wagner or even Marilyn Manson (Kinkle’s favorite) will lead you to commit murder. But then again, none of these murderers were listening to Michael W. Smith or the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir either.
Violent music, art, comics, video games, and movies are all products of a nihilistic, no-rules-but-my-rules culture that despises the idea of God. They seem to have a significant influence on most of these young killers, yet any attempt to talk about this issue is met with derision by the media and the professional class.
We kicked God out of schools a long time ago. But we didn’t kick out Satan.
Speaking Poison
Forsaken, the sequel to Forlorn, delves into the spiritual power of music. For good and evil. Marz, a rapper turned evangelist, puts it this way: “If a commercial during the Super Bowl is so effective at implanting and manipulating our desires that corporations spend millions of dollars for that 30-second spot, how much are we being subconsciously manipulated and programmed by the music we listen to for hours, weeks, months and years?”
Marz should know. He had been on world tours with bands like Insane Clown Posse and Korn, steeped in the dark world of drugs, alcohol, hedonism, and witchcraft. One day he accepted Jesus, and everything changed. “It was like blinders fell off of my eyes. I was seeing for the first time what my lyrics were — how I was speaking poison into the hearts and minds of the crowds at the shows.”
Marz lived the life of Forsaken’s Lester Crow until God got a hold of him. Now he praises Jesus with his music and speaks to kids all over about the power of music and the love of God.
Rejecting God
Am I saying there are demons behind every mass shooting? No. But why do we discount their power and influence completely? Take the Las Vegas shooter, an older, well-off man with no known history of mental illness and no religious or political affiliation. The worst thing anyone could say about him was that he was a “germophobe.”
Why did he do it? Maybe just because he could.
When a person rejects God, whether consciously or not, the door is open to any behavior because there is no moral framework. You can be a good person, but then again, you don’t have to be because there is no such thing as good, anyway.
This is called a lie. And lies are what Satan is all about.
1 Peter 5:8 says that the devil is like a “roaring lion who prowls around seeking someone to devour.” And who do lions prey upon? The weakest, the youngest, the most vulnerable of the herd. Our youth are definitely at risk. But we ignore the spiritual battle for their souls at our peril.
Gina Detwiler is the author of the bestselling YA Supernatural series Forlorn and The Ultimate Bible Character Guide, as well as a co-author with Priscilla Shirer of the bestselling middle-grade fantasy series The Prince Warriors.
The fourth books in the Forlorn series, Forbidden, comes out in March 2022.
