Spirit Possession and Exorcism in Today’s Church of England

Abstract

The Church of England, a Protestant transformation of Catholicism, is derived from a two thousand year cultural history of belief and ritual that has, within its own biblical texts, included ideas of the hard-form of possession and exorcism, and is heir to liturgies of baptismal initiation whose early forms included formal exorcism. Moreover British Protestantism itself hosted a significant late-medieval cum early-modern phase of possession and witchcraft engaging possession by evil forces. Focused, then, on its state church, this chapter briefly sketches its historical background, offers a slightly fuller account of the last fifty years, and a more detailed analysis of contemporary exorcism and its complementary notion of possession. The detail will take three Anglican dioceses, document their approach to what is often called deliverance ministry, and furnish some detailed account of case studies of a small number of selected clerical professionals. In theoretical terms the chapter will briefly indicate the way possession and exorcism are related to ideas of evil, of social deprivation, and of personhood and embodiment. This will include the theoretically challenging phenomenon of the post 1970s Charismatic Movement within Anglicanism with its doctrinal stress of the Holy Spirit as an influence upon its largely middle-class devotees, some acceptance of evil spirits, influences, and deliverance. This ritual-focus on deliverance will be compared with that of medically-linked therapeutic care. These two foci frame an arena of cultural uncertainty, revealing paradoxical attitudes to notions of personhood, identity, ecclesial authority, mental wellbeing, and divine or satanic influence. This uncertainty will, finally, be discussed alongside phenomena that are not usually related to exorcism and yet which bring home the often ‘exotic’ elements of exorcism as belonging to some ‘other’ culture. Here the theoretical emphasis will lie on identity and one’s apparently ‘dead’ kin. The human capacity to identify with other living persons and to embrace them as part of one’s composite identity offers its own very weak form of possession, most especially when experiencing one’s dead parent’s embodied behaviour (habitus) in one’s own. In other words, the sense of the presence of one’s dead in oneself, whether in everyday behaviour or, of the sense of being close to one’s dead, as fostered in some forms of liturgical context, offers a phenomenological family resemblance to possession, albeit a benign kind not usually requiring any exorcism.