There is a poignant story in the gospel of Mark where Jesus encounters a young man tormented by a demon.

The boy’s father, who desperately wants Jesus’ disciples to help him, has reached the point of exhaustion. The disciples cannot free the man’s son from the demon. The simple question we face at this moment in the United States is can we be freed from our demons?

The murders of Alton B. Sterling, Philando Castile, the five Dallas police officers, and the other black men killed last week who did not make the news show us our oppression. The problem with invoking the demonic is that such invocation has been used as a rhetorical band-aid to cover a wound far too serious to imagine recovery. Yet we must invoke the demonic now not to cover over what Wendell Berry called the racial wound but in order to understand the kind of resistance we face to our liberation.

Racial antagonism structures our imaginations as does our love of weapons. The former creates our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom.

I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about the demonic sought to capture the dynamic interplay of our being oppressed by evil and our making ourselves tools for evil’s use. Some yield to evil, and others receive the suffering inflicted by such yielding.

Click Here to Read Full Story – Originally Published by Religion Dispatches