Exorcising gay teenagers is one of the things that makes christianity look wholly indefensible. Nor am I trying to defend it. But I do wonder if there is anyone among our readership who has been through this, or anything like it. I suspect that there is almost no overlap between the sort of pentecostalism on display in this video and Guardian readership.
At Morris Cerullo's Earls Court rallies in the Nineties they exorcised all kinds of things backstage. I tried to watch, but the press was being kept away. But though we could see nothing, we could hear the screams; and in the darkened amphitheatre they were horrible.
Another question is whether we should conclude from these horrors that exorcisms, or magical ceremonies more generally, are always wicked and wrong. I have an Anglican priest friend who will perform them on houses, if he is asked, and he believes that nothing else will bring peace to the (real) inhabitants; and some years ago there was a celebrated and extremely interesting account of depression published in which the author, a sophisticated and educated New Yorker, found that an African ceremony cured him where drugs and analysis had failed. The point is that he had to go through the ceremony for it to work. Merely understanding it was not enough.
Of course, if these things can have beneficial effects, that makes their use for the persecution of teenagers even worse.
