For those who seek to understand the religious foundation of the continuing belief in witchcraft among members of Sarah Palin’s home church, a little crash course in demonology is called for.
Thomas Muthee has become infamous as the preacher who gave supernatural protection from witchcraft for her 2005 campaign for Governor, and announced that Sarah Palin would help “infiltrate” and “invading” the government in order to help God complete his plans – plans that end in Armageddon.
Just this last weekend, Muthee returned to the Wasilla Assembly of God church, which is still Sarah Palin’s home church, and gave a serious of sermons. In one sermon, Muthee called upon the church to work against the “spirit of witchcraft” and “python spirits“.
We’ve all heard of witches and witchcraft, of course, but what are these python spirits?
Python spirits are a character that you’ll find throughout the preachings of radical churches like Sarah Palin’s Assembly of God, once you know to look for them. The python spirits are described as demonic evil spirits that magically constrict the virtue out of their victims. Think of these demons as like a succubus, except that they’re serpentine, not sexy.
The Catholic web site Demonbusters lists pythons as spirits of false prophecy and divination. These are the demons that your pious teenage friends worried about when you played with a ouija board when you were a kid.
Theresa Cox, a missionary to the Congo, links python demons to divination games, witchcraft in Africa and even Harry Potter. Even books and movies that have witchcraft in them, she tells her followers, are portals through which evil spirits from Hell can come to possess your soul: “Python is the spirit of divination which empowers crystal ball readers, palm readers etc. to see into the future. In Africa this is much more sophisticated sorcery! People truly get sick and die. This spirit has access to us if we expose ourselves to any aspect of the occult through movies, horoscopes, “fun” fortune-telling or even reading books such as Harry Potter. This enemy loves the naiveté of its victims (especially in the American and European cultures).”
A note about Theresa Cox’s missionary work: The Congo is one of those countries in which children are being tortured and killed because they are accused of witchcraft. There is no documented case of a witch killing someone through the magical powers of satan. There are cases, however, of Christian preachers in the Congo being responsible for horrific child abuse after they encourage their followers to seek out witchcraft, even amongst their own children. “My study and time in Congo (3 years living there) has taught me some things about sorcery, witchcraft, and demonic activity,” Cox writes. What, we may fairly ask, did Cox do in the Congo? Did she participate in encouraging the anti-witch violence there?
Roy Sauzek from Wellington, Kansas warns that the curse of python demons is inherited, passed down in a family from parents to children. “Understand that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. If any of your ancestors dabbled in this type of thing, you could have this soul problem and not be aware of it,” he writes.
What makes the demon python truly evil, in the zealot’s mind, is that it promotes religious diversity. Through the idea of divination, the python demon brings people the idea that they can come up with ideas for themselves, instead of obeying authority of one doctrine. Take Heart Ministries, which regards its information about “evil spirits” as “God-given”, warns that “The Python spirit is the main influence in causing all the different religions of the world and even separate denominations!”
With these preachings, we see the true heart of this so-called demon spirit. Python is a spirit of independence from authority. When church authorities pronounce or facilitate “God-given” revelations of truth about the future, as happens with Take Heart Ministries and in the Wasilla Assembly of God Masters Commission it’s called “prophecy”. When people do the same thing on their own, without the sanction of church authorities, it’s called “divination” and is linked to the python spirits from Satan.
When Thomas Muthee goes to Sarah Palin’s church and preaches that the church must crush “python spirits”, he isn’t just preaching a crusade against witchcraft. Muthee is also calling for a struggle against religious diversity and an effort to quash dissent. Muthee is preaching the idea that those who disagree with the authority of the Wasilla Assembly of God church are to be interpreted as guided by demons from Hell that must be purged.
That’s the kind of religious model that has contributed to the brutality of witch hunts for hundreds of years, from the Dark Ages in Europe to the Salem witch trials, and including the plague of violence against accused witchcraft now troubling Eurasia and Africa. Sarah Palin’s years-long association with Thomas Muthee is therefore a source of concern for people who still support the First Amendment’s separation of Church and State, and value cultural diversity within the United States.
Let’s not forget that, just a few weeks ago, Sarah Palin pledged to work to use government in coordination with the Wasilla Assembly of God to make sure that the will of God would be done. “What I need to do is strike a deal with you guys, she said. “We can work together to make sure that God’s will be done.” Let’s not forget that three years earlier, Thomas Muthee presented Sarah Palin as someone who would take over the government in order to make it an instrument of Christian power – and Palin approved of this description of her agenda.
Even with the scanty records that are available, we can see that for years, Sarah Palin has supported a consistent agenda of infiltrating the government in order to impose the beliefs of the Wasilla Assembly of God church. That consistent theocratic approach on Palin’s part makes the weird demonology of her church important for voters to understand.
Sarah Palin needs to speak to voters truthfully about whether she truly intends to use the power of the White House to start a crusade against “python spirits”, or has just been stringing along the pentacostals at the Wasilla Assembly of God church in order to use them as the base of her political career.