Who Gets To Cast Out Demons? (Part 1)

Ask most mainline Protestant congregations whether they have a theology of the demonic, and you may get an uneasy pause. Ask whether they have a rite for it — actual liturgical words that address a real adversary — and many will assume the answer is no. But that assumption misses something important. The doctrine has not disappeared. In many places, the church has simply stopped saying it out loud, and that has left pastors and congregations less prepared than they need to be.

It’s Already in Your Baptism

Every time a child is baptized with a traditional Lutheran rite, something is happening that we rarely pause to name: a form of exorcism. Not the dramatic thing people imagine when they hear that word, but the church’s ancient confession that Christ delivers us from sin, death, and the devil. Luther's own baptismal booklet, the Taufbüchlein, once included the exsufflation and a direct adjuration: “Depart, thou unclean spirit, and give room to the Holy Spirit,” spoken over the child before the water. That specific formula is no longer part of the rite most of us use. What remains is the renunciation — “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?” — and while it does less explicit work than the older wording did, it has not stopped doing real theological work. It is not decorative language on the way to the “real” event of the water. It assumes a real adversary, a real bondage apart from Christ, and a real deliverance accomplished by the Word in the water. Not by technique or personal power, but by what God does in holy baptism.

That claim is general, not accusatory or individualized. Every child is born under the old dominion — Adam’s, not a specific spirit’s — and it is that general captivity the renunciation addresses and the water breaks. It is a different thing to say that a child was born with some particular spiritual attachment: a mother’s occult involvement, a generational curse actually transmitted, or a direct claim beyond the common inheritance of sin. Baptism still accomplishes the definitive transfer of dominion in that case. The child passes from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son. But a direct attachment is not always addressed with the same specificity by the sacrament’s general word as it would have been by the older rite’s direct one. That is a pastoral gap worth naming carefully — not a sacramental failure.

That is what every baptismal service already does at the level the general renunciation reaches. The theology does not need to be invented. It needs to be noticed again, and then spoken with the kind of pastoral clarity the older rite once carried.

The Rite That Went Quiet

If baptism draws the boundary at the church door, the house blessing carries that same boundary into ordinary life. Here the change in language becomes easier to see. Two versions of the rite circulate widely in Lutheran circles, depending on which tradition has produced them. They sound as if they come from different moments in the church’s life — because, in spirit, they do.

The ELCA rite (found in ELW Pastoral Care, p. 337ff) organizes the blessing around vocation and daily life: entryway, kitchen, workshop, garden, pets. It is pastorally attentive and thorough, moving room by room to bless daily labor and household spaces. Its opening prayer, designed to be prayed at the entranceway to the home, reads: “O God, watch over (names) in all their going out and their coming in; keep all evil away from their door; and let them share the hospitality of this home with all who visit, that those who enter here may know your love and peace...” That is a beautiful prayer, and there is real pastoral care in it. But it also stops short. It names no adversary and speaks no renunciation. Evil becomes an abstract condition to be protected from, rather than an enemy Jesus has already defeated and the church may name.

The LCMS rite (found in LSB Pastoral Care Companion, p. 148ff) speaks with more specificity: “Lord God Almighty, we implore You to bless and sanctify this home, its occupants, and its possessions, enriching them in every way. Drive from here the snares of the evil one and send Your holy angel to guard, protect, visit, and defend all who dwell in this home. Mercifully hear their prayers and, when their last hour comes, grant them safe haven in Your heavenly mansions…” It prays plainly for God to drive away the devil and to post angels as guardians of the home. It reinforces that clarity with Luther’s Evening Prayer, praying that the evil foe hold no power here.

Someone may want to defend the ELCA rite here on category grounds: a house blessing is not an exorcism, it was never meant to expel an indwelling spirit, so of course it does not talk that way. That is fair as far as it goes. I am not arguing that every home needs deliverance ministry.

But that does not settle the question, because Christus Victor does not leave much room for a third category between “claimed for Christ” and “left alone.” Its whole argument is that there is no neutral territory — no morally inert space where evil is merely bad weather to be managed rather than a defeated but still-active enemy to be named. A rite can decline to perform an exorcism without falling into that gap. What it cannot do, at least on Christus Victor terms, is bless a house as though the space were neutral until blessed rather than contested until claimed.

Naming the adversary is not the same move as casting one out. It is the difference between planting a flag on ground being claimed and simply tidying a room that was never in dispute. The gentler rite can leave the second impression. Under this theology, though, a home is never merely tidy. It is under one dominion or the other.

One version says the thing plainly; the other has grown quieter. A rite is addressed not only to God but also to the household that prays it. The old principle lex orandi, lex credendi — “the law of prayer is the law of belief” — is not an academic slogan. It is how faith is actually formed. What we pray shapes what we remain capable of believing. A household that prays for evil to be kept away from the door, full stop, is not being taught quite the same thing as a household that prays for the evil one’s snares to be driven out and an angel posted at the threshold. Both may confess Christus Victor if asked. Only one is being formed by a rite that assumes it out loud.

St. Paul says something adjacent in 1 Corinthians 14: uninterpreted speech reaches God, but it leaves everyone else unable to follow what is actually being said. A house blessing has the same double task. It addresses God, and it forms the people praying it. Softening these words does more than change the tone; it can stop teaching what is at stake, the same way an unintelligible tongue stops teaching the church even while it remains valid prayer. That is the real cost of the gentler rite, and it is a matter of biblical conviction, not nostalgia for older phrasing.

What We Stopped Saying

None of this is meant as a complaint about vocabulary. The doctrine is still there. What has weakened is our willingness to say it clearly and pastorally. A congregation that hears only the gentler version — “keep all evil away” and no more — has not simply softened its language. Over time, it may lose the category before the category is ever needed.

The same drift runs through both rites we have looked at here. Baptism’s renunciation still names a real adversary and a real claim, even though the old exsufflation has fallen silent, and it still reaches the general captivity every child is born under.

But general and specific are not the same thing. A congregation that has stopped saying the general form aloud may have no vocabulary ready for the specific case — the generational curse, the direct attachment — when it actually walks through the door. That is not hypothetical. It is what happens when someone needs a pastoral answer to something they cannot explain, and there is little left to offer except vague reassurance or whatever the internet supplies.

I have written before about what fills that vacuum when no one else will: a well-meaning person with little or no training, diagnosing the situation and cobbling together a ritual for “deliverance” with more confidence than authority. [Read all about that and more at: The Facebook Exorcists] Part 2 of this essay, coming next week, takes up why that gap is so dangerous, and who actually has standing to close it.

The point I am emphasizing is simple: when a church stops naming the adversary, it eventually learns to manage abstractions instead. And that is an oddly un-Lutheran approach to a deeply Lutheran topic.

The good news is that nothing needs to be invented. The language already exists. It already carries real theological weight, and it already belongs to the same confessional tradition. Recovering it is not about importing something foreign or making pastoral care more dramatic than it needs to be. It is simply a matter of using what is already ours — in baptismal preparation, in house blessings, and in the ordinary care a congregation offers its people.

In Part 2, we will turn to the harder question behind all of this: if the church already holds the theology and the words, who is actually authorized to use them in a crisis — and why that answer matters far more than we may realize.



Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area

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