The public ministry of Jesus didn't create demonic activity, but it did expose it, theologian and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said during a recent episode of "Ask Me Anything," cautioning Christians against both the denial of spiritual evil and the unhealthy fixation on it.
Responding to a question about whether Jesus’ arrival triggered an apparent surge of demonic activity in the New Testament, the 77-year-old British author said the Gospels portray Jesus’ proclamation of God’s Kingdom as a moment when hidden spiritual forces were suddenly confronted.
“When Jesus comes into Galilee and starts saying, ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand,’ it’s as though suddenly all the furniture starts flying around the room,” Wright said, pointing to Gospel accounts of public confrontations and exorcisms. “The dark powers realize, if He does everything that He looks as if He’s going to do, then we’re in deep trouble.”
Wright, one of the world’s leading biblical scholars and a former Anglican bishop, said demonic forces were not absent before Jesus’ birth, nor were they unknown in first century Judaism. Rather, Jesus’ arrival forced those powers into the open.
“Most serious practicing Jews at the time would have known that you could pray for deliverance, that you could exorcize if somebody was seriously afflicted,” Wright said, noting references in Jewish literature and Jesus’ own acknowledgment that exorcists already existed in the community.
In the Gospels, Jesus’ opponents accused Him of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, a charge the Surprised by Hope author said only makes sense in a cultural context where spiritual affliction was already recognized.
“At that point, the dark forces, seeing that the Kingdom of God is being announced, realize they’re going to be in serious trouble,” Wright said. “And the answer is yes, they are.”
At the same time, Wright warned against framing spiritual evil as an equal and opposing force to God, rejecting what he described as a dualistic worldview.
“We have to get away from any sense that there is God on one side of the page and Satan on the other, locked in endless struggle,” he said. “That’s not the biblical picture.”
Drawing on the Apostle Paul’s discussion of idols and demons in 1 Corinthians, Wright said Scripture acknowledges the existence of “non-human dark forces” whose aim is to distort and degrade God’s good creation. The devil does this, Wright said, often through systems and behaviors that diminish human dignity.
“These forces are not the ‘real gods,’” Wright said. “But they seek to spoil God’s creation and pull it down.”
Wright contended that modern Western skepticism toward spiritual evil hasn't eliminated it, pointing to the large-scale horrors of the 20th century as evidence that evil can operate beyond the intentions of a few individuals.
“When whole populations are taken over by lies and commit serious wickedness as a result, you realize that the evil involved is more than the sum total of a handful of bad people at the top,” he said.
That recognition, Wright added, should not lead Christians into fear or fascination, nor into a desire for dramatic spiritual experiences.
“It’s good to be alert to the spiritual texture of the world,” he said. “But there’s always the danger of wanting to find the demonic under every stone.”
Wright expressed particular concern about teachings that encourage Christians to seek visions or become “seers,” calling such pursuits spiritually risky.
“That just colludes with a sense of dark fascination which we ought to avoid like the plague,” he said.
Drawing from his own experience as a bishop, Wright acknowledged that some ministers are called to deal directly with severe spiritual affliction.
“There were times when people had to go into a parish or a house and say special prayers to deal with what seemed to be something like an infestation,” he said. “Some Christian ministers really do have a God-given gift of discernment.”
But those who engage in such work, Wright said, describe it not as dramatic or glamorous, but as exhausting and deeply unsettling.
“One of them said, ‘It’s like cleaning out toilets,’” Wright recalled. “It’s a messy, murky world involving poor human beings trapped in destructive patterns.”
“In His death and resurrection, Jesus has won the victory over these powers,” he said, citing 1 Corinthians 15. “We live between the initial victory and the final victory.”
“Jesus goes into the very heart of darkness in order to defeat it,” Wright said. “And the resurrection declares: it’s done. It’s finished.”
Wright concluded that while evil and wickedness persist, the Church’s calling is to be a faithful witness to the Kingdom already inaugurated by Christ.
“There is a kind of acceleration and publicness about the demonic activity once Jesus starts announcing the Kingdom, but in the practice of the Church throughout the years, the Church has basically known strange things happen, and some people have to be trained to deal with them wisely and not superstitiously, and not grandiosely,” he said.
A 2025 study from Gallup found that nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.
In a 2025 interview with The Christian Post, Wright shared how the concept of "spiritual warfare” has been badly distorted in popular Christianity.
Ephesians 6 famously exhorts believers to put on the "armor of God," but Wright places that passage alongside Ephesians 1 and 2, which say believers are already "seated in the heavenly places in Christ."
"The heavenly places [are] where the battle is going on right now," he said. "God has won the battle in Jesus." The armor, he notes, is almost entirely defensive, "apart from the sword of the Spirit."
"Paul, like Jesus Himself, says … our battle is not against flesh and blood. … If you think you can fight this battle by fighting particular people or groups of people or ethnic groups, then that itself becomes part of the demonic problem, rather than the Christian solution."
Wright warned against subscribing to either extreme: theological skepticism that dismisses spiritual evil entirely and what he calls the tendency to see demons "behind every bush."
"As C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, 'There's two equal and opposite errors. On the one hand, people who say that that's all just medieval mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, people who see demons behind every bush,'" he said.
During his tenure as bishop of Durham, Wright said he supervised a discreet deliverance ministry that dealt with genuine cases of spiritual disturbance.
"They would pray with them and do what you could carefully call an exorcism," he said. "It's just very nasty, dirty, messy … and you end up feeling desperately sorry for people who are caught up in it."
