Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

My father went to war with a demon bird

The night before my father drove three hours to Southern Illinois to do battle with a demon bird, he handed me a three-ring binder. Inside was a thick stack of arcane documents he’d compiled over several months: photocopied maps, handwritten notes, and reprinted articles; opposition research, if you will, dedicated to a creature called the Piasa Bird.

That is the name for a multiheaded monster whose crude visage had been lavishly painted hundreds of years ago across the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River in present-day Alton, Illinois, by the Illini — the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans after whom my home state was named. It was the late 1990s, and my dad, John Mark, and a small group of men in his prayer group planned to drive I-55 from Springfield, IL, to the old river town, march to the bluffs, pray intensely over the site, and begin a rite of spiritual warfare.

I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. "Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird?"

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The Piasa Bird is a quirky, little-known piece of Southern Illinois lore. The bluffs painting was first documented by French explorer Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet during their famous Mississippi River expedition in 1673. (“They are as large as a calf, with head and horns like a goat, their eyes are red, beard like a tiger’s and a face like a man’s,” Marquette wrote in his diary.)

Nearly 200 years later, my dad not only vouched for the story’s truth, but he’d tacked on a new supernatural element: he believed that the Piasa Bird was a demon, one that had cast a spell on the state of Illinois, binding it in a spiritual darkness that had yet to be broken. He pointed to a map, traced a finger along the bends of the Illinois River, and explained that our home state was shaped like a human heart and the rivers running through it were symbolic veins beating with the powerful blood of the Piasa. His goal: to bind the principality, thus freeing Illinois from Satanic power. He didn’t share my mortification about the preposterous quest to fight a demon. He traveled to Alton anyway. I never asked how it went.

What I realize now is that there was little difference between my father, who believed that devils and angels walked amongst us, and the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribes who, in Marquette and Joliet’s telling, averted their eyes in fear of the image of the Piasa Bird.

My mother, Janice, converted to Christianity in her mid-20s, not long after what my uncle described as a horrifically bad acid trip, in which she claimed to have seen the face of God, which wasn’t as uncommon as you’d think in the ’70s; the Jesus People movement of that time merged counter-cultural hippie aesthetics with fervent, Spirit-filled evangelical Christianity. My dad followed her, reluctantly at first, and gave up playing bass in a local cover band and recording jams in our marijuana-smoke-filled basement for Sunday morning hymns.

My family’s religion had a specific name, even if no one I knew used it: the neo-charismatic movement, or the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. (We called it simply: “The Revival.”) The idea is that conversion should be accompanied by signs and wonders, and that the miracles described in the New Testament had returned. Theologian C. Peter Wagner and his colleagues developed a related doctrine of “spiritual mapping” and “territorial spirits”: the idea that demonic powers were attached to specific geographic locations and could be displaced by prayer warriors visiting those sites. This is the theology my father was practicing on the bluffs above the Mississippi.

It is hard to overstate how large the Third Wave religious movement got. By the mid-’90s, the global Pentecostal and charismatic believer population was massive — estimated at over 200 million, spreading from Wimber’s Vineyard church in Orange County, California, to tens of millions of Americans gathered in evangelical churches, school gymnasiums, converted strip malls, and suburban basement prayer groups. Television did the rest: through Trinity Broadcasting Network and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn brought faith healing, prophecy, and the spectacle of enchantment to millions of living rooms, including ours.

https://unherd.com/2026/06/i-was-a-chari...christian/

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