Decades before dying while
doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973),
Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in
Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion:
The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad
enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The
Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no
means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that
domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a
corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its
aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural.
Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on
supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.
The full essay is at "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist."
