#2496: Preston Bailey

Preston Bailey, jr., is Executive Director of something called the Spiritual Warfare Center, and author of the breathlessly insane fundie conspiracy nonsense book SPIRITUAL WARFARE: Defeating the Forces of Darkness. He apparently likes to call himself “Dr. Bailey”, since he apparently has a Doctorate of Ministry and PhD in “Counseling” from the Biblical Life College and Seminary – which makes you very significantly less suitable for offering counseling for anything than spam is.

 

Bailey is apparently also a sometimes TV show host, and has made a number of appearances in various media talking about the occult and Satanic ritual abuse – and yes: we probably should talk about the harms caused by the in retrospect profoundly embarrassing nonsense Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s, but Bailey is certainly not the person to talk to: he takes the paranoid rumors and incoherent nonsense of the panic at face value. Bailey is, however, on the board of directors of several Christian Counseling centers in North America that specialize in childhood trauma, demonization and dissociation – according to Bailey, he “has counseled thousands of demonized people and hundreds of people who were ritually abused and led many Satanists, witches, warlocks, and those involved in the occult to Christ”. You are well advised to stay far, far away from those centers.

 

Now, demons don’t apparently just “attack anyone without reason”, as Bailey sees it; rather, a doorway must be opened. And you can open a doorway in many ways, including “practicing white or black magic, sexual immoral behavior, drugs, sins of ancestors, a passive mind such as hypnosis, fortune telling, spiritism or communicating with demons, association with demonized people, fears, possessing a cursed object, someone placing a curse on you, worshipping idols, New Age or false religious practices, rebellion, any work of the flesh such as uncontrolled anger, criminal behavior, abusing children” and other actions. You are probably possessed, in other words.

 

For a good illustration of how Bailey’s mind works, you can check out his exchange with Rick Wiles in an interview on Wiles’s TruNews show on how the “New World Order” is trying to restore the “Luciferian government” that existed before Noah’s Flood and will accelerate the End Times. When Wiles asked Bailey if then-President Obama – Wiles believes and might still believe that Obama is literally a demon – was of Illuminati bloodline, Bailey responded no … according to Bailey’s unnamed Illuminati “source”. Rather, according to Bailey, the Illuminati ostensibly considered Obama to be the “forerunner of the Antichrist” and that there would be an Illuminati coming to the White House soon enough: Hillary Clinton. (As for the bloodline part, as Bailey sees it – he seems to have confused a range of cheap novels for academic resources – you have to be born into the Illuminati, “so if you hear these people who claim ‘well I joined the Illuminati and blah blah blah’ well they’re lying, that’s just not true, they have delusions of grandeur.” That Bailey is intimately familiar with delusions doesn’t mean that you should listen to him on the topic.

 

What is profoundly scary is that Bailey was, apparently, for many years “appointed by different governors as Chairman of the Task Force on Child Abuse and Chairman of the Juvenile Anti-crime Task Force” and “has assisted law enforcement agencies in occult crimes”. Now, this is of course according to himself, and Bailey has a demonstrated significant problems with distinguishing reality from paranoid delusions, but if there is any basis in reality for the claim, then he might be directly to blame for some needless suffering caused by the actions of delusional “Satanic panic” maniacs.

 

Diagnosis: No, Jack Chick comics is not a suitable substitute for a psychology curriculum, but the Biblical Life College and Seminary doesn’t care. The result is that insane clowns like cartoon-fundie caricature Preston Bailey are walking around trying to – and thinking that he does – “help” people. “Deranged” and “delusional” doesn’t even begin to describe him, and yes: He seems to be causing real and serious harm to real people.