A few years into my clinical practice I started getting a referral that graduate school doesn't prepare you for: people who needed a psychological evaluation before an exorcist would pray over them. I am Dr. Sean Tobin, a clinical psychologist, and that chair is where this book comes from. I had already written my doctoral dissertation on exorcism, deliverance, and psychotherapy, mostly because the question was the one elephant in the room nobody in my program wanted to talk about, and then the referrals turned the research into a specialization. Big God, Little Devil is what I learned sitting there. Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.
One woman had been receiving exorcisms every other week for three years. Each one bought her a few days of peace, and then the thing would manifest again, heavier, in retaliation for her trying to get free. In one of the first evaluation sessions we stopped attending to the presence and went to the feeling underneath it instead, and a memory surfaced from childhood, the place where the helplessness first got in. She met the Lord inside that memory. The demon left and never came back. I watched some version of that happen too many times to keep filing it under exception.
The war is won. The enemy is disarmed. So why are so many Christians still living in fear? In a lot of places spiritual warfare has been twisted into a spectacle, and the spectacle breeds anxiety, superstition, and control. What I argue in this book is that deliverance is not about confrontation but communion, that we do not fight for victory so much as live from it, and that fear-based methods usually deepen the very thing they're trying to remove, because the moment your confidence sits in the technique rather than in the relationship, you have quietly gone back to a system of works.
So the book walks through why fear-based deliverance often makes the problem worse, how the Holy Spirit integrates what the enemy tried to fragment, how worship and testimony silence accusation, why trust rather than striving is the real battleground, and how the sacraments and Scripture equip an ordinary person to walk in peace and power. It is written for the battle-weary and the curious, for ministers and for the laypeople who have been told all of this sits above their authority. Fr. Boniface Hicks, OSB wrote the foreword. Dr. Mary Healy, who serves on the Pontifical Biblical Commission, calls it dynamite and believes it will help change the whole paradigm for the ministries of deliverance and exorcism.
The devil is real, and he is also small. Most of what I'm doing in these pages is putting those two facts back into proportion, because a soul that has the proportions right is already most of the way free.