In early Christian times, many people feared being consumed by the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath, greed, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, and pride. These instinctual emotions were recognized as being so powerful that Peter Binsfeld, a 16th-century German theologian and bishop, attributed each one of these sins to a particular demon: Satan (wrath), Mammon (

In the 1920s and 1930s, as the Great Migration pressed African Americans into Northern urban landscapes, a groundswell of alternative religious communities promised religious—and often metaphysical—answers to social and economic problems.

“We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.

“We are tired of being made out to be these horrible people,” she said, acknowledging there was some violence but insisting on the falsehood that Antifa was behind it.