The Devil Made Me Do It

I’ve been marinating on this one for a while.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It started as an interesting thought experiment - the kind of thing that floats to the surface when you’ve been thinking about theology and law in the same week, which I apparently do now. And then it wouldn’t leave. It kept nudging at me from different angles. First from a faith perspective. Then from a legal one. And then, somehow, from both at the same time, like two trains on a collision course that don’t quite collide but pull up alongside each other and just… sit there.

The question, at its most absurd and also most earnest: if a demon made you do it, are you still responsible?

I know how that sounds. Bear with me.

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A Bit of Context

I’m a Christian who holds the Bible as my authority. And I take it seriously - which means I take the supernatural seriously. Not in a gimmicky, Instagram-exorcism sort of way. But in the sense that the biblical cosmology is treated as actually true. Angels are real. Demons are real. Spiritual warfare is not a metaphor. The unseen world is not decorative.

That’s not a fringe position, incidentally. If you survey global Christianity - and specifically African Christianity - the overwhelming majority of believers worldwide hold a genuinely supernaturalist worldview. The discomfort with it tends to be a fairly specifically Western, post-Enlightenment thing. Which is itself worth thinking about, but that’s a different post.

The point is: within a Christian framework, I don’t have the luxury of treating “the devil made me do it” as a purely rhetorical flourish. I have to take it seriously as a theological claim. And once you do that, you run headfirst into a genuinely interesting problem.

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The Theological Problem

Here’s the tension. Classical Christian theology - holds two things simultaneously that are in productive friction with each other.

First, humans have genuine moral agency. The entire structure of sin, redemption, repentance, and sanctification depends on this. If you can’t actually choose, you can’t actually sin. And if you can’t sin, the cross doesn’t mean what it means. So human agency is not negotiable.

Second, the demonic is not decorative. Scripture is consistent about the fact that spiritual forces can and do influence, afflict, oppress, and in extreme cases, act through human persons. The Gadarene demoniac (Mark 5) is not a case study in first-century misunderstanding of mental illness - or at least, that’s not the only or best reading of it. Paul’s language in Ephesians 6 is not poetry about vague cultural forces. The tradition is clear that the spiritual realm is real, active, and capable of exerting meaningful pressure on human beings.

So: humans are responsible agents, and non-human agents can substantially interfere with their operation. How do you hold both?

The tradition tends to resolve this through what I’d describe as a spectrum of influence. Temptation is the ordinary mode - something external presents itself to the will, and the will chooses. Oppression is an intensified version of external pressure, without penetrating the will. Possession - the contested and theologically weighty end of the spectrum - is where the question gets genuinely hard. Because if a demonic agent is operating through someone’s faculties in a way that genuinely displaces their volitional control, then the ordinary conditions for moral accountability start to wobble.

The key doctrinal move - and this is the one I keep coming back to - is that full possession doesn’t simply happen to innocent, passive victims without any prior volitional opening. That’s not a blame-the-victim argument. It’s a theological assertion that human agency is persistent enough that even the worst demonic intrusion typically requires some prior act of the human will to gain access. Which means the person remains implicated, even in possession. The degree of implication is what’s contested.

Within a Christian framework, that’s important. We don’t get to say “a demon did it, I’m clean.” But we also can’t pretend the supernatural dimension is irrelevant to understanding what actually happened. Both things are true, simultaneously, in tension.

And honestly? I find that intellectually satisfying in a way that cleaner answers don’t quite manage. It matches the texture of how the world actually seems to work.

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Now Add a Courtroom

Here’s where it gets interesting - and slightly absurd, in the best possible way.

South African criminal law, as a formal matter, does not care about any of the above. At all.

The law is not in the business of adjudicating cosmological claims. It doesn’t have a mechanism for evaluating whether a demonic entity was present, what its level of influence was, or whether the accused had prior volitional culpability for the intrusion. These are not questions the Criminal Procedure Act was designed to answer.

And yet. The courts of this country have repeatedly encountered accused persons whose explanation for their conduct is, at root, supernatural. Muti murders. Ritual killings. Exorcism-related deaths. Conduct attributed to ancestral compulsion, spirit possession, divine instruction. It happens. It has happened. It will happen again.

So the law has to do something with it.

The primary gateway is Section 78 of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 - the mental illness defence. An accused is not criminally responsible for an act committed while suffering from a mental illness or defect that rendered them incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of the act, or of acting in accordance with that appreciation.

The immediate question is: does a sincere, deeply held belief in demonic possession constitute a “mental illness or defect” within the meaning of section 78?

And here is where it gets genuinely complicated, because the answer is: it depends. Not in a weaselly, non-committal way, but in a technically precise way that’s actually quite interesting once you dig into it.

The architecture of the inquiry was usefully set out in S v Stellmacher 1983 (2) SA 181 (SWA), which clarified that the section 78 enquiry is ultimately a legal one - psychiatric evidence is essential, but not determinative. The court must find both a qualifying condition and the specific incapacitating effect the section describes. That two-stage structure matters here, because it means a supernatural belief claim has to clear two hurdles, not one.

Then there’s the pathological/non-pathological distinction, which the Appellate Division worked through carefully in S v Laubscher 1988 (1) SA 163 (A). Pathological incapacity - flowing from mental illness or defect - leads to a section 78 finding and referral to a psychiatric facility. Non-pathological incapacity, flowing from some other cause, is a far harder defence to run and carries different consequences. Where a supernatural belief-induced state falls on that spectrum is, frankly, undertheorised in the reported judgments, and I think that’s a gap worth acknowledging.

The DSM-5 - which South African forensic psychiatrists routinely use - explicitly cautions against pathologising culturally normative religious experiences. A belief that would constitute a delusional disorder in one cultural context may be a completely coherent, community-affirmed account of experience in another. An isiZulu-speaking person in KwaZulu-Natal whose entire community recognises ancestral possession as a real phenomenon presents a fundamentally different diagnostic picture than someone with no prior religious framework who suddenly begins acting on direct divine instruction to commit violence.

Which means the forensic psychiatrist has to make a culturally literate assessment. Which means the court has to evaluate that assessment. Which means - whether anyone intended it or not - the constitutional commitments to religious and cultural diversity (sections 15 and 31 of the Constitution) end up doing quiet but substantial work inside the criminal law’s culpability inquiry.

That’s a genuinely elegant piece of jurisprudential architecture, even if it arrived somewhat accidentally.

There’s also a secondary pathway - putative private defence - for cases where the accused genuinely believed (even mistakenly) that they were acting to neutralise a threat. S v De Oliveira 1993 (2) SACR 59 (A) is the locus classicus here: the test is whether the mistake was bona fide, with the reasonableness of the belief going to whether negligence liability survives even where intention is negated. If someone sincerely believed that another person was demonically possessed and posed an imminent danger, the doctrinal opening exists - but the courts have been largely unreceptive to it in practice, and the reasonableness hurdle is a significant one when the threat is invisible to everyone except the accused.

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The Overlap

What I keep finding, when I sit with both frameworks together, is that the underlying analytical problem is identical.

Both theology and law are trying to answer the same question: when a human act has a claimed non-human co-author, how do you allocate responsibility?

And both - independently, using completely different tools and vocabularies - arrive at roughly the same answer: you don’t simply discharge it.

Theology doesn’t let you off the hook because a demon was involved. It complicates the accounting, but it doesn’t zero it out. The tradition is consistent on this. Culpability is scalar, not binary, and the final adjudication belongs to a Judge with information no human tribunal will ever access.

Law doesn’t let you off the hook because you claim supernatural compulsion. It has narrow doctrinal channels - the capacity inquiry, the fault inquiry - through which the claim can be processed, but it insists on processing it rather than accepting it at face value.

Both traditions are, in their own way, resisting the same thing: the idea that a sufficiently dramatic supernatural attribution dissolves moral responsibility entirely. Neither buys it. Both insist that the human person remains implicated, even when genuinely compromised. The question is always how much, and both traditions are honest about the fact that this is genuinely hard to answer.

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Why I Find This Worth Thinking About

I’ll be honest: part of what I find compelling about this question is that it’s not actually about exotic edge cases.

The “the devil made me do it” formulation is easy to dismiss when it arrives in dramatic, headline-grabbing forms - exorcisms gone wrong, ritual violence, that kind of thing. But the underlying question - to what degree are my choices actually mine, given the forces operating on and through me? - is one that most of us encounter in less dramatic forms all the time.

Theology, at least within a REACHSA framework, takes seriously the possibility that external spiritual forces shape the conditions under which human choices are made. That’s not the same as saying those forces make the choices for us. But it is saying that the framing of “you chose freely, therefore you’re fully responsible, end of discussion” is too clean. It doesn’t account for the actual texture of how temptation, influence, and spiritual pressure work on a real human being in a real fallen world.

Law is grappling, somewhat awkwardly, with the same problem through entirely different vocabulary. The section 78 inquiry, the capacity question, the culturally-literate forensic assessment - all of these are the legal system’s attempt to acknowledge that human agency, while real, operates under conditions that can compromise it in ways the law has to take seriously.

Neither framework has fully resolved this. Both are doing their best with incomplete tools.

Which, honestly, feels right. Some questions aren’t meant to be resolved cleanly. They’re meant to be held carefully.

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A Final Thought

Neither framework has fully resolved this. Both are doing their best with incomplete tools. And I think that’s okay - some questions aren’t meant to be resolved cleanly. They’re meant to be held carefully.

What I do know is that “the devil made me do it” is neither the joke it’s usually treated as, nor the get-out-of-jail-free card it’s sometimes intended as. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle and considerably more uncomfortable than either extreme.

The human person remains implicated. The supernatural dimension remains relevant. Both things are true at the same time.

Sit with that for a bit.