What Latter-day Saints Believe About Demons

A common trend in contemporary Western thought is to deny the reality of demonic evil. This trend arises from a combination of dismissal of scriptural accounts of demonic possession; lack of personal experience; and a general tendency in the West to reinterpret supernatural phenomena through a scientist or naturalist worldview. This trend to disbelief was present even among Latter-day Saints from the early days of the restoration; Jedediah M. Grant lamented in an 1854 address in the Salt Lake Tabernacle that "I am aware that even some of the Latter-day Saints are slow to believe in relation to the power of Lucifer, the son of the morning, who was thrust from the heavens to the earth; and they have been slow to believe in relation to the spirits that are associated with him ... "