In 1977, the Talking Heads rose to avante-rock stardom when David Byrne's hit song "Psycho Killer" drove their "77" album up the charts. Twenty years later came another audio milestone - This American Life #77, which chronicled a radical reinvention of the biggest religion on Earth: Christianity. While Alix Spiegel didn't know that what was going on in Colorado Springs, at Haggard's church in 1997, represented a radical break with historic Christianity, she nonetheless grasped the essential - of how anti-modernist ('medieval' even ) and far right New Life Church really was. As Ira Glass introduced Spiegel's segment:

"Usually we think of prayer as a private thing... In Colorado Springs, Colorado, there's an elaborate program underway involving dozens of churches and thousands of people to pray - not just for those nearby but to try to fundamentally alter the civic life of their city, through prayer. The details of how they do this are complicated. It's almost like a modern door-to-door marketing or canvassing campaign - they use maps, and computers, and statistics to chart out what parts of their city need prayer, for what reasons - merged with something that couldn't be less modern - prayer. When This American Life producer Alix Speigel started to investigate it, it became something she could not get out of her mind. She decided she had to go to Colorado, to see what it was all about."

Spiegel found there was another, darker, dimension to the prayer program: Ted Haggard's New Life Church members were - street by street and block by block, toiling to expel, one by one, with prayer, the teeming territorial demon spirits they believed plag