Discerning the Demonic: See Through Deception Before It Destroys You

Alexander Pagani dropped out of high school in the South Bronx, joined a gang, and served a three-to-nine-year sentence in prison. He came to faith behind bars, earned his GED in a prison program, and entered ministry in 1995, the same year he was released. He planted a church in 2007 with seventeen people meeting in a living room in the Bronx; by 2015, the congregation had grown enough to rebuild an abandoned nightclub into a building. In 2026, he and his wife Ibelize relocated to the Atlanta area to launch Amazing Church Global -- a transition he describes in this book without softening the difficulty of it, which is consistent with how he writes about everything else.

He has conducted more than four hundred documented deliverance sessions, has taught at Princeton University, and has appeared on TBN and The Word Network. His four previous books -- The Secrets to Deliverance, The Secrets to Generational Curses, The Secrets to Maintaining Your Deliverance, and Manipulated: The Ten Toxic Traits of Legalism -- moved progressively from the mechanics of individual deliverance to the conditions that make deliverance necessary. This book is where that progression lands: not how to cast out a demon, but how to build a life that is not structurally vulnerable to the thing that invited it in.

His oldest son, Apollos, is an ordained pastor now running the ministry's overseas work. His youngest son, Xavier, works in media production for the ministry. The chapter in this book about the power of words in a family was written by someone who made deliberate, daily decisions about the atmosphere in his home and watched those decisions produce something over twenty years that he considers worth writing about.