Today on “The 700 Club,” a viewer wrote in to tell Pat Robertson that her daughter “is possessed by a demon” because “she’s in jail.” The mother told Robertson that she can’t “stand to be around” her daughter “long enough to visit her,” so asked whether it was possible to cast out her daughter’s demon “from afar.”

That is indeed possible, said Robertson: “Yes, you can pray it [out] from afar. But I think you ought to get a group together and maybe see that daughter, but I think you may have to have an exorcism. But I don’t know what she’s got.”

He advised the mother to be careful because “the last thing you want to do is to get together and start singing, ‘There Is Power in the Blood,’ you don’t serenade demons, you command them in the name of Jesus to leave.”

“I don’t know if the jailers would allow you to have a little intercessory deliverance meeting if you brought some people in,” he added.

“I had a demon who said, ‘You can’t have her, she’s mine,’ and I said, ‘No, demon, you can’t,’ so sometimes he’ll talk to you and you’ve got to respond,” Robertson continued. “How come she’s got the demon? What did she do to get possessed?”

He did, however, entertain the idea that the woman’s daughter has a mental illness and actually needs “psychiatric care or some chemical intervention to keep her sane” rather than an exorcism.