Boston SatanCon, the Satanic Temple's (TST) proclaimed "largest gathering of Satanists," wrapped up last week. Among the festivities were an oxymoronically-named "unbaptism" ceremony, observances of a Satanic rite for renewal of wedding vows, a Satanic masquerade ball, and Satanic priests and priestesses adorned in everything from Satanic vestments to Party City devil horns. The ceremonies opened with a young woman ending her opening remarks by ripping up a Bible and throwing the Sacred Pages of Holy Writ upon the ground.
These festivities drew a lot of attention, both from secular media covering the spectacle and from religious devotees who protested the event by standing outside the Copley Place Marriott holding icons of St. Michael and praying the Rosary, and by attending Eucharistic Adoration to pray for the souls attending the event. The Archdiocese of Boston even issued an official statement about the event.
All of this makes an earnest, humble American Christian wonder what one is to do with all of this. What are we to make about the rise of Satanism, their devilish rites, and their rights to do these things in this country? Why are people all of a sudden openly worshipping the father of lies and how do we as Christians respond?
This article is not the first time that this author has publicly addressed neopaganism generally and Satanism specifically. This author has written on the rise of neopaganism in the United States on this blog and on the similarities between liberal paganism and alt-right paganism in The North Texas Daily during his undergraduate studies. As he pointed out in the latter article, paganism began to become in vogue with progressives out of a liberal resentment of American evangelical conservatism. Tara Burton, writing for The American Interest says that, for progressive millennials and zoomers, paganism is "a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity."
Burton's blasphemous comparison aside, paganism generally, and Satanism particularly, are very truly nothing more than pseudo-religious instantiations of liberal ideology. To see, this look no further than the Seven Fundamental Tenets of Satanism:
"One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason." Reason, so-called, is the guiding principle behind the TST's entire philosophy. While this may seem fine, even to Christians, this particular understanding of reason divorced from all else is the underpinning of liberalism and one of the ways in which it errs most grievously. Look no further than the Cult of Reason established in France after the revolution.
"The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions." Again, a Christian would have no problem with this at face value. After all, the fourth Beatitude is "Blessed are they which hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall have their fill." However, the type of justice that Satanists strive for is not true Christian justice, which is giving to each what is due to him and living righteously (iustitia in the Vulgate is the Latin equivalent of righteousness). Rather, the justice that the Satanists look for is social justice, the tearing down of institutions they view as evil and restrictive upon individual human license and equal outcomes. This is why, among their panels, they included topics like "Reclaiming the Trans Body," "Reimagining Lilith as an Archetype for Reproductive Justice," and "Satanism and the BIPOC Experience."
"One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone." This is a key feature of radical, rugged individualism. Your body is not the business of anyone else, and is subject to nothing, not even nature, unless you consent to these outside forces. This is why TST considers abortion to be a sacred rite and wants exemptions to pro-life laws for its members in states where infanticide has been made illegal.
"The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own." Again, TST understands freedom differently from Christians. Whereas St. John Paul II famously said "freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought," liberals say that freedom consists in unregulated license. It's not a shock that these iconoclasts prioritize the right to offend: their entire mission is to offend Christians. Also, notice the last bit at the end: to unjustly encroach on another's freedom is to forgo one's own. In this view, a Christian that denies a Satanist the ability to erect statues of Baphomet in the public square encroaches on their religious freedom, so-called, and forgoes his own.
"Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs." This is supremely ironic in the age of transgenderism, but it is once again indicative of liberal thought. Science, for many, is the new religion. Peer-reviewed studies are the unquestionable sacred texts, and scientists are the infallible priests. We can think of Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson as scientistic televangelists.
"People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused." Again, on its face, this is something that Christians emphatically agree with. It's the idea behind Penance. But what do the Satanists mean by harm? It's obviously not the same thing that Christians mean, for they have no care about trampling holy things and offending God. Harm for them, and for the modern liberal, means the harm principle: do what you will so as you do not directly injure someone else, at least without their consent.
"Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word." This is simply laughable. In no circumstance could worshipping the embodiment of ignobility ever be noble.
We see in the Seven Tenets a short catechism of liberal thought. Why then is there this strange obsession with the devil? TST is expressly nontheistic and does not confess credence to a personal Satan or even to souls. What gives?
Go back to the argument made by Burton: all of this is political reactionism to evangelical conservatism. Evangelicals have a religion, with ritual and praxis to varying degrees, which house their deeply-held moral, metaphysical, and political beliefs. Satanism, as the instantiation of liberalism as religion, must do the same. But what would a Satanic religion look like?
It should be no surprise, given that their central object of non-ironic, ironic worship can create nothing and only mock God, that these devotees have created a religion that aims to be a mockery of Christianity, and especially Catholicism. Their figurehead, the Devil, is known by revelation from the Scriptures. They invert the sacrament of baptism. They dress in vestments imitating that of Western Catholicism and take the Cross of our Lord and invert it in mockery. The Satanic Black Mass is nothing more than a ritual desecration of the Eucharist, which is only possible by stealing a consecrated Host from a Catholic church.
It should also be no surprise, given the embarrassing blunders Lucifer's pride has caused him to make over the course of salvation history, that the attempts to mock the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith do nothing but expose it, as Brian Holdsworth has put it, as parasitic of Catholicism.
Take the ineffective so-called unbaptisms for example: in one such event in Arizona, the participants received inverted Crosses on their foreheads in ash from two diabolic ministers wearing black and red stoles and Spirit-of-Hallowe'en-esque plastic masquerade masks, while the officiant asks a litany of questions, beginning with "do you reject your baptism?" similar to the first question a catechumen is asked at Christian baptism: "do you renounce Satan?" Some forms (read at your own spiritual risk) of the ritual are even more of a line-for-line inversion of baptism.
Further, Anton LaVey said himself that "a black mass is essentially a parody of the religious service of the Roman Catholic Church" (Satanic Bible, p. 54), while the use of Latin in their blasphemous rites is derivative of the words of Christ in Mark 8:33, "Vade retro Satana!" (Get thee behind Me, Satan!), and the vestments that they wear are all black and red versions of Catholic vestments, adorned with red gems and inverted Crosses and Crucifixes. Nothing about this is original, but is all derivative of Catholicism.
The reason that all of this is ironic and embarrassing on the part of the Satanists is that, in attempting to live a life in pure opposition to Christianity, they wind up defining their lives by Christianity, even if only a parody of it. If you truly reject your baptism, one might ask the Satanist, why do you do so by imitating it instead of simply living your life according to that decision? Surely that would be the more reasonable thing to do, especially since you probably believe it's all hokey anyway. When you examine the symbolism here, you're not in fact getting unbaptized, but you're getting re-baptized into the false Cult of Liberalism.
Doing all of this also just makes our Satanist look foolish and silly. Why go to black Masses and worship an entity you don't even believe exists? Surely you must understand that this makes you look like the stupid one? When Christians praise God, we at least believe that He exists and graciously hears us. You're simply dressing up like an eccentric and shouting nonsense into what you wrongly think to be the empty sky.
Not even merely this, but the attempt to desecrate the sacred on the part of people who don't know what is sacred and what is not leads to hilarity. Take the inverted Cross: to our Satanist, it is an inversion and rejection of Christianity and Christendom. To the Christian, it is the Petrine Cross, the result of St. Peter's humility in the face of martyrdom, and a symbol of the Papacy. To put it plainly, the Satanist who wears an inverted Cross inadvertently expresses humility before Christ our Lord. Pride goeth before the fall for a reason.
The fundamental reason that people are doing these really ridiculous and counterintuitive things is that they have what basically boils down to parental-abandonment issues but with Western Civilization. These people have bought into a false ideology that tells them that their forefathers were evil and so is the culture they built. Their lens tells them that our ancestors genocided natives, held minorities as slaves, and treated women as property to be exploited, while likewise raping the earth of her resources and beauty and leaving us with a globe-threatening crisis, and that Western Civilization is the inheritor of this legacy of evil. They hate the society they have been born into and want to simultaneously refuse their birthright and create a new society out of the ashes of the old, which they are intent on burning down.
If any of this sounds ridiculous, look to the fruits of liberalism: marriage and birth rates are down, rates of single motherhood and violent crime are on the rise, happiness among women plummeted after the triumph of feminism in the sexual revolution, and more people than ever have a diagnosed mental disorder and are being medicated for it. Society is imploding on itself, and the goal of the liberal is to bring about utopia out of the rubble. To the progressive, the oppressive society must crumble and die before it can be reborn.
Because of this, Satanism is inherently subversive and must not be tolerated in the public square. Satanists see the Christian civilization into which they were born and which they are duty-bound to inherent as backwards, stupid, and evil, and they want it gone. Their liberal dogmas have led to the destruction of civilization and will never be able to pull us out of the rubble left behind. On top of this, whether they acknowledge the reality of it or not, they worship the literal Devil, the embodiment of evil and sin, and seek to promote this image of evil and sin as a representative of their Cult of Liberalism.
It is often said by American Evangelicals that, while the actions of these Satanists are definitely awful, they have the right to practice these under our system of laws and should be left to do so until they are convinced otherwise. To that, let this question be posed: if someone started a religious cult that worshipped Adolf Hitler as a deity, and was able to get tax-exempt status for this cult, would it then stand to reason that he could erect a statue of der Führer next to the Ten Commandments on the Oklahoma Capitol grounds? Do you genuinely believe that to be protected by the First Amendment?
If you answered "yes" to the above question, you are wrong. Not only would doing so be a violation of public peace, but it is also simply true that we should not erect monuments to evil. Full stop. We would not allow someone to erect a placard advocating evil acts like genocide. Why, then, should we allow the erection of monuments to the embodiment of evil itself? Why should we allow people to publicly extol the destroyer of souls, especially when the underpinning of the entire ideology is the destruction of our civilization?
Some may challenge this and ask, "well, if we start doing this, what's to stop them from banning our symbols in public? What's to stop them from banning our books and preventing our speech?" To that, there are two responses: first, they already do that. Bibles are banned in schools, symbols of Christianity have been banished from the public square, and TST literally opened their ceremonies with the desecration of a Bible. According to their fourth tenet, those who deny rights forgo their own, and since we have been denying them the license to do these things, they think it is now their turn. Second, those Christians opposed in principle to banning ideas from the public ought to take a serious look at their Bibles again. Acts 19:19 recounts the conversion of the Gentiles at Ephesus, saying "many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men." As soon as they converted, the Gentiles burned their books of sorcery and smashed their heathen idols. They did not do this simply because these items were their possessions, and therefore they had the right to do so, or any such liberal nonsense. They did so because sorcery and idolatry are evil, and must be destroyed.
One of the ironies of American evangelical conservatism is that, despite Christianity being the driving force behind their political ideology, many of them accept the tenets of liberalism. As shown above, liberalism is outrightly contradictory to Christianity and cannot be consistently held by any Christian, because he will either have to give up his liberalism or his Christianity. Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvani says in his treatise Liberalism is a Sin: "[Liberalism] is, therefore... a very grievous and deadly sin, for sin is rebellion against God in thought or deed, the enthronement of the creature in place of the Creator."
The Satanists have shown us that Fr. Sarda was exactly right. Let us, therefore, smash their demonic idols, erase their corrupt ideas from the public square, and pray for their conversions.
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