A Satan for All Seasons

Christians shouldn't be scared of a satanic Christmas display in Iowa.

The Alt Christian Right is rallying behind Michael Cassidy, a failed GOP candidate from Mississippi who traveled to the the Iowa State Capitol to vandalize a Christmas display sponsored by the Satanic Temple of Iowa and dedicated to the pagan deity Baphomet. Conservatives including Ron DeSantis and Charlie Kirk have promised support for Cassidy’s legal defense fund. Others have gone further yet, like William Wolfe, a minor former Trump administration official, who tweeted that activists should similarly be willing to desecrate a statue of Allah — which makes no sense unless one is unburdened of even the slightest knowledge of Muslim iconoclasm.

Cassidy said he trashed the display to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government.” Which means Cassidy took offense to a particular group of non-Christians receiving similar accommodations from their state government as those provided to Christians. If the state is to remain religiously neutral as an institution — not favoring any one faith over any other — then if Christians are allowed erect a manger for Christmas then it must also allow Jewish groups to put up a menorah, Hindus to celebrate Diwali, and even Satanists to put up a stylized ram’s head.

Cassidy professes a profoundly majoritarian conceit. After all, nearly three quarters of Iowans identify with a Christian tradition; and the share of Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews each round down to zero. (Hindus have one percent; praise be the staff of the University of Iowa hospital system.)

The idea that any of these groups — let alone a few atheists pretending to be Satanists in order to troll the Iowa GOP — pose a meaningful threat to Christianity in the great state of Iowa is risible, albeit only slightly less ludicrous than the fear that allowing Baphomet surrounded by a dozen or so candles from HomeGoods to briefly occupy a niche under the stairs in the capitol amounts to a meaningful government promotion of “anti-Christianity.”

While in Iowa it’s a fundamentalist Christian who trashed a Satanist display, a few days earlier in Poland a Catholic nationalist made headlines for violating a menorah in the parliament while denouncing the celebration of the Jewish faith as “acts of Satanic, Talmudist triumphalism.”

One marvels at the degree of delusion required to worry about either “anti-Christian acts” in the deep red state of Iowa or “acts of Satanic” Jewishness in a country that quite infamously collaborated in the annihilation of almost its entire Jewish population less than a century ago. “Triumphalism.” “Triumphalism”?? You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means!

How to account for such paranoia? It’s not really caused by the few offering a hearty, holiday “Hail Satan!” or anyone lighting a menorah in Warsaw. Rather, it’s the internalized fear of Christians who have grown used to wielding political power and cultural influence but who now worry they might lose a little bit of those privileges. Yet the real threat to their control isn’t Satanists or Jews or any religious “others.” It’s those with no religious affiliation at all, those known as “nones” for how they respond when asked about their affiliation.

Roughly the same share of Iowans (71%) and Poles (72%) are Christians. But in both places, the share of those who are religiously unaffiliated is booming among younger generations. While only about a quarter of Iowans are unaffiliated, that number soars to 42% for those in the 18-29 age bracket. Given how sticky religious (dis)affiliation tends to be, within a generation or two an outright plurality of Iowans could be religious “nones.” Given how evangelical churches and schools structure so much of Iowa society and politics, that sea change will have dramatic ripple effects.

Delusional as it may be, it’s cognitively easier to blame State support for Satanism for the decline of American Christianity than it is to look inward. Introspection is uncomfortable. Better to blame government neutrality towards religion than to acknowledge that the call might be coming from inside the cloister, so to speak. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to ignoring clerical abuse scandals, partisan political idolatry, and megachurch antics. And many there be which exit thereat.

But paranoia often ends in self-fulfilling prophecy. These kinds of acts alienate all but those who are already committed to the Christian faith. While I was growing up in church, we used to sing a children’s song titled, “A Sermon in Shoes,” the core proposition of which is that someone’s behavior tells you far more about their faith than than their mere profession thereof.

So consider what kind of “sermon” is being preached by a man angrily beheading a religious display from a tiny religious group. It signals paranoia, threat, and a basic disrespect for law and order. The non or marginal Christian might well ask: if that’s what Christianity is, then give me more of these “acts of anti-Christianity” stuff, pretty please!

It’s also an attitude that requires a profound ignorance of the history of one’s own religious traditions. As religious minorities have learned from long, hard experience, limiting the religious liberties of one group endangers the rights of all. Toleration tends to come as a package deal.

Remember that even concepts as seemingly basic as saying that you’re “Protestant” or “Christian” are identities that were invented in the relatively recent historical past. They were forged in the religious wars of early modern Europe and the fires of intra-Christian religious persecution.

No Lollard took comfort from the fact that the Catholic setting torch to pyre in 14th century England would be considered a fellow Christian half a millennia later. No 16th century non-conformist found respite in a shared Protestant categorization with the Church of England officials who had thrown them in gaol. No 17th century Quaker felt relief from the pain of having their ears shaven off or tongue pierced with a hot awl by the Puritan colonial authorities simply because some day their descendants would utterly forget they’d ever been in opposition to one another. No 18th century Baptist forgot the lashes given to them by Virginia Anglicans even though both would enjoy the same religious freedom under state and federal law a few years later.

A long history of persecution and pain taught Christians the pragmatic virtue of religious toleration. It also fueled the rise of newer forms of Christianity that emphasized a faith based in “religious affections,” as theologian Jonathan Edwards put it, or marked by a strange warming of the heart, to paraphrase John Wesley. The development of evangelicalism was a reaction to the way that Christian religion had been reduced to a mere tribal marker which delineated you and yours from them and theirs in an ongoing series of political contests or cultural (and once literal) wars.

If there is even a kernel of truth to the anxieties of conservative Christians in 21st century America — those who agonize over the threat of oppression from godless secularists clustered in fifteen minute cities ruled by liberal Demoncrats — then they should be the very last people to cheer the eroding of basic religious liberties for other faiths if for no reason than because it is in their own self-interest to do so.

If centuries of progress towards religious freedom were to be rolled back, there are many more Christian than there are Satanist Christmas displays to be toppled. Defending the right of a single Baphomet to stand in the Iowa capitol is ultimately a way of defending the right of a hundred mangers to mark the holiday in capitols and public buildings all across the country.

I’m reminded of my favorite scene from the classic film A Man For All Seasons starring the masterful Paul Scofield as the titular character Sir Thomas More. More was a Catholic dissident at a time of intense, complex conflict between Catholics and Protestants in 16th century England. If you had told someone then that the many groups involved were all “Christian” and thus were natural co-belligerents, you would’ve been laughed to scorn (and been grateful to come away with your head still intact upon your neck … unlike Sir Thomas More).

In the scene, More is encouraged by his family his friend, William Roper, to have a man arrested before he can betray More to the authorities. More refuses to with this exchange:

More’s wife: “Arrest him.”

More: “For what?”

More’s wife: “He’s dangerous.”

Roper: “He’s a spy.”

More’s daughter: “Father, that man is bad.”

More: “There’s no law against that.”

Roper: “There is! God’s law.”

More: “Than God can arrest him.”

More’s wife: “While you talk, he’s gone.”

More: “And go he should if he were the devil himself until he broke the law.”

Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law?!”

More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

Christians like Michael Cassidy and William Wolfe have become so accustomed to the blessings of religious liberty that they now pronounce that very liberty a curse. They want to harness the unchecked power of the State to prohibit any religious practice they find bad or wrong or dangerous, and do so without due process or regard for the potential implications to their own civil liberties. They flail about like an infant, possessed of a child’s understanding of how State power works and a teenager’s angst about their uncertain position in society.

But if they are allowed to cut down the laws that this country is planted thick with from coast to coast, laws that protect all of our religious liberties, then there will be no hiding for any of us — Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Satanist — from the storm that would follow.

We should give the Satanic Temple of Iowa the benefit of law for our own safety’s sake.