Chestnuts roasted over an open fire. Jack Frost bites your nose. Christmas carols sung by a choir. And people lighting candles for a satanic goat-headed mannequin. Even the most wonderful time of the year is stranger than it used to be.
I am of course referring to the public exhibition of Baphomet erected at the Iowa State Capitol near the local Satanic Temple. This burst into public debate in response to a social media post by Rep. Jon Dunwell, an ordained Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor.
Dunwell argued that he, like most Iowans, finds the figure repulsive and offensive, but that the state allowed its placement there on grounds of government neutrality in matters of religion and rights of the first amendment. The state insisted, he said, that the group not use a real goat’s head.
However, the goat god is not really worshiped by Satanists. Most of them are actually atheists for whom “Satan” is a metaphor for the absence of rules and norms. Like Aleister Crowley and, later, the Satanic Bible explain he: “Do what you want will be the whole law. » These Baphomet statues are often a performative ruse, tried repeatedly different States and localities – in the same spirit as atheists who claim to believe in the flying spaghetti monster to ridicule belief in God.
These showy goats exist to make a point in the culture war, which is that public places should not allow Christmas nativity scenes or Hanukkah menorahs and the like. The devil’s demonstrations are only a means to an end. It’s not so much who the followers love but rather who they hate, namely religious people – especially those who would be outraged by a devil in the capital. Shock and repulsion on the part of religious people are not simply unintended by-products; that’s the whole point.
This is where devil worship becomes perilous, and not just for occultists.
CS Lewis, in response to criticism, asserted that the fundamental problem of the age – which he saw in the emergence of communism, Nazism and fascism – was devil worship. As Lewis explained, he did not mean that people knowingly worship the devil. The temptation, he argued, was to accept an ideology to the point of concluding that “desperate illnesses demand desperate remedies and that necessity knows no law”. Because our enemies are so evil, the theory said, one must consider the side one is on as “the supreme duty and abrogates all ordinary moral laws.”
“In this state of mind, men can become devil worshipers in the sense that they can now honor as well as obey their own vices”, Lewis wrote. “All men sometimes obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy and lust for power appear as the commands of a great suprapersonal force that they can be exercised with self-approval. »
“Under this pretense every abomination enters,” Lewis wrote. “Hitler, the Machiavellian prince, the Inquisition, the sorcerer, all claimed to be necessary.”
Whether we call the devil “God” or “Jesus” or “progress” or “history” or “race” is irrelevant, because what we end up with is still Satanism.
In a interview with Charlie Sykes, journalist Tim Alberta cites the three temptations that Satan offered Jesus in the desert. He notes that the language Jesus uses to rebuke the devil here is echoed later, when Jesus says to his own disciple, the apostle Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” »
Peter didn’t have a goat’s head idol on a shelf somewhere. In fact, not long before, he had been the first disciple to announce his belief that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). But, Jesus said, Peter was not thinking “of God’s concerns, but of purely human concerns” (v. 23). More specifically, Peter wanted to defeat the enemies who wanted to crucify his Lord.
But what strikes me at this moment is not only what Jesus said, but Or he said it: in the region of Caesarea Philippi. Caesarea Philippi was, as New Testament scholar Craig Keener said explain, “pagan territory, near a cave dedicated to the cult of the wood divinity Pan; Herod had also dedicated a temple there to the worship of Caesar.
And that brings us back to the false religion of the goat idol in Iowa.
We recognize the man-goat hybrid as satanic, even without reading the plaque affixed to it. Like historian Jeffrey Burton Russell arguesthe image of the devil in our cultural memory – with horns and hooves – incorporates imagery of the Greek god Pan: the deity of wild and untamed nature, sexual expression and freedom from constraint.
It was in Caesarea Philippi, which was linked to the cult of the goat god, named by and for the very political system that would crucify Jesus, that Jesus chose to ask: “Who do you think I am?” (Matt. 16:15) and where he promised Peter “upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (v. 18).
If Satanism were as obvious as the painted pentagrams and nativity scenes of the Antichrist, we could denounce it and rest easy knowing we are on the other side. But the most pernicious forms of Satanism are those which offer What of “Christianity” with a how on the other hand, those whose goal is not to persuade our neighbors but to defeat them. Because when we abandon ourselves to this strategy, we end up with a “Christian” culture – but only in the sense that a Christmas tree is, not in the sense that the cross is.
It’s horrible when we name our idols Baphomet, but it’s also horrible when we name them after the causes our side holds dear. And worst of all is when we ascribe value to the ways of the devil while claiming the name of Christ, trying to convince ourselves that we are fighting for God. You can do it from the left or the right, with hedonism or hypocrisy. It all leads to the same place. It’s the temptation of the moment, and none of us is safe from its lure.
The devil you know is horrible, but the devil you don’t know can be much worse.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and the director of its public theology project.
