An Open Letter to Christian Nationalists in Response to Recent Bills Seeking to Ban Satanic Expression

Dear Christian Nationalist,

You demand Religious Freedom for all. At least, that is where your demands begin, in begrudging recognition of the fact that in a pluralistic democracy, the government is not at liberty to codify religious favoritism or animus. 

But you don’t mean it. 

Feeling that the weight of religious majority is on your side, you assume that your efforts to allow religious expression in the public square will result in public spaces being overtaken by propaganda declaring that this is a “Christian Nation,” the evidence for which resides, circularly, in your public displays of religious expression. We have seen this before. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and “Under God” was added to currency in 1955, and these remain, defended by arguments that claim the phrases are merely “ceremonial,” having been neutralized “because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”

And yet, any time you are presented with the prospect of having to share your religious accommodations with another party, we find you waving a dollar bill, presenting “In God We Trust” as proof of codified Christian supremacy, proof of your “Christian Nation.” But the truth is that this is not a Christian Nation, and this is why it is necessary to lie about your intentions, your willingness to accept Religious Freedom for all, up until the point in which another religion becomes involved.

But, you object, Satanism is not simply “another religion,” it is an affront to your religion specifically, a direct insult against that which you hold sacred. This is how you see it, this is the way in which you insist it must be seen, and these are the only motives you will believe that Satanists are acting upon. But even if it were true, which it is not, your arguments for the exclusion of Satanists from any religious recognition would be incoherent. Religious Freedom includes freedom to believe as one will and follow one’s own conscience, as well as the freedom to doubt or disbelieve. Protection of Religious Liberty includes, and has always included, the protection of both practice and opinion. As I have pointed out, Thomas Jefferson made this explicit, writing in A Bill For Establishing Religious Freedom (1779) that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” In his memoirs, Jefferson clarified, “protection of opinion was meant to be universal,” [and the document included] “within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” 

But Satanism is not an insult meant to provoke offense from Christians. To pretend that it is is to pretend that we are invading barbarians who arrived from distant shores to arrogantly mock a new and bizarre, primitive superstition. Not only do we have our own set of affirmative values that define us, regardless of whether they conflict or agree with any of the various sects of Christianity, but most of us came into awareness in a culture steeped in Christian iconography, parables, panics, and prohibitions, giving them a permanent life in our minds, becoming the raw material from which we learned to express our own values. We were made to understand the most compelling of existential existential questions within the framework that you contextualize them in: a Manichean battle against the Christian god and his adversary, Satan. We came to see your god in the way that you show him: as a divine autocrat demanding subjugation. And your subjugation to Him is real, even if He is not. Our resistance to autocracy is real, even if Satan is our collective voice and principles, rather than our ruler.

You want it both ways. You seek relentlessly to be allowed to proselytize publicly, while you also frame disagreements with your viewpoints as unprovoked attacks. You seek to impose your prohibitions on others while seeking exemptions from the law. You insist that “tradition” legitimizes your claims, even as you often do not bother to attempt to attach your viewpoints to some scriptural foundation. You pretend to speak for all Christians, openly ignoring that you are a minority of Christendom, ignoring those Christians who take offense at what they see as your blasphemous efforts to claim what they hold sacred as government property. You ignore those Christians who support our viewpoints on pluralism and government neutrality because it lays bare the lie you like to tell about our motives: that what we do is about offending you, rather than supporting the democratic values that we hold sacred…values you are afraid to explore too deeply knowing that you claim to support them only when you believe it benefits you alone.

We see your true intentions in the accusations you hurl at us. When we established after school clubs to offer an alternative to pre-existing Christian fundamentalists clubs that you had insisted were separate from the school curriculum and outside the jurisdiction of a school board veto, you demand that school boards veto our club, objecting that we seek to indoctrinate children. When we seek equal access in public forums available to religious displays, you demand we be banned on the grounds that our participation silences you. But you only feel silenced because your intended message is an assertion of your exclusive entitlement and supremacy. You claim that we are political rather than religious, even as you openly seek to install your flunkies in roles within, and influential to, politics.

And now your flunkies are overplaying your hand, outright attempting to codify Christian Nationalist supremacy in complete ignorance of the Constitution, and in flagrant disregard of democratic principles. They desperately seek to limit the federal recognition of “religion” to only those that are theistic, in complete ignorance of the history of non-theistic religious traditions extending far beyond, and long preceding, Satanism…and in flagrant disregard of the fact that expressions of non-belief are, and should be, afforded equal religious protections, even if not attached to a recognized religious organization. They seek to limit any perceived criticism of their viewpoints, even as they seek to limit the civil liberties of others based upon those viewpoints. 

But it won’t work.

Your elected flunkies failed to do any work that would allow for success. Just as generations of your theocratic efforts have provided ample justification for the image of a righteous Satan in contrast to a depraved god, spawning a new generation of Satanic uprising, your disingenuous and outright false, self-serving arguments have attracted the least capable and critical minds, as now made clear in their tactless and futile approaches to carrying out your theocratic coup. They submit bills now that are based on no legal theory at all, with no reference to the Constitution they contradict, much less any attempt to reconcile those contradictions. They demand nothing short of being able to define Satanism, and to define Christianity, on their own terms, attempting to eradicate a specific iconography, independent of the actual practices, values, and even messages that iconography may express. They have abandoned your tact and your disingenuous lies, openly stating the parts you kept silent for so long, the parts that admit to your abandonment, and your contempt, of actual Religious Freedom.

This is not to say that no anti-Satanist bills are likely to pass. The bills are, however, impossible to have upheld by the courts without there finally being a general recognition that the coup is afoot, and law itself has been abandoned.

By whatever route we get there, regardless of how much longer we need to fight this fight against your efforts to create a theocracy, it is easy to see where your efforts are leading. As you fight to define the rights of others within the framework of your superstition, as you fight to impose your own norms upon the most intimate and personal interests and activities of individuals, you inadvertently proselytize for Satanism. In your arrogant insistence in executing your opportunistic, grandstanding Culture War crusades in the voice of your god, you have presented him as antagonistic, cruel, dictatorial, and unintelligent. You make intuitive what might have once been obscure: the counter-narrative of a benevolent and compassionate Satan as a defender of pluralistic liberty. 

You insist that you represent “good,” and that Satan represents “evil.” But then you act in ways that are morally reprehensible, tarnishing your credibility, and the credibility of your faith. You force reasonable people to re-evaluate your assumptions regarding morality. You demonstrate that people who loudly declare themselves “good” are capable — perhaps even extra inclined toward — the most despicable acts of “evil.” You have become symbols of self-licensing and thoughtless disregard. As emissaries of your god, you are causing people to see only his despotism and inhumanity. You have taught us to seek other means through which to express true ethical, humanistic values.   

You have abandoned Liberal Democracy in the name of your god, and in doing so, you have given the future to Satan.

Hail Satan

Love,

Lucien Greaves