Devil’s Advocate: Are Satanists Now the Good Guys in the Fight Against the Evangelical Right?

• Satanism: the inversion of reality. Good is Evil. Evil is Good. God is Satan, Satan is God blasphemy. Illuminist social engineers rule this world by subtlety and deception!
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• Devil’s Advocate: Are Satanists Now the Good Guys in the Fight Against the Evangelical Right?
  by Steve Rose, https://www.theguardian.com/international
  Over the past century of popular culture, Satan has acquired the souls of delta blues musicians, incited youth rebellions, possessed small children and goats, impregnated unsuspecting women and transmitted evil through backwards lyrics on heavy metal records. But recently, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, the nature of his game has been puzzling us.
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  The forces aligned against Satan have become so objectionable that he no longer looks like the bad guy. They include such groups as the Westboro Baptist church, notorious for its hate speech against LGBTQ people, Jews, Muslims and other groups, all of which it condemns as “satanic frauds”. There’s the Trump administration, in league with the US religious right, which has been aggressively pushing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation, not to mention engaging in overt Islamophobia. Those forces would also include the 20,000 people who recently signed an online petition condemning the Amazon TV adaptation of the cult novel Good Omens – about a demon and an angel – as “another step to make satanism appear normal”.
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  Now, a documentary threatens to rehabilitate Satan. Directed by Penny Lane, Hail Satan? follows the early adventures of the Satanic Temple, an institution that has hit upon the perfect counter-strategy to the evangelicals’ efforts to recouple church and state. Based in Salem, Massachusetts (where else?), the Satanic Temple is officially recognised as a tax-exempt religious organisation. As such, it has been claiming the same rights and privileges as those obtained by evangelical Christian groups – albeit with a prankster sensibility.
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  Where the city council of Phoenix, Arizona, began its meetings with a Christian prayer, for example, the Satanic Temple demanded that satanic prayers should also be said. The council chose to drop the prayers altogether. When the Child Evangelism Fellowship set up the pro-Christian Good News clubs in US public schools, the Satanic Temple introduced its own After School Satan clubs – promoting scientific rationalism. And when the Oklahoma state capitol permitted the installation of a Ten Commandments sculpture in its grounds, the Satanic Temple campaigned to erect its own 8ft-high statue of Baphomet, the goat-headed, cloven-hoofed deity.
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