On October 6, at an Ottumwa, Iowa, City Council meeting, former council member Matt Dalbey — a member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa — delivered the opening invocation. In it, he addressed the “dark father,” referred to the “Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge,” and concluded with the words “It is done. Hail Satan.”
Despite the Satanic Temple’s claims to be non-theistic, local pastor Rick Bick called it a curse on the city that needed to be reversed.
BlazeTV host of "Strange Encounters" Rick Burgess agrees. Even though he believes the Satanic Temple “really is more of an agnostic movement” designed to test the limits of “freedom of religion,” he nonetheless takes invocations of Satan as matters of spiritual seriousness.
Council Member Bill Hoffman, however, disagreed with Bick, saying, “I'm a Christian man with Christian values. That doesn't mean I don't want to observe his First Amendment right. It just means that I want to use my rights not to observe that.”
Rick agrees with this sentiment too, but with a caveat.
“I'd certainly agree with that, but I think that we think that somehow freedom of religion would include something as dark and blasphemous as this, and honestly, if you look at the history of our country, it just never did,” he says.
“The Establishment Clause was designed for one thing and one thing only,” Rick explains, “that we would not have a government-sanctioned denomination of the Christian faith.”
“You find nowhere in our history — nowhere — that anybody outside of Christianity was ever allowed to have a devotion” or “pray,” he adds.
Our founding fathers, he says, made this clear.
“We know that Thomas Jefferson … didn't believe in the miracles of the Bible, but even he said that the separation of the church and the state is a one-way wall and is protecting the Christian church from the government, not the government from the influence of Christian values,” Rick says.
“So for us to think that our Constitution allows for satanic prayer at any kind of government meeting is just not true. It was never the intent because [the founders] never did it. They didn't even allow other religions,” he continues. “All that was allowed was Christianity, and this was more of a discussion that we're not going to have an official denomination — not that anybody with any claim of a religious belief can now have the floor.”
As for Dalbey’s prayer, Rick believes it doesn’t matter if he worships Satan or not; the words he speaks still hold power.
“I would give him a stern warning,” he says.
“He's playing with a very dark powerful force that is real, whether he believes it or not. And if you choose to be agnostic, well, then it's the same thing as being a satanist, because there is no middle ground. You're either for God and you stand with God and you believe in the one and only living God or you don't.”
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