The Devil Made Them Do It

I've heard it said that conspiracy theories provide simple answers to complicated questions. I don't know about that, a lot of conspiracy theories that I've come across are remarkably complicated. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that conspiracy theories provide simple villains and straightforward motives.

A former co-worker shared a link to a YouTube video that could best be described as nonsensical. Not in the sense that it flies in the face of accepted science or conventional wisdom, but in the sense that I couldn't really make heads or tails of what was being put forth. I think the idea was that the mRNA vaccines were some sort of toxin or were viral infections themselves, but I can't be sure. The poster, attempting to evade YouTube's efforts to suppress medical disinformation, was being quite cryptic. Or maybe I simply lacked the requisite background to follow her. In any event, the poster self-identified as a Christian, and so identified Satan as the source of the trouble.

I was raised Roman Catholic, although I never managed a sincere belief in God. What put the final nail in the coffin of what was basically paying lip service to a Faith that I never really felt was the question of Satan. I'd come to the conclusion that Satan was a scapegoat, sometimes, it seemed, quite literally, for the fact that people were sometimes just jerks. Once I'd decided to stop pretending I believed, I set both deity and adversary aside and went on about my business.

But while watching this video, it struck me that Satan was making one his occasional forays into everyday life again. After all, the whole Q-Anon conspiracy posits that a number of high-ranking Democratic politicians and their supporters are Satanists and indulging in that old bugbear of the ritual abuse, rape and murder of children. Despite having been there for the Satanic Panic over role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons, specifically) in the early 1980s and the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral panic of the 1990s, I'd never really thought about how much real estate that Satan takes up in the American psyche. Like perhaps a lot of people who thought of themselves as educated and sophisticated did, I tended to see Satan as the province of people who'd been rendered backwards by being such devout Christians that they'd lost touch with the world around them. And that simply wasn't a large population of people, as I experienced things. At least not in the United States. Sure there were plenty of people who spent a lot of time worrying about Satan in places like Latin America and Africa. But these were places that barely had schools, and so it made sense. As I grew older, I started to understand that "Satan" could be a legitimate answer for some questions, even if I had come to different answers for those same questions; or didn't need answers for them in the first place.

But Satan can be a simple answer to what really is a complicated question: Why do people want to enact policies that the faithful see as not only harmful, but Evil? While the Salem witch trails had taught me to regard people "being in league with the Devil" as something between a joke and a tragedy, it occurs to me that there is a sincere belief in a divine conflict that has human beings fighting on both sides. Of course, that's likely not news to very many people, but I'd never really looked deeply at it until just recently. Because, well, the topic bears about as much on my daily life as fights between unicorns and dragons.

The term "American myth" is tossed about a lot, but never in terms of people's belief systems. Whatever the technical definition of "myth," the connotation of "ignorant and/or outdated false belief in something supernatural" renders the term offensive when used in reference to modern religion. But, from a technical standpoint, Satan is a myth, and one that does a lot of heavy lifting in people's worldviews. I wonder if that's appreciated in proportion to the impact that the belief in Satan has on people's lives.