Satanism suddenly seems to be everywhere. But don’t worry, the real problem, we’re told, is noticing it.
Who could possibly think that a quasi-pornographic, hell-themed performance portraying devil worship and sexual sadism could possibly be satanic? Well, anyone frankly. And the Grammys performance was but one more log on the hellfire.
Such tenets echo Aleister Crowley, the father of modern satanism, who famously announced, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In the world of the occult, Lucifer is considered the perennial light-bearer, and God the ultimate oppressor. Freedom from oppression in this construct then requires never subordinating one’s will to the will of God. The Devil doesn’t ask upfront for fidelity to him but rather simply for fidelity to self. “Thy will be done” becomes “My will be done.”
While the increasingly open celebration of Satan might seem sudden, it’s merely the logical endpoint of the progressive “woke” ideology that has long pounded into our psyche that the point of life is the unencumbered expression of the will. In this framework, the moral law, oriented around our flourishing and freedom, is recast as the means of our oppression. Liberation then is relocated to exercising our ability to transgress that law.
The “Unholy” Grammys singers Smith and Petras, two men who identify respectively as non-binary and as a woman, are effective apostles of such transgression. Claiming the power to speak into existence one’s identity, in defiance of bodily reality, isn’t just to claim different pronouns; it’s to proclaim oneself to be a god. This is the trajectory: If we forgo the belief that God became man, we eventually start believing that man can become god.
The fetishizing of transgression explains the escalation we’re seeing now. This is the insatiable nature of sin. What’s transgressive today becomes boringly normal tomorrow, and so the envelope must be pushed and prodded until every boundary is crossed and the mask fully slips and we look with horror at who it was that was behind it all along.
But the thing about a slipped mask is it’s very hard to unsee it. At some point, people can’t help but begin noticing. This simple turn creates a panic in the purveyors of lies, and they respond by becoming louder and more ferocious as they sense their narrative collapsing.
But keep noticing. Shine light, watch it writhe and squeal, and denounce it wholesale. It’s getting more blatant, but that just might mean that the narrative is nearly collapsed.
