Whether you consider Satan sinister spirit or symbol, he’s assuredly in style. A good example is the 2016-2021 series Lucifer; a more recent one is a concert put on by aging pop star Madonna, an event including a reportedly blasphemous use of a prayer hymn that narrates Jesus’s crucifixion.
Of course, many will dismiss this as being more marketing than malevolence. But then there’s this:
There’s also an allegation that many of entertainment’s biggest stars are satanists.
Does this matter, that what symbolizes pure evil in Western tradition is being normalized as a source of pleasure? Is it not, some may wonder, like legitimizing Nazism and making it chic?
Commentator Andrea Widburg reports on Madonna’s latest effort:
Forty years after she attained pop star fame, Madonna is still packing stadiums. Once, she did this by selling sex. Now, she does it by selling Satanism.
…It’s really not clear whether Madonna believes in anything at all…. Her evolution over the years has had less to do with spiritual searching and almost everything to do with maintaining her fame. She looks at the zeitgeist and decides how to profit from it.
Madonna, who is nobody’s fool, has clearly decided that today’s zeitgeist is Satanism. Although it is possible that the same woman who once professed to be a kabbalist — that is, a student of Jewish mysticism — isn’t just an opportunist but is, in fact, a Satanist.
Widburg then presents the following video from the Madonna event:
Of course, many will find this unsurprising from a woman who adopted a name for the Virgin Mary (the real Madonna and the antithesis of “Madonna”) and then sold salaciousness.
Widburg then adds that “if you’re thinking it’s an exaggeration to say the above was Satanic, it’s important to note that the intro to that segment in her show was a Sam Smith/Kim Petras song called ‘Unholy.’ That song makes no bones about its being an homage to Satan. The title is a giveaway, but it’s the video [below] that really tells the tale.”
It also tells the tale about our cultural state: The video has 238 million views on YouTube alone.
By the way, the name “Kim Petras” raised my eyebrows. I reported on this individual many years ago when he (correct pronoun) was touted as the “world’s youngest transsexual” after he appeared on German TV, in 2006 at age 13, and discussed his SDTs (sexual distortion treatments). Now, lo and behold, he’s a pop star. Talk about a transition.
And if the “Unholy” official video isn’t enough to illustrate the song’s satanic bent, take a gander at the image below of Sam Smith performing the piece at last year’s Grammys.
Of course, Smith trades in the bizarre and might only have sold his soul metaphorically, for money. The problem, as Widburg points out, is that he’s hardly an outlier in today’s entertainment world. But before addressing that, a bit more perspective.
To expand on the earlier Nazism analogy, imagine entertainment started embracing Nazi symbolism and created titillating works featuring it; imagine that hundreds of millions of people imbibed these creations and cheered them. Would this not be concerning?
For the reality is that Nazism represents for us profound evil, and legitimizing evil never ends well. Yet what does Satan represent?
Theologically speaking, normalizing the demonic world is far worse because it’s more fundamental. Good theology holds that man is good by nature because he was made by God and for God (but that nature is fallen); hence, people, Nazis included, cannot be evil but can only do evil.
But Satan, as malevolent reality or traditional metaphor, is the embodiment of evil itself. He is completely and irredeemably wicked.
Of course, our secular society fears and flagellates Nazism far more than Satanism; on Halloween, for example, many will dress their kids as devils (part of the problem) but never as Nazis. Regardless, is this a road we should tread?
We are already well down it, though. Widburg introduces us to a website called The Vigilant Citizen, which, she writes, “tracks the actual and spiritual debauchery that is constantly pumped into Western culture.”
For example, the site highlights the overt satanism in the newest video from Justin Timberlake, a thoroughly mainstream figure. It also has an archive where you’ll “see these themes — blood sacrifice, Satanic rituals, demons — played out over and over,” Widburg informs. And “the writer brings the receipts.”
Then there’s the aforementioned show Lucifer, which I critiqued in 2016. It portrays the Devil as seductive (which he is) and suave and God as a stern killjoy. It perfectly advances our time’s moral relativism, too, having dialogue that muddies the waters about who’s the “good” guy or “bad” guy — God or Satan.
None of this is happening by accident, either, if Zachary King, a Church of Satan ex-High Wizard who converted to Catholicism, is to be believed. He claims that many of entertainment’s biggest stars are actual satanists. He also, Widburg points out, connects this with the pedophilia apparently rampant in Hollywood.
The bottom line is that whatever their worldview, good Americans should recognize that even mere dalliance with the Devil isn’t just fun and games. It shouldn’t be ignored because satanism “is what it’s always been,” concludes Widburg, “starting with Lucifer himself: An ideology hiding behind a beautiful face (for Lucifer was quite literally a star) that stands in direct opposition to the Biblical God” — and the sense of virtue upon which our Republic was built.
And returning to the Nazis one more time, something history’s most infamous National Socialist reportedly said is relevant here. To wit: “By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell — and hell heaven.”
Adolf Hitler meant this as a strategy. We should take it as a warning.
