Iowa City Council Meeting Opens With Prayer to Satan; Preacher Denounces Curse on City

Before October 6, Ottumwa, Iowa, was mostly likely known for one thing: It was the birthplace and home of M*A*S*H’s Radar O’Reilly, the corn-fed company clerk who grew up on a family farm with his mom, Edna, and his Uncle Ed.

Now it’s known for something else. At its meeting two days ago, the City Council permitted a Satanist to offer the “invocation.”

A former council member opened the prayer with “Dear Dark Father” and ended it with “Hail Satan.” 

And when a clergyman rose to repudiate the prayer to the father of lies, a female council member opposed him.

Welcome to America, 2026, where Christians in a country founded by and for Christians must listen to prayers to and gaze upon statues honoring Satan and his demonic legions.

The Prayer and Objection

The estimable individual who offered the “invocation” was the Satanic Temple’s Matt Dalbey, appropriately attired in a black shirt.

“Let us pray. Dear Dark Father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born in fearful minds in darkened times,” he began:

Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge, and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old. Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations. Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.

It is done. Hail Satan.

Before the prayer, Mayor Benjamin Foote invited all who wished to stand for the “invocation” to do so. All council members stood, heads bowed, except two. One was Cara Galloway, who never stands for such proceedings, the Ottumwa Courier reported.

There followed the Pledge of Allegiance, after which New Life Center pastor Rick Bick rose to stop the meeting because Dalbey had cursed it.

“Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city. That ending with ‘Hail Satan’ or ‘Hail Dark God,’ that’s not welcome here,” Bick said.

Galloway objected and said Bick’s comments should be reserved for public comment at the meeting’s end.

“It needs to be done now,” Bick continued:

I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city when he said “Hail Satan” and “Oh Dark God,” and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.

Foote ordered a break for a moment of silence but Galloway objected. “The invocation happened” she said, and it’s to move on to the consent agenda.

Foote overruled her.

As the meeting closed, Galloway said the city had no choice but to allow the infernal prayer because of the city’s invocation policy, which passed January 20, the Courier noted.

“Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own, and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing for others to object or respond,” Galloway said:

This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it. I think I specifically referenced that having someone from the church of Satan or a prayer about Satan, when we talked about that, that this could happen and we would need to allow it.

“The city released a statement Wednesday afternoon regarding the prayer, and said ‘we’ve been fielding calls all day … some calls have been cordial, while many have been rude and full of profanities,’” the Courier reported:

“We cannot discriminate against a denomination, and everyone that is invited to perform the invocation has followed the correct protocol,” the city said on its Facebook page. “We are not informed ahead of time what will be said for an invocation nor do we automatically endorse what the speaker is saying. We encourage everyone to review the policy.”

Invocation Policy

Galloway, it appears, is correct. The city’s official invocation resolution notes that state and federal governments open proceedings with an invocation.

The policy “is not intended, and shall not be implemented or construed in any way to affiliate the City Council with, nor express the Council’s endorsement or preference for any faith or religious denominations,” the policy explainer says:

Rather, this policy is intended to acknowledge and express the City Council’s respect for the diversity of both organized and unorganized religious denominations, as well as other faiths, belief systems, or the lack thereof, represented and practiced among the citizens of the City of Ottumwa. To ensure that invocational speakers are selected without preference to any specific religion, belief, faith, or ideology, from amongst a diverse pool of Ottumwa citizens, volunteers shall be selected according to [specified procedures].

The mayor must keep a list of volunteers to offer invocations:

Within thirty (30) days of the adoption of this policy, and on or about July 1 of each calendar year thereafter, the Mayor shall e-mail one invitation addressed to potential volunteer groups for delivery of the invocation and will also enable submitting a request to volunteer to provide the invocation on the City’s website.

Satanism Nationwide

The Satanic Temple, headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, operates nationwide.

It temporarily erected an effigy honoring Baphomet at the Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, after it won a lawsuit that said erecting the Ten Commandments but refusing the effigy violated the First Amendment.

The temple is “resolutely non-theistic,” it claims:

The Satanic Temple does not endorse supernatural (or “supernormal”) explanations, a position also codified in the tenets which state, “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs”. Rituals in The Satanic Temple are creative and expressive — often event-specific — rather than rote and “magical.”

Which raises the obvious question of why one of its disciples offered a public prayer to the “Dark Father.”