How Satan is propping up Bush's war on terror

"Any religious movement that involves being born again, some kind of ecstatic experience, is quite aware that you can have good trips and bad trips," says Ellis. "When you dissociate your personality and allow someone else to step in, so to speak, most of the time it's going to be somebody good. It's going to be the Holy Spirit, it's going to be your spiritual helper, whatever term you wish to use. And then, a certain number of times, it's going to be somebody bad.

"Satan is the cultural name that has been given to those experiences for several millennia" within the Judeo-Christian tradition, he goes on. So believers who have witnessed ritual spirit possession in their churches, both positive and negative, "don't have to be convinced to believe in the devil. They've felt the devil. They've experienced the devil."

In other words, the explosion of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States in recent years has led directly, even inevitably, to widespread public belief in the Father of Lies and his nefarious schemes -- a topic avoided by mainstream religion for most of the 20th century. Not so paradoxically, it has also led countless heavy-metal musicians and their fans to embrace the trappings of Satanism, on the time-honored premise that anything that outrages and horrifies adult authority figures is inherently cool.

Nothing exemplifies this dialectic better than the infamous Onion article published in 2000 titled "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children." To regular Onion readers, this article, with its ludicrous factoids about millions of J.K. Rowling readers fleeing from Sunday school to Satanic churches, forming their own schoolyard covens (membership fee: $6.66!) and proclaiming that "Jesus died because He was weak and stupid," was an obvious and even rather heavy-handed spoof. (Its outrageous coup de grace was a spurious quote from Rowling, crowing that "the weak, idiotic Son of God is a living hoax" who will be forced to "suck the greasy cock of the Dark Lord" on the Day of Judgment.)

But as Ellis discusses in "Lucifer Ascending," fundamentalists took the story at face value, and it spread through Christian anti-occult circles like an unstoppable virus. A chain letter containing the text of the Onion piece was forwarded from one believer to another (usually with the obscene quotation redacted), along with appended messages urging recipients to "forward to every pastor, teacher and parent you know ... Pray also for the Holy Spirit to work in the young minds of those who are reading this garbage that they may be delivered from its harm."

What Ellis may not have noticed is that even now, more than three years after the hoax article was first spread (and then widely debunked), and despite Rowling's frequent avowals that she herself is a believing Christian, fundamentalists on the Internet have not quite abandoned the cause. At the evangelical Web site Greater Things, pseudo-damning quotations from Rowling are assembled ("Death and bereavement and what death means, I would say, is one of the central themes in all seven books"), and the site's author explains that the Onion article itself was yet another diabolical machination: "One of the tactics of Satan is to make fun of those who cry 'evil' or 'foul,' by creating parody designed to make the concerned Christian look foolish."

Sincere believers, the site continues, "intuitively sense (by the Spirit) that there is cause for concern about these books" and so became vulnerable to the Onion hoax. By the same token, Ellis argues, you can't understand contemporary American politics without understanding the importance of profound spiritual faith, and specifically belief in Absolute Evil. "An experience-centered believer," he says, "is going to think and vote different ways from someone who -- like me, being a Lutheran -- checks the precedents and reads the Bible and thinks for a while before making a decision."

So when our born-again president refers to Osama bin Laden as "the Evil One," he is not dealing in metaphor or analogy, even assuming he is capable of such things. Rather he is addressing his co-religionists in a not-so-secret code. "That makes perfect sense to a born-again believer," Ellis says. "Evil, like God, is One. So you can say, and believe in, an 'Axis of Evil,' because you know that the person who is giving the orders to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the leader of Iran and the leader of North Korea is, of course, Satan."

Ellis also believes that the current belief in Satanic evil (and the Saddam-Osama linkage) is connected to 20th-century right-wing fantasies about the Illuminati, a Jewish-run conspiracy that aimed at taking over the world, often through the United Nations, an international banking consortium or some other nightmarish force. "You did not have to believe that the members of the Illuminati all belonged to the same ideology or ethnic group," he says. "Some would be communists, some would be alleged liberals, some would be terrorists. But they would all be working together in the same diabolically inspired plan."

As a scholar and historian, Ellis is inclined to believe that religious manias, both of the Christian and occult varieties, inevitably burn themselves out. Organized religion and the folk-witchcraft traditions, he suggests, balance each other out in the long term in what he calls a "Luciferian dialectic." But as the witch trials of medieval Europe and colonial Massachusetts, the Red Scare of the 1950s and the Satan panic of the 1980s also indicate, these moments of ecstatic belief can also produce fervent persecutions of dissidents, heretics and perceived enemies of all kinds.

Ellis explains this in neutral, anthropological language, but its relevance to George W. Bush and John Ashcroft's America -- where the Constitution seems increasingly endangered and prominent Christian ministers accuse Muslims of worshipping the Moon God -- should be obvious. "One group can become so convinced of its religious rectitude, and so convinced of the danger that the Other puts them into," he says, "that they end up taking political and legal action against the Other. And of course, the fact that they're doing this for God makes them even less critical than they otherwise might be about the evidence and about their own motives. This is why I'm writing these books -- I'm trying to get people to see these dangers."

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