Provocative doco reframes the devil you know
There’s a new documentary doing the rounds of the New Zealand International Film Festival. It’s called Hail Satan?, a name that implies an examination of Satanic cults of the type we heard about in the 1980s.
What the film delivers is altogether more amusing and provocative. Although it examines the origins and exploits of a group of political activists collectively known as The Satanic Temple, its revelations have little to do with literal devil worship.
The focus is instead on the conflation of religion and politics in the United States. Ironically, in a nation founded on the separation of church and state, Christianity assumes a disproportionate influence on policymakers and legal structures.
By appropriating the language and imagery of Christianity’s reviled villain, The Satanic Temple actively challenges such prejudice.
However, its agenda is not one of witches, virgin sacrifice or kissing the behind of Beelzebub.
Instead, its seven tenets preach empathy and compassion, the inviolability of the individual body and the idea that belief systems should be grounded in verifiable science. Their notion of freedom of expression extends to the ‘‘freedom to offend’’, almost a radical idea in the age of political correctness.
The Temple’s most renowned stunt, documented at length in Hail Satan?, offended many. To counter the erection of a statue of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capital, the organisation designed, crowdfunded and built a statue of its own.
The image of the winged demon Baphomet, seated, with two worshipful children gazing up at him, could not have been more provocative. The prospect of its installation resulted in the removal of the Christian erection.
At one point in the film, Satanic Temple co-founder and spokesman Lucien Greaves speculates about the moral panic and wild claims of Satanic cults that emerged in North America in the 1980s.
These were no doubt a reaction to trends in popular culture such as heavy metal music and the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and Greaves argues that the institutions warning about secret societies and the widespread abuse of children were often guilty of such practices.
Such things go beyond irony or hypocrisy. Greaves makes a case for psychological projection.
Given what we now know about the Catholic church, in particular, the idea is a powerful one. An institution that not only countenanced paedophilia, but actively encouraged it by lying at the highest level to protect perpetrators and reassigning them to different parishes and fresh victims, is rotten to the core.
If you believe in the idea of evil and the concept of the devil, surely the abuse of innocent children is Satanism personified. Any bishop, archbishop, cardinal or pope who put the reputation of Holy Mother Church before the welfare of its youngest parishioners was not doing Christ’s work, but Lucifer’s.
It’s a bitter truth that while many of the powerful and powerfully pious abuses of children have escaped justice, less fortunate souls have been convicted of socalled Satanism on flimsy evidence.
In the US the high-profile case of the West Memphis Three is a textbook example. The testimony of an alleged expert on the occult, his qualifications hailing from an unaccredited university, held sway at the trio’s first trial.
By coincidence, New Zealand’s own travesty of justice in this regard has been in the news this week. The revelation that Peter Ellis has terminal cancer has focused media attention on his Supreme Court bid to overturn his convictions for child sexual abuse at a Christchurch creche.
It is an indictment not only on our legal system, but also on wider society, that Ellis has suffered so, the flaws in the original case and trial exacerbated by the time he spent in prison and the unwillingness to overturn a conviction based on ridiculous testimony.
To believe his juvenile accusers, Ellis farmed them out to fellow paedophiles, held them in elevated cages, led them through tunnels and into dungeons. He made them eat excrement and drink urine.
They were kicked and defiled while robe-wearing adults laughed and played guitars. Yet, somehow, charges were dropped against all of Ellis’ female colleagues, leaving him, branded a homosexual, to be found somehow uniquely guilty.
There was no physical evidence for any of this. Rationality took a back seat to paranoia and superstition.
The year was 1993, but it might as well have been 1692, in Salem.