Devil is in the details
WHEN the registration of the first satanic church in South Africa became public, it sent shock waves of indignation through social media.
While Satanism is a provocative name, we should look beyond the surface before rejecting the South African satanic church outright.
In Christianity, Satan is the personification of evil. In history, those that were seen as dangerously different, from heretics in the 12th century to witches in the 16th century, have often been labelled as Satanists. Satanists were imagined to do the opposite of what good Christians would do. They were believed to sacrifice or eat children, to practise sexual taboos, and to worship the devil. While the groups accused of being Satanists were no more than dissidents and outcasts, they became synonymous with evil.
During the Enlightenment, belief in the devil started to decrease in Western Europe. Misfortune began to be understood to have previously unknown natural causes or to be an unfortunate coincidence.
Secularisation opened the way to see Satan more as a literary character than as an almost divine power – in works like Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan became someone who had been misunderstood and misrepresented. People who felt oppressed by Christianity started looking favourably upon Satan.
In 1969, Anton Szandor LaVey published The Satanic Bible, a collection of rituals and principles for Satanism as a religious movement. An important tenet of the movement is individualism. Satanists do not want to conform to the rules of society and conventional religion. They feel that the standards and etiquettes of society – ideas about sexuality, for example, or about how one should look – are narrow-minded and oppressive. Satanists want to live out their true selves.
Satanism as a new religious movement has little to do with the Christian conceptions of Satanism as an organisation of devil-worshippers.
An exacerbating factor is that a dominant form of Christianity in southern Africa nowadays is neo-Pentecostalism, which places emphasis on the devil and his agents. According to neo-Pentecostals, these forces of evil need to be fought in spiritual warfare.
The Christian idea of Satanism has become compounded with certain traditional African notions, such as that any misfortune has a spiritual cause, and that wealth, status and power can be acquired through sacrifices.
The Christian image of Satanism is disseminated most forcibly by testimonies of people who claim to be ex-Satanists. They speak of an organisation of evil. They say they had to carry out assignments such as causing road accidents, disease or other misfortune. They also claim that they had to sacrifice people and were rewarded for that with riches and authority.
This image of Satanism is a descendent of the accusations of Satanism against heretics and witches in European history, and has nothing to do with it as a religious movement today.
There are self-declared Satanists, like the members of the South African Satanic Church, who practise a new religious movement. They have chosen a provocative name, and should be prepared to take some flak from the confusion this might cause. At the same time, South Africans should be prepared to look further than a name.