Satanic 'Panic' 2023

The Luciferian lies we are being compelled to affirm as true

Rod Dreher

Jun 6, 2023

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The demon baby in ‘The Passion of the Christ’ is an apt symbol of our time

A reader sent in a photo of a house in his upscale neighborhood in the suburb of a red-state capital. The homeowners are flying from the front porch a Pride flag with a Satanic symbol on it. The reader says that there really is no geographical escape from this evil.

Meanwhile, Erik Carnell, the FtM trans person whose work was kicked out of Target after her pro-Satan jewelry and commentary came to light, says the retailer, whose stock price has plummeted under the force of consumer boycott, is abandoning the LGBT community by reacting against her Satanic material:

"It's a very dangerous precedent to set, that if people just get riled up enough about the products that you're selling, you can completely distance yourself from the LGBT community, when and if it's convenient," Carnell told Reuters.
"If you're going to take a stance and say that you care about the LGBT community, you need to stand by that regardless," Carnell added.
Carnell had previously explained in an Instagram post that Satan represents "passion, pride and liberty" and "loves all LGBT+ people."
"Satanists don’t actually believe in Satan, he is merely used as a symbol of passion, pride, and liberty. He means to you what you need him to mean. So for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences. They reject binary stereotypes and expectations. Perfect," he said.

Baphomet. You’ve heard of that figure, right? It’s the figure in the statue that The Satanic Temple has been displaying in public:

The original statue featured women’s breasts, to emphasize the Baphomet’s gender fluidity, but a Satanic Temple spokesman said they removed them, to avoid controversy.

They want our children, you know. How can you deny it?

The symbolism could hardly be more Luciferian. Remember that the original sin of Lucifer, the light-bearer, was Pride. He thought he knew better than God. He preferred to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. The forces regnant over our culture today agree. This is why it is completely beside the point to say that these Satan sympathizers don’t really believe the devil exists. Maybe not — yet they affirm what Lucifer stands for, and want to see Luciferian principles replace Christian ones in public life.

In Phoenix (click here to watch the video, which Twitter won’t allow to be embedded):

From St. Matthew’s school in Newfoundland (click here to watch the video):

And to think I had a pastor tell me once, emphatically, that he is not going to talk about gender ideology to his congregation, to help families navigate it, because he doesn’t want to get involved in politics. The schools have no problem at all talking about this stuff to kids. Cowardly Christians whiff all the time.

In West Hollywood, they’re so proud it hurts (video here):

I’m old enough to remember back in the early 1990s, when Pat Robertson’s network aired actual footage from the DC Pride parade, the guardians of public decency criticized Robertson for encouraging bigotry — this, simply by showing what was on the street. A gay friend of mine in DC at the time told me that this was his first Pride, and what shocked him was how everything he saw in that parade confirmed every negative stereotype of gays he had heard growing up. Today, though, thirty years on, nobody is ashamed for anybody to see the worst perversions, and show them to their children to desensitize them. This kind of filth has corporate backing, as well as the full faith and credit of the US Government.

In Dublin this past weekend, I was walking around with a Catholic friend, who pointed to the Pride bunting hanging off of the august columns of a Victorian-era building. He said, “Can you imagine trying to explain this to the Irish stonemasons who erected these columns?” Dublin is all in for Pride. My friend said if you talk to the older people in his Dublin neighborhood, they’ll tell you that back in the day, the Feast of Corpus Christi, the medieval celebration of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, was celebrated with the same fervor. There were sacred processions, flowers and ribbons everywhere, and a spirit of joy and celebration. Now, nobody cares about Corpus Christi. They are celebrating queer bodies and queer sex. Only fools can fail to see what’s happening here, symbolically. I stood on campus at Trinity College Dublin on Saturday, and observed the rainbow standard of the One True Faith flying high over the institution:

The Irish government is about to institute a new blasphemy law to protect the New Faith. Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:

In talking this past weekend to Irish Catholics about the state of the culture there, over and over I heard it said that things have gone far beyond indifference to Catholicism. Now outright hatred is the order of the day. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where things are going in that country. And in ours, though the Irish, having no First Amendment, will get there first.

Where are the brave pastors? Where are the brave lay Christian men and women? Do you begin to understand how evil triumphed in the past? So many men and women who ought to have known better, and who maybe did no better, kept silent, and rationalized their cowardice. It’s all there in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, based on the true story of the martyred Franz Jägerstätter, a Catholic who was executed by the Nazis rather than swear allegiance to Hitler, who, as we see in an earlier scene, made the German people proud again. Franz’s entire farming village in the Austrian Alps, near the German border, were churchgoing Catholics. And yet, only he and his family resisted the Nazis. Everybody thought they were faithful Christians — but when they were put to the test, only the Jägerstätters passed. And passing it cost Franz his life, and his wife a husband, their children a father.

But Franz feared the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob more than he feared Hitler. Hitler was at least a formidable foe. Some of us Christians today fear losing a job — but that’s not the same as losing your liberty, or your life. Many of us Christians simply don’t want to be thought ill of, so we retreat into silence, thus compromising with evil, and hastening the day when the cost of resistance will be one’s liberty, or maybe even one’s life. If you see this coming and want to know how to prepare, please read the advice Christians who endured Soviet persecution give in my book Live Not By Lies. It is dedicated to Father Tomislav Kolakovic, a brave Croatian Jesuit serving in Slovakia, who saw the persecution coming, and who used the precious years of liberty the Slovaks had to prepare the underground church. Go ye and do likewise. This is not a drill.

Because, let’s face it, this can’t go on forever. Something has to give. What comes next is going to be even worse. What came after the Luciferian decadence of Weimar Germany? What came after the Luciferian decadence of early twentieth century Tsarist Russia? Nemesis is a hell of a curse — and we here in Babylon bloody well will have earned it, both by what many of us have done, and by what the rest of us have tolerated. Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

Now we come to a deeply shocking part of this post — one so shocking that I have put the image below beneath a divider, so those who don’t want to see it can avoid it. It explains why I used the image at the top of the demon baby from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as the main illustration of this post. The hideous child shows up at the edge of the scene in which Jesus is being scourged at the pillar.

Why did Gibson use this creepy image? He told Tim Challies years ago, when the movie was released:

When asked why he portrayed Satan —an androgynous, almost beautiful being played by Rosalinda Celentano— the way he did, Gibson replied: “I believe the Devil is real, but I don’t believe he shows up too often with horns and smoke and a forked tail. The devil is smarter than that. Evil is alluring, attractive. It looks almost normal, almost good—but not quite.
“That’s what I tried to do with the Devil in the film. The actor’s face is symmetric, beautiful in a certain sense, but not completely. For example, we shaved her eyebrows. Then we shot her almost in slow motion so you don’t see her blink—that’s not normal. We dubbed in a man’s voice in Gethsemane even though the actor is a woman … That’s what evil is about, taking something that’s good and twisting it a little bit.”
But what about the ugly baby?
“Again,” said Gibson, “it’s evil distorting what’s good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old ‘baby’ with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it’s almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place.”

Evil distorting what’s good. Evil scourging and torturing and mocking what’s good. That’s what we are living through today, in this satanic moment. You do not have to believe in the devil (though I do) to recognize that our dominant culture has turned Luciferian.

The hideous image is one of a pseudo-penis surgeons constructed for a female-to-male transsexual. It is hideous. It is to the natural male phallus as the demonic baby is to a real infant. I post it not for prurient reasons, but because sometimes it takes actually looking at one of these things to make the sentimental abstractions of the propagandists take form. This appendage has no natural function. It is a zombie phallus mocking Nature, and the natural order. This is what we are told is natural and good now. This is what we must affirm as right and proper. This abominable lie.

If you won’t speak the lie, and you work for the City of Dallas, you can be fired. Not San Francisco, not Boston, not New York … Dallas. If you won’t speak up against the lie, you leave young people like this Norwegian man, Alexander L., vulnerable to mutilating himself and ruining his life. He’s a detransitioner. I have cued his testimony to the part where he describes lying on the surgeon’s table, thinking as the anesthesia takes effect that he shouldn’t be doing this. He woke up without a penis or testicles. He realized eventually that he is not a woman, and never will be. He has destroyed his capacity for reproduction and for normal sexual pleasure. He has a gaping wound where his organs of generation should be. And he had painful, horrible surgical complications. He is clearly psychologically tortured to this day.

We are allowing these ghouls to groom our children in the schools, in pop culture, everywhere. What decent father or mother can look at this image below, and think that this is what they would want for their daughter?

I’m sorry, in a way, to shove this in your face, but you have to know what all this Pride rhetoric really means, in the flesh. I’ve sent this post out to my entire subscriber list, not just the paid ones, but the paid subscribers alone can comment. If you are not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. I charge the minimum allowed by Substack — $5 per month — and post every weekday, and sometimes on the weekend. It’s not all culture war stuff, but I’m trying to bring you the stuff that you need to know to navigate the Brave New World — the stuff that the media will not tell you.

Below the comment and subscribe buttons, you can see the image. Now is the time to look away if you don’t want to see it.