For many, Rick Santorum is a living, breathing, head-scratching, eyebrow-raising quote machine. In just a week, he can raise the specter of Hitler and Nazis, question President Obama’s theology, and (thanks to Right Wing Watch, which surfaced a 2008 Santorum speech) say that America is suffering from the prolonged attack of Satan.
Interestingly, it’s the Satan comments, more than the attack on Obama or unfortunate World War II references, that have caused the hottest controversy. Santorum is being widely critiqued for having religious views that are outside the mainstream, and the furor of the reaction is of about the same tone and incredulity as if he had declared the world flat while walking around the Creation Museum wearing a John 3:16 sign and a rainbow wig.
And Santorum hasn’t just raised the ire of the left. Matt Drudge kicked off the firestorm by headlining Santorum’s Satan comments for half a day, and other right-wing mavens, including Rush Limbaugh, have joined the chorus of ridicule.
But why? Is the idea of Satan now so unacceptable in our public discourse as to be dismissed whole cloth?
If so—and if that sounds like an asinine question—it is an intellectually and spiritually sobering acknowledgment that there is now no room in our public discourse for a core belief of billions of people for thousands of years—that there is embodied evil in the world. And that embodied evil goes by several names. And one of those names is Satan.
This view sounds pre-modern to many ears, but it is not an outlier today. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 70 percent of Americans believe in the Devil. Many of those pray against him regularly in a spiritual war.
Of course, Satan has ancient roots. Jesus’ “Lord’s Prayer” or “Our Father”—one of the most famous prayers in history, and one prayed daily by millions of Christians worldwide—is, in a sense, an exercise in spiritual war. In that prayer, Jesus calls for the kingdom of heaven to intersect with the kingdom of earth, and one facet of that intersection is that God may “deliver us from the evil one”—by which Jesus surely meant Satan. Some translations render the noun abstract—saying simply, “deliver us from evil”; both translations depend on the real existence of something called “evil” which exists and which is contrary to God’s purposes.
The Christian life is one that is understood to be a continual struggle between the forces of good, the reign of life, and the forces of evil, the reign of death. This is such a central message of the Christian faith that it is one of the few doctrines that unites the various strands of Christianity, from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.
The wise old Oxford sage C.S. Lewis once wrote that most people either blame the devil for everything or for nothing. Each side, he contended, was in serious error. Those who blame the devil for everything are prone to lead impotent lives of victimization. That’s easy to see.
It is the other side—the devil-deniers—that is dominating our refined modern discourse. The subject of evil is disallowed in our public imagination today.
No less a scholar than Andrew Delbanco—Columbia University’s esteemed American Studies professor who just last week was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama—has documented the end of evil. In “The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil,” Delbanco examined how American ideas of evil shifted from the time of the Puritans and gradually fell away entirely. Delbanco is not especially concerned about the loss of faith in God, but he is concerned about the loss of faith in Satan in the American imagination. The son of German Jews who fled the Nazis, Delbanco remembers his mother telling him that “Joseph Goebbels had been the devil incarnate,” and he knows the explanatory power that comes with such a view—a capacity to name evil and to not underestimate its real threat to kill and destroy human lives.
When Santorum made his remarks about Satan’s attack on America, he was engaging in widely accepted Christian rhetoric and belief.
Now, if we wanted to find fault with Santorum’s speech and expressed theology, there would be plenty to work with. For starters, he sees Satan’s influence first in “academia,” a favored whipping boy of the right. He also idealizes the American past and seems to assume that the influence of Satan was somehow absent in a time when America’s most pernicious evil, slavery, was the law of the land.
But his acknowledgment of embodied evil—particularly in a room filled with his fellow believers—was completely un-extraordinary. What’s extraordinary is the current fainting couch response from American pundits left and right.
David Kuo was deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the George W. Bush White House and is the author of “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.” Patton Dodd is managing editor of Patheos Press and the author of “My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion.”
