The Devil, Demonization, and Dehumanization with Mikki Brock, Richard Raiswell, and David Winter

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
In this exceptional episode. We welcome back returning guests
Doctor Richard Raiswell, who brings along fellow devil
history experts Doctor David Winter and Doctor Mickey Braun.
Our three guests recently Co edited an amazing book, The

(00:21):
Rutledge History of the Devil inthe Western Tradition, which
features chapters by 30 incredible authors.
What are we unpacking in this episode?
The devil's back story, his transformation through the ages,
the dark history of how he's been used to demonize entire
groups of people, and the ways he shows up in contemporary

(00:41):
society. Our experts are breaking it all
down. This is a fantastic
conversation, so let's meet our guests and begin.
Welcome to The Thing about WitchHunt podcasts.
Doctor Richard Rayswell is back with us today along with Doctor
Mickey Brock and Doctor David Winter.
Please introduce yourselves. I'm Richard Rayswell, a friend

(01:04):
of the podcast These Days. I'm a professor at the
University of Prince Edward Island, and my research these
days is largely concerned with the history of the devil and
demonology. I'm David Winter.
I'm a professor of history at Brandon University in Brandon,
MB, Canada, which is due north of North Dakota.

(01:25):
I am working also working on theDevil right now.
I somehow have ended up working up an article with a friend of
mine in Iceland on A Cunning Manwho performed exorcisms in the
16th and 17th century, early 17th century.
And I'm Mickey Brock. I'm professor of history at
Washington and Lee University inVirginia.
I work mostly on things that go bump in the night in Scotland,

(01:46):
but my new research has taken meinto the direction of gender
studies and infanticide. So what in the hell brings you
all together today to talk to us?
Back in the 80s, this medieval historian called Jeffrey Burton
Russell wrote a series of four books on the history of the

(02:07):
devil, and they really defined the field for quite well.
Until quite recently, however, quite a lot has happened in
devil studies, driven in part bywhat's the enormous amount of
scholarship on witchcraft. We decided that it was probably
about time that we did a comprehensive collection of

(02:28):
articles by experts in the various subfields in devil
studies to look at where scholarship is about the devil
now and to do a comprehensive analysis from the Old Testament
up until, well, I mean, we endedup writing the intro the week
after Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania.

(02:50):
I mean, a lot's happened since then, but you've got to stop at
some point. The publisher does actually want
the book. We joke that we did try to get
the page link to 666 pages, but we couldn't quite get there
because of limits. I'll say one of the things about
the book that we've just done isit is the resource that I think
we all kind of wish we had had in the years that we've spent

(03:12):
teaching our own courses on the history of the double.
So we tried to write, to put something together that was
scholarly in dealing with the field, as Richard laid out, but
was also comprehensible for our students, right, and engaging
for them. And frankly, just in terms of
the timing, I just want to add that we felt that this is a
moment where the devil really matters.
We've seen a resurgence in demonic rhetoric, and we can

(03:34):
talk about that over the course of the podcast.
But we felt that it was really asort of ripe moment in 2020 when
we put the book together in terms of its prospectus to do
this sort of project. And it actually, in some ways
seems even more urgent to us now.
Yes. I don't think any of us got into
the field of devil studies thinking it would be immediately
relevant. Here we are.

(03:57):
You know, I just as a side note to sidebar to that, I opened my
doctoral thesis. This is absolutely true when I
defended it in 2012 with the quote that Rick Santorum had
said sometime in I think the late late 2000 and eight, 2010,
something like that about how the devil was the greatest enemy
of America, right. And that seems like such a blast

(04:17):
from the past to think about Rick Santorum and sort of that
moment. And I think the role of the
devil in our world has just accelerated tremendously, you
know, since then. One of the things that's always
struck us, and it runs from the New Testament period until
yesterday, is that the devil is really useful, easy, lazy way to

(04:41):
deal with difference. Rather than sort of thinking
about people who are not like me, you can just demonize them.
And this puts up a wall between you or your community and them
and their community, and you need to protect yourself from
them. But equally, demonizing them in
that way makes them somehow evil, and you shouldn't be

(05:04):
contaminated by them and all of these sorts of discourses.
It's a really lazy way of just dealing with difference, dealing
with anything which is different.
Just demonize it. And that's an adequate
explanation for many people. And you see that in the New
Testament. You see that in some of the

(05:26):
stuff which is coming up from the Republican Party these days.
When you say the New Testament, it makes me think of another
book that the three of us have used, which is Elaine Pagel's
excellent Origins of Satan. I know we've all used it in
various different classes, and one of the points she makes is
just how it's also cumulative. You accrue enemies, you accrue

(05:46):
opponents, but you don't necessarily dispense with the
old ones. It's kind of inflationary, which
is one of the other hallmarks ofhow we look at opposite or how
opposition is constructed by Christians and.
Other I think that's a really interesting point.
If you go back and you look at all of the things that are
demonized, I mean from sort of Jews in the New Testament to

(06:08):
heretics in the Middle Ages to now the International Monetary
Fund, to Scientologists, they'vegot absolutely nothing in
common, nothing at all. And yet they're also.
Transgender binary folk. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So as Dave says, it becomes
cumulative. So you've got heretics in the

(06:30):
same category as the International Monetary Fund, as
now Catholics for for Protestants.
Yeah. It's just a really big lazy
category. I don't like this.
Demonize it. Problem solved.
And if you bought into that, what a world to inhabit, right?
Like, what a world to inhabit where you just accrue just

(06:50):
everything that's outside your experience is potentially
demonic. Yeah.
Absolutely. Stressful.
So I'm hearing there's a big usefor the devil.
Can we just take a peek at the definition?
I, you know, I kind of think of two devils that might come to
people's mind. There's this pop culture devil,

(07:12):
but then I know there's this medieval devil.
Is there a consistent definitionfor the devil?
No, and that's. Yeah, that's the that's the
question. Right.
I think this is one of the reasons why he is so useful.
The New Testament is very, very vague about the devil.
The Gospel John says that he's aliar from the beginning, but if

(07:36):
you look at the Old Testament, he's not in the beginning and
he's a fallen Angel. But that's not biblical.
The biblical story, if you startlooking at the New Testament
where Satan appears, there's just a few snapshots and there's
all sorts of gaps. So the tendency from very early
Christianity is to try and fill in those gaps.

(07:56):
OK, so where did the devil come from?
He's there at the beginning according to the New Testament.
But So what do we do about that?OK, so he's not mentioned in the
creation days, so we've got to sort of write him in somehow.
And so there's a whole traditionwhich writes him in, and that's
the story of the fall. And then So what was really

(08:17):
happening in the Garden of Eden,a talking snake comes up and
talks to Eve. Well, yeah, that's pretty
strange. But if you go to the end of the
whole Bible, to the book of Revelations, the serpent is
associated with the devil. So you read that back to the
beginning. And so there's just enough
snapshots of the devil to make it interesting.

(08:39):
And you yourself or your tradition can fill in the gaps
however you want. So you can make him do pretty
much anything in that respect. Yeah.
And just to add on to that, I mean, I think I've always found
it useful to think of the devil as sort of a palimpsest, right?
A series of layered beliefs thatare mobilized and used in

(09:01):
different ways across time and space.
So to the story that Richard is telling about Genesis 3 in the
story of the fall, right? If you ask any run-of-the-mill
Christian on the street today, they will say, oh, the snake in
the Garden of Eden, that is the devil.
But that's not actually what thetext says.
But the way that this layering works is there are passages and
revelations that are read to confirm that interpretation of

(09:22):
the story, which really became dominant in the 2nd century for
massive consequences for women. Obviously, if we think the first
person to be LED away astray by the temptations of Satan was the
first woman, and that's the fundamental part of how we
understand what a woman does, right?
The implications of that, as youcan imagine, are massive and
certainly something your podcastengages with.
So just seeing the ways in whichthese things get developed over

(09:47):
time, there's no coherence to it, but there's a utility to it.
And I think that's actually the point, right?
It's a useful organizing tool tothink with the demonic.
Sorry, Dave, I think you were going to come in there.
I was just going to say, he's also, from the way he's written
early on, a compelling figure and very early in the

(10:07):
demonization process, you get this sort of fan fiction being
written about him, who he is, what he represents, the kind of
threat he represents. And because he is this nullity
or empty category, you can pull from a number of different
sources to try and shape and form the image of what this
opponent actually looks like andwhat he.
Does. I think that's a really

(10:28):
important .1 of the problems with Russell's books, which I
was mentioning earlier, was thathe took very much the
perspective of intellectual historians and theologians.
He was looking at what sort of the greatest hits of
theologians. But of course, that's not where
a lot of this stuff comes from. It comes from folklore, but
increasingly now it's coming from the likes of horror films.

(10:50):
I mean, people's ideas of what an exorcism is come from that
1973 film. All of that feeds into what the
devil is. But to Mickey's point about the
story of the fall and the consequences for women, there's
a really interesting text which talks about the fall from Eve's

(11:11):
perspective. It's 2nd century, I'd have to
look it up, but the story is that Eve is on her deathbed
after the fall, and Adam's thereand so on.
And she is really, really angry.And she's saying this whole
thing is not my fault. What was happening is that we

(11:34):
were in the Garden of Eden. There was Adam there, there was
me there. There were a whole pile of
angels. And the Garden of Eden was
walled off. And Adam was manning one gate
and I was manning another gate, and the angels had the other two
gates. And we were holding off all of
these demons and the devil who were attacking us.
And then at 4:00 in the evening,God demanded to be worshipped.

(11:58):
And so all the angels left that left the whole fortification
vulnerable. And so the devil attacked at the
weakest point. And her point is, if God wasn't
so vain and demanded worship, none of this would have
happened. So it's a really interesting
story and I don't know if there's been very much

(12:18):
scholarship on it, but it does seem to be a female reaction to
the force of the story as it's developing in the time Mickey
was talking about. Yeah.
And actually your point about God, Richard, I think is one
that we have to talk about. Because when we're talking about
the nature of the devil and whatthe devil does, in some ways
we're also talking about God. And a fundamental problem that

(12:40):
develops over the course of the composition of the various
building blocks of Scripture, which is this idea that if by
the time you're well into the New Testament, if God is
supposed to be all knowing, all good, all powerful, well then
how the hell does evil exist in the world?
Why are there famines? Why is there war?
Why are there natural disasters?Why are there illnesses?
Why are loved one signs? All of these sorts of questions?

(13:03):
Why would it all knowing, all powerful God let that happen,
right? So people have to come up with
how to answer that question, andto some degree the devil is part
of that answer. There's this, and now it's
actually I don't think the devilworks as a theologically
consistent answer, but that's neither here nor there.
People use the devil as a way toabsolve God of being the author

(13:27):
of evil. He might let the devil do
certain things, but at the end of the day, it's the devil who's
doing them. So again, not theologically
satisfying. But it was.
It became, as Richard says, a sort of lazy answer to a really
vexing problem in Christianity from its early outset.
So the devil, he's given certainqualities and people suggest

(13:50):
that he behaves in certain ways.What's used as evidence to
develop the devil's character? Yeah, this is a really
interesting problem and it's onewhich has concerned me quite a
lot in some of my recent work. So the theologians need

(14:12):
something, as Mickey was intimating, that maintains the
integrity of God. God is all good.
You've got to maintain that, right?
That's first principles. God is good and God is all
knowing, so you've got to make adevil which sort of fits like
that. So the devil becomes a force who
tries to undermine the perfection of creation, but he

(14:35):
can't really do that because ultimately God is in charge.
It makes the devil pointless, really, other than as an
explanation in the way Mickey was talking about, because the
devil just becomes a moron, right?
I'm going to lose this one, but I'm going to keep fighting.
That's sort of in some ways the nub of it, right?
Because it's like if you've got this all powerful God, this

(14:57):
transcendent God, in a sense, you don't have a need for it or
the devil doesn't work, he doesn't fit.
And so there's all kinds of, particularly during the Middle
Ages, some of the tortured scholastic logic to try and make
him work. It ultimately fails.
Right. Yeah.
Dave was alluding to an argumentwhich is made in the 12th
century, that the devil is effectively nothing.

(15:18):
He's the absence of good, which is incredibly unsatisfying
unless you're a theologian, whenI'll come around and sort of
slap you on the back and say, yeah, yeah, that's really
clever, isn't it? And it maintains the dignity of
God and his all knowingness. And in the end, he's nothing.
But if you're in some village and your child is languishing

(15:39):
and dying slowly in a painful way, telling them the devil is
nothing, don't worry about that.It has absolutely no value for
you. The other sources of sort of
devil information are people's experiences.
I mean, did they take their experiences of misfortune or a

(16:00):
personal misfortune or misfortune to the community?
And they say ultimately that must be an action of the
demonic. So our crops got wiped out by a
freak hail storm in the middle of summer.
We're looking at starvation by the high winter, by the coldest
part of the winter. That's clearly got to be the

(16:20):
action of the devil. It's not something that the
theologians would come up with. They're too busy coming up with
these neat solutions to the problems that To Mickey was into
amazing about. So you get a lot of this
personal experience moving in there, and I think now with a
lot of the ways that it's working with Christian
nationalists is they're also doing the same sort of thing.

(16:44):
Anything to do with secular humanism becomes ultimately
something that is evidence of the devil.
So going to the 60s when the debate about sex education was
happening, clearly this is an attempt to subvert the family,
to take away traditional family roles and to make it something

(17:08):
which is happening in the state that's not on.
We don't like that, so thereforedemonize it.
So then the attempts to, I don'tknow, implement some sort of
national standards in education become touchy as a result of
that. And I think any other social
issue, this is probably giving them too much credit.
But I do think that some of these people who see in secular

(17:34):
humanism the devil are actually sincere.
I mean, many of them are just using it as a convenient prop,
but some of them I think, are probably sincere.
But again, it just sort of gets assimilated into this massive
category which has no coherence and no sense.
But I do think what's interesting is that I think
that's completely, completely right.

(17:54):
And it's interesting to me that this category, which doesn't
have coherence, ends up in practice, lending coherence to
people's lived experiences, right?
That's why that's useful. So let's take your Puritans,
right? You've arrived off the ship.
It's 1634. You're trying to navigate your
way around early days, Boston, whatever, and you're feeling
like you're in a literal wilderness.

(18:15):
You're having these encounters with indigenous folks.
You're suspicious of recent immigrants who are coming into
one's Puritan community. You have someone like Anne
Hutchinson who's starting to saysome things that are contrary to
the way that the people in the positions of power in that
community think. And there is this overwhelming
sense of being under assault because if you are the new

(18:36):
Israelites going into this wilderness, you need a proximate
enemy to make sense of your lived experience in that
wilderness. And there becomes this sort of
internal logic of people who believe in election.
And these are the people that I work on, right?
I work mostly on reformed Protestants.
They have to have an enemy to sort of make sense of their own

(18:58):
sort of story and lived experience.
And also the devil helps to explain why they, the elect, may
have trouble praying, why they may have evil thoughts when
they're sitting and supposed to be listening in sermon, but
actually they're thinking about their cute neighbor that they
met, you know, the other day or whatever.
The devil becomes a way to explain their own religious sort
of sorting. So I think it's interesting how

(19:18):
the devil is so lends so much holistic coherence to people's
experience because of the very fact that the idea of the devil
itself is incoherent. It's that profound flexibility.
I think that brooding sense of being at siege in the world is
captured really nicely cinematically in Robert Eggers
film The Witch. Some of the opening scenes there
just that oppressiveness of the wilderness and being at the edge

(19:42):
of the godly part of the world so.
And there's, there's an element that which frees you from
culpability. Talk about the Puritans.
If you can externalize your guilt, your lust, then it's not
your sin, right? Yeah, I fancy the cute woman
down the road or whatever, that's not my fault anymore.

(20:03):
I can externalize it and make itdemonic.
Or what Tertullian does in the 2nd 3rd century and she's argue
that the woman is somehow creating lust and transmitting
it to the male. There's a whole element to guilt
transference there, which is also very nice and comfortable
for people who think that they are particularly pious.

(20:27):
Well, and I think it it does explain modern actors in some
ways too, because it's like, This is why in the culture wars
things are such a threat, right?Like, well, who is actually
changing that Cracker Barrel logo and exposing me to the
waves of wokeness? It's Nick.
And just start. And one very quick point just to
add on to this. So I'm thinking about what

(20:47):
Richard said about its guilt transference.
And it's easier to say this is Satan who's implanting these
thoughts on my mind. It's not me.
If you asked your average Puritan minister, they would say
no. This is part of man's innate
sinfulness, your fallenness. You're only elect because of
God's grace. You actually are closer to the
devil in your lived experience than you are to God.

(21:08):
But just by virtual election that you are given another sort
of chance. But that double predestination
is a bonkers idea. Restoration, it's not very kind
of dies out eventually by the time you get into the 18th
century, and it's not something that's easily comprehensible to
people. So when they're listening to
their minister, someone like Samuel Harris or whomever
reeling about Satan, they're going to be thinking about who

(21:31):
externally to them is of the devil.
And I just think that disconnect, which I think Dave
and Rich and I have all sort of talked about between what the
theology might strictly speakingbe and how people are
interpreting it are light years apart sometimes.
And in a strange way, there is akind of empirical quality to how
the devil is constructed as well, because it comes out of
your experience, comes out of what you've read or what stories

(21:52):
you've been told. That's something that's
imprinted on when we talk about demonization and sort of how the
devil becomes like, You'll get some students who are quite
surprised to find out that thereis physical description of the
devil in any of Scripture, right?
And it's like, well, where do those ideas come from?
And you get the list of everything from Pan to the
foreign God, whatever. Those are the sorts of things

(22:14):
that people find recourse in andhow they start to construct it.
But it can be empirical and how I got there.
That was great because it really, I think it's
understanding. I mean, it's, it's kind of like
the witch when you know what a witch is, when you see it
supposedly that's the devil too.And it's taken all these layers

(22:37):
that you're discussing to get usto who he is.
But he was established pretty early on.
And I also find it fascinating how we personify people as the
devil. And they were doing that through
history too. But so he is the supernatural
threat, but then a person can bethat same threat.

(22:58):
Yeah, Corinthians says that Satan can take on the persona of
an Angel of light, which medieval scholars are generally
sensible enough to ignore because they realize that if you
accept that, then the whole fabric of reality collapses.
You can't be certain of anything, right?

(23:19):
All of this could be a demonic lie.
So they sort of ignore that one.But it becomes quite important
with the witch hunts again. Well, really in the 15th
century. So some of the stuff around
visions and stuff. But think how useful that is for
the Reformation, too, Richard. Right.
Once you get to the Reformation,you have all these false

(23:39):
preachers. Then you're trotting out
Corinthians left. Yeah, right.
You know. Yeah, yeah, if the devil can
make himself look like an Angel firstly again, how the hell can
I possibly recognize it? But they find little ways of
suggesting that the devil can't quite make a perfect looking

(24:02):
person, right? So he's maybe got some sort of
cloven foot or something. There's something a bit off
about him. It's really is an attempt to say
yet. Yet if you just look closely
enough, you can work it out. But again, it's another sort of

(24:23):
cop out in order to not address the consequences of the
Corinthians passage. But it's also why discernment
becomes such a major thing. Being able to establish good
form, evil, What? There's been a lot of
scholarship on that in the last 1520.
Years, yeah. If you claim that you're
receiving visions from God in the 12th century, most people

(24:47):
will generally say, oh, OK, that's interesting.
Fast forward 200 years and if you claim exactly the same
thing, they'll automatically assume that it's demonic and the
burden of proof shifts and it completely reverses.
So in 1450, you've got to have to demonstrate that your visions

(25:08):
are divine, not demonic. Saint Teresa of Avila and also
Francis Ausavier both had to spend some time trying to
impress upon people that their visions were actually divine and
not demonic. I just want to say about that,
one of the things that's really important in terms of how
discernment operates or how perception of people or groups

(25:31):
as in League with the Devil operates is one of the really
important factors is how fearfulare people.
So have people in positions of power created this sense, either
based on real experience or fabricated and usually a mix of
both, that the world is under siege, that we're living in an
apocalyptic moment, that Satan is loose from his chain.

(25:51):
Just use the Augustinian framingthere, Augustin's framing.
I think if you create that picture right, that the world is
literally going to hell in a handbasket, then people are
going to be much quicker to interpret their enemies,
challenges that they face, events in the natural world,
whatever, as coming from the devil because of this sense of

(26:12):
being under siege. I think that really matters.
I think it's why apocalyptic rhetoric and fear mongering writ
large is so profoundly powerful.Because if you tell people that
the devil is after you and the devil's enemies are all around
you, then you're conditioning people to look for that in their
lived experiences. And it becomes a self legit,
amazing discourse, right? There are witches among you.

(26:33):
You have to look for them. Oh look, I found some witches
and they definitely are doing devilish things.
Gosh, I should look for more evidence of the devil that's
active in the world, right? It becomes a snake eating its
tail. And I think we just see that
happening really profoundly at different moments in history, I
think including our own in some.Ways and importantly, it works
backwards too, where it's like they're doing something I don't

(26:53):
like. That must be demonic, correct?
Yeah. Yeah, it's just a line that I've
read once ages ago, and I've, I can't remember who, who wrote it
down originally. But seeing, maybe believing, but
believing means that there's an awful lot to see.
And it's significant, as Mickey was intimating, that whenever
you've got a major witch panic, it's always preceded by somebody

(27:16):
coming to town, or usually preceded by somebody coming to
town and spending days preachingabout the evils of witchcraft. 2
weeks later, guess what? People find lots of witches,
yeah. Conditioning and priming sort of
really makes a lot of difference.
Well, and in a way, I think thisgoes back to one of the things

(27:38):
we were talking about, about theorigin of the book, is that we
have detected like if you want to understand witchcraft and if
you want to understand the social panics associated with
stuff like that, you have to understand this world, this
oppositional frame that people have.
You have to understand that theythink that the devil is loose in
the world and they need to be aware of that and prepare.

(28:01):
The oppositional nature of Christianity, the combative
nature of Christianity is reallybuilt in right from the earliest
days. The problems for early
Christians is that it's difficult to distinguish them
from mainstream Judaism. And the early debates.
Is what makes us we just a sect of Judaism or are we something

(28:25):
completely different? Pagels argues in the book Dave
was alluding to the one of the big walls that the Christians
put up is between them and Jews.And it's actually easier for the
Romans, who are hardcore pagans,to be assimilated into that than
it is for Jews because they're trying to say we're something
different to the group they cameout of.

(28:47):
And then of course, early Christianity is persecuted.
And so a lot of the sort of early theology is formed in this
context where Christians really are a secret sect and they
really are being executed for their beliefs.
So the theology has that built in from a very early stage.

(29:10):
You talked about the devil beinga ever present threat in
people's lives. It's curious because some
theologians talk about the devilhaving limited powers and
limited presence, but others make him seem like he's
everywhere all at once, all the time.

(29:30):
Like, what's the difference? Like which is it I?
I think that goes back to what Mickey was saying.
It depends on what version of God you want, right, and what
you're trying to explain. If you've got a very, very
powerful God, God is all powerful, then your devil must
ultimately be underneath them, subservient to him, and so his

(29:52):
power is limited. What power he has is granted by
God on a pro tempore basis or anad hoc basis doesn't really free
God from responsibility for evil.
But then you get a comparativelyweak devil, and he's doing
things like correcting people ashe is in some of the bits of the

(30:12):
New Testament. He's purging them of sin so they
can atone here and now won't be saved later.
But if you want a very powerful devil, you've got a much weaker
God. And that's an early Christian
heresy. The idea that you've got 2 equal
principles, a good one and an evil 1.

(30:34):
And what we see here in this world is a result of them
fighting it out called Manichaeism or dualism.
So I think what you're talking about, Josh, is really a
function of how you want to thathandle the power of God and what
explanatory power you want to deal with with the devil.

(30:56):
Because as Mickey said, you can't start defining the devil
without having an implication for God.
If the devil is God's opposite, God's all powerful, the devil's
impotence, God's all being, the devil's nothing.
OK, you're afraid of an impotentbeing who is nothing.
No, of course. And that's not very useful for
explaining anything. It's also not useful for

(31:19):
Christians because the atonementand the resurrection don't make
sense against an impotent enemy,right?
He is a necessary part of the story and a necessary part of
the worldview. So I think, I think this becomes
a really thorny issue, as I've already alluded, for Calvinists,
because they're so obsessed withthis sovereignty of God, right?

(31:41):
They're very, very fixated on it.
So what is the place of the devil in a world in which
salvation is predetermined? If the devil can't really lead
people away from salvation, thenwhat the hell is he doing here,
right? No pun intended.
And wearing started things becomes again, this emphasis on
how fallen man is the devil becomes a way to delineate who's
among the reprobate. Because you do have this world

(32:02):
where most people are reprobate and only a few are the select
elect. Then you need a way to
understand who the reprobate areand what it is they do.
And I think actually that that idea is so animating in the
American context because it alsobecomes a way.
And this is something Richard has written on in other places

(32:23):
to understand. Hey, there are people here
before we got here. How do we understand their place
in the world? How do we understand the things
that we're missing in our sort of knowledge?
Well, maybe it's part of the devil's secret knowledge.
Maybe it's part of the reprobate.
Maybe it's part of this whole sacred plan where we, the elect
are tested and tried until we finally ascend to heaven, Right?

(32:45):
So again, where I think we're circling back to this organizing
principle, but it's a thorny question.
It's a really hard 1. And frankly, I think it's why
the devil kind of falls out of fashion by the time you get to
the end of the 17th and into the18th century among certain
intellectual circles, because there are some theologians who
start to say, you know what? Actually, I think the witch
trials and possession and all this, it's given too much power

(33:09):
to the devil. I actually don't think that's
what's going on at all. So we should move away from that
and recommit to the sovereignty of God.
And you see that a lot of arguments that are supposedly
skeptical, but they're really just trying to refashion what
they think that relationship between God and the devil in the
world is. But I think this is also one of
the reasons that the second-halfof our book is so important too,
right? Because we don't buy this whole

(33:30):
sort of notion of like the disenchantment of the world.
That has a valence. It has a relevance that
continues. And in fact, in some ways, the
great age of the devil might be 19th and 20th century.
I don't know. I mean, we could argue that,
yeah. Yeah, and actually what's scary
about that, Dave, is the devil is unmoored from theology now,

(33:51):
which surprisingly, paradoxically, almost acted as a
fixing agent, right, To say we have to think seriously about
what the devil means for the sovereignty of God, whatever.
Unfortunately, most people who are talking about Satan now are
not thinking seriously about theology and the way that
scholastics were or Calvinists were, whomever.
And even though theology has always been part and parcel of a

(34:11):
broader world, with folklore andlived experience and all that, I
think now the devil to me just seems totally, you know,
unmoored from any of that. Sorry, Richard, you were.
No, I think that's an excellent point.
Yeah, he really is unmoored by theology.
The Inquisition, for obvious reasons, gets a very bad rap.
But there's an Italian scholar called Carlo Ginsburg who's done

(34:34):
some really interesting work. He looked at some trials from
the 1570s to 16 twenties, 1630s of these Italian peasants,
northeastern Italian peasants who believed that at certain
times of the year they travelledin the spirit, so out of their

(34:54):
bodies with sorghum sticks to fight against witches.
These people are bizarre. They're holed up in front of the
Inquisition, and Inquisition just says you're nuts.
This makes no theological sense.If you, if your spirit leaves
your body, we've got a word for that.
It's called death. So you're saying that you died

(35:18):
and you came back to life. That's not happening.
That happened to Jesus. It's not happening again, right?
And it's certainly not happeningwith a bunch of you peasants who
don't understand anything about theology, so they reject it just
because it's theologically ridiculous.
But forward now to where we are.And Mickey's absolutely right.
We've got no sort of theologicalanchor.

(35:40):
And sure, I had a spiritual visitation.
I've travelled up. Yeah, absolutely.
It's theologically ridiculous, but without any theology, Not a
problem. Sorry, Dave, No.
I was just going to say the nameof that book if your listeners
are interested. It's Cuddle Ginsburg, it's The
Night Battles, and it's a marvellous book.

(36:01):
It is, and he includes a good chunk of the Inquisition
records. And what's so interesting is
that the scribes actually recordthe mannerisms of the people
being interrogated. So when the Inquisitors are
asking them questions you've gotnotes about, and the accused is
laughing when I asked this and things like that, because

(36:24):
there's clearly such a gap in their level of understanding,
their worlds just don't coincideand the Inquisition just thinks
they're nuts. So I'm hearing here presently he
is the devil, is more of a livedexperience, starting to become
more of a lived experience as far as people's perceptions of

(36:46):
him. And I'm wondering about portals
to hell and possessed homes and possessed objects.
How is that happening? What is the origins of that?
Yeah, that's interesting. I many, many years ago when I
was in Toronto, I met the exorcist for the Diocese of

(37:07):
Toronto. He was, I don't know, I must be
in his 70s. So he was appointed, must have
been in the late 40s, something like that.
And he said he had done, in thattime, a grand total of 0
exorcisms. So Diocese of Toronto is a
fairly large Canadian diocese. He's probably the most populous.

(37:31):
And he'd done none. He said there'd been a number of
cases referred to him, but he'd referred the people to mental
health counselling or something like that, but he'd done
nothing. 10 years ago, when I was still following this sort of
stuff, the Diocese of Ottawa, which is smaller, had in place 2
exorcists because there was so much business for it.

(37:55):
And the church on the Catholic side has been really, really
slow on the uptake for the demand for exorcism.
I mean, that's gone way up over the last 20-30 years.
Again, I think there's an element of, well, guilt
transference with the idea of needing to exercise my bad luck,

(38:19):
The fact that I'm not a millionaire, the fact that my
business failed or whatever is due to external forces,
obviously, so I don't need to beexercised or my drinking is a
result of some sort of false acting upon me or whatever.
As to portals to hell, yeah, I don't know.
Does anybody else have? A lot of that stuff like portals

(38:41):
to hell, I mean, there's so for example, I live in rural
Virginia, I'm almost to West Virginia and their Appalachia is
chock a block with like the Devil's Watering Hole and
Satan's Riverbend or whatever. There are lots of features in
the natural landscape where people have had falls, where
they've had bad events, things like that, that get sort of
reframed as having these demonicvaliances.

(39:03):
And I think that's part of a very long folkloric tradition of
associating certain energy and events, various landscapes.
I mean, this happens in the context of the witch trials.
There are certain places and spaces that are known to be
Centers for like a witches Sabbath, for example.
So I think it is partially like a folkloric reading of the
landscape that can sometimes be rooted in lived experience, but

(39:25):
also is a way for people to Orient themselves with the
world. I have to say, everybody wants
to ask about portals to hell. I once did a History Channel
program and the person interviewing me kept saying, but
what about the portals to hell? And I was like, Sir, I'm a
historian of the 17th century. I've never read anything about
the portals to hell. And in fact, like, my ministers
would have been really freaked out if any of their parishioners

(39:46):
said anything about that. They would think that was like
Popish and wrong. But I do think people are
interested in how they live in the world and what they
encounter and what they experienced.
Just to say quickly about Richard bringing up modern day
exorcism, and this connects to what you used to ask Sarah about
haunted houses and poltergeist and all of that.
Certain, there are certain hallmarks in the media landscape

(40:09):
that have such a big impact in how people see the world.
And there's no question that TheExorcist was that 1973.
Correct me if I'm wrong on that date, but yeah, 1973, Rosemary's
Baby, these films coming out that are.
Conservative responses to what they see as growing liberalism
of the late 1960s and but perceived growing

(40:30):
secularization. So these films are basically
meant to say, look, the devil ishere, he is active in the world,
he may be in your child, you better be a believer, that sort
of thing that sets off this realappetite right from lots of
people to see more representations of the devil on
screen. So yeah, I think you have one

(40:50):
film that makes a big difference, or two, or whatever
that's responding to a certain moment.
I I would say it's 3:00. You got to put in the omen in
there, which is 75 or 70. 6. Which is the Protestant response
to The Exorcist, Yes, Yeah, those films are enormously
important in in that respect. But what's interesting about

(41:11):
those three films and goes back to what Mickey was saying about
Fear, is that they're happening in the household, in the
domestic space, right? They're happening in the family.
There's something wrong with thefamily in both Rosemary's Baby
and in The Exorcist. The Exorcist, it's a woman who

(41:31):
is, I can't remember, she's divorced or just separated, but
the father is out of the scene and he won't even phone Reagan
on her birthday. And then the Omen is a couple
who really wanted a child, but it's switched with the
Antichrist, as happens. But I think making it, putting
it into a domestic context, really goes a long way to

(41:55):
feeding into what becomes the panics of the 80s, which are all
about domestic spaces and challenges to childhood and
mothers who aren't fulfilling their traditional roles as they
didn't in The Exorcist. I guess Rosemary's Baby, she
tried, but she was carrying the Antichrist.
So what can you do? And that's, of course, when we

(42:19):
get the panic 10 years later. The locus for demonic activity
is in all those places where badmothers are letting their
children run riots. So it's heavy metal concerts,
it's Dungeons and Dragons when they should be doing wholesome
after school activities. Instead it's a bunch of kids,
latchkey kids sitting around playing with satanic forces and

(42:40):
stuff, heavy metal music. It's all those places that are
new spaces in the 80s and 90s, seventies, 80s and 90s, I guess.
One of the points that Sarah Hughes makes in her excellent
book about media and the panics in the 80s is that of course,
the 80s are the first time that kids will have ATV in their

(43:01):
room, and also when they've got access to video cassettes.
So parents, you don't have TV asa family time anymore.
It becomes a more solitary activity and they're often in
their bedroom listening to theirheavy metal and then watching
what it what is an R rated film?And their parents don't know.

(43:22):
And so there's all of this angstand associated with that.
But I highly recommend Sarah's book.
Yeah. I do think there's something
important to say here about how much of this satanic panic, how
much of these demonic anxieties revolve around two things that
have just come up in Richard David's comments, which are
mothers, right, and the female body.
And if you look back, for example, at the history of the

(43:43):
witch trials, one of the things people believe witches do is
impede reproduction at its various stages, right?
Causing a husband to be impotent, causing a woman to
have an abortion, which is stealing babies from their
mother's beds, all of those sorts of things.
So that's connected to the second way, just this tremendous
anxiety about childhood and thisidea that children are uniquely,

(44:04):
in some ways vulnerable to beingLED astray by the devil or by
the devil's sort of various venues, be it Satanic music or
video games or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever it is.
And I think at the heart of Christianity are a lot of big
feelings about moms and babies, right?
Which of course, is rooted in this sort of very idea about

(44:27):
Jesus, and Jesus is coming into the world, all of these sorts of
things. And I think nobody's ever been
able to work through this. And it's clearly being made
manifest in these locuses of anxiety in that, as Dave was
saying, that domestic, but also in the female body and in the
child. One of the things that I'm
thinking about these days, and these are just Phillips right

(44:48):
now, I haven't fleshed them out,is the idea of demon free
spaces. And the family should be the
ultimate demon free space, right?
It should be an enclosed environment.
And we're talking about a patriarchal structure here with
the male is the external face and he's also the protective
figure and the woman is the nurturer inside.

(45:10):
But the family needs to be protected and it's our community
against the rest of the world. But within that, of course, we
can't have any contamination. And back in the good old days
when America was great, there was no contamination, right?
Everybody watched wholesome family TV together and went to

(45:31):
bed at 10:00 or whatever. But as soon as it's penetrated
by outside forces in the 70s and80s with mass media and so on,
but it but the whole idea goes, I think you can see it in
medieval monasteries. That's what they are.
But I also think it feeds into Christian nationalism.

(45:51):
I mean, Trump's rhetoric, Trump won was all about building
walls. And that's the ultimate sort of
gated community. Well, gated communities are
another example is that it's where nice white middle class
people live. And we've got guards at the
gates not letting in any sort ofpotentially subversive forces
who can corrupt our youth. But the walls around America are

(46:16):
sort of functioning in same sortof ways now.
Anyway. I, I think there's parallels
there. Now flesh them out.
Richard I think that's really interesting because one of the
things that's so striking about people like Doug Wilson and
other sorts of figures in the Christian Nationalist right that
people like Peak Headseth are listening to is they want women

(46:38):
to be home, stay home and not goto work, preferably not vote
all, you know, certainly not control their own reproductive
outcomes. And there is embedded in that
idea this profound misogynistic sense that women, are they
possible people who will open the gate to that demonic
influence. And that goes again right back.

(46:59):
We're circling back to that Genesis 3 story and what becomes
the dominant interpretation of that.
So you have to control women if you want to control this walled
family home. Bring up Tertullian and the
Devil's Gateway, I'm sure. You were going in.
That direction too, right? No, no, I hadn't.
That's exactly right. Thank you, David.
I hadn't thought that hadn't been connected to my head, but

(47:19):
that guy sucks anyway. Julian.
It's a letter by this 3rd century patristic theologian who
writes to this community of women.
And it's, it is the most misogynistic piece of writing
that I think Christianity has ever produced, which is saying.
The TLDR is stop wearing makeup you harlots.

(47:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's you are the Devil's gateway, right?
Yeah, famous line there. He was a very good Latinist and
I did actually enjoy translatingthis.
No, it's Latin. You know what?
Maybe everybody has a redeeming quality.
Richard. Horrible person, but he's good
at Latin so let's give him a pass.

(48:00):
I kind of just want to get your thoughts about the state of the
devil today. You've talked a lot about it,
but just what are your general thoughts?
Where are we with the devil? Who is he today?
How's he being used? I know it's a big question.
Well, one of the things that came out from the Russell book,

(48:20):
the last of the Russell books, is that there's a really nice
sort of conceit Mickey alluded to it called the disenchantment
theory, the idea that the devil just sort of Withers away with
the enlightenments in the 18th, 19th century, that he's no
longer a major threat, that it'sjust the loony fringe sort of

(48:42):
communities of people, they're not very educated, who accept
that. And that had currency really
until sort of the 80s. And one of our points in the
book is that that's just wrong. It never goes away.
It's just that people have been looking in the wrong place.
There are they're really lively traditions who keep the devil

(49:05):
going all the way through this period.
And in fact, it's those traditions that are so very
important, like early Pentecostalism in the early 20th
century, which is all about, I mean, it involves spirit
possession, allowing the Holy Spirit in.
But if your body becomes porous to the Holy Spirit, it's also
porous to other spirits as well.And those traditions, I think,

(49:30):
are so very important. And that's what we've sort of
seen sort of revive from the 50s, quietly at first with the
likes of Billy Graham, but increasingly more vocal from the
80s that that would be my very superficial reading of things.
I and I'd say just to add to this, because it is a big

(49:50):
question, it is the question that our book in some ways
tackled. I mean, something does change,
right? And in the late 17th and 18th
century there there's a greater permission structure for people
to have questions about the identity, the efficacy, the
existence of the devil, right? There becomes a broader range of
opinions. And there are some people who do
see the devil as symbol, as metaphor, as representative of

(50:13):
this idea of how is other peoplethese sorts of things.
But I think what you have now though, but as Richard is
saying, the devil remains profoundly important in people's
lived experiences and then increasingly in literature and
art and media on screen and other things.
I think what we have now is a situation of really 2 tracks of
thinking about the devil that have a major impact on the state

(50:37):
of Satan today, if you will. And on the one hand, you have
people who are continuing this nascent skeptical tradition who
are, who maybe don't believe in the devil at all, right?
Surveys show the devil is not fared as well as God, right, in
terms of belief. Although of course, actually I
think those surveys need to be redone because of the way
they've asked those questions. If anybody out there wants to
fund the three of us to do that research, they're quite keen to

(50:59):
do it. But anyway, there are people who
don't believe in the devil or who've taken a completely
different view of the devil likethat The Satanic Temple that
said actually, no, let's believethis story that Richard was
alluding to earlier of Eve saying, hey, wait, this was
blamed on me. This was kind of God's fault.
The devil might be a symbol of something else, of ligration,
whatever it might be. So there's modern day Satanists

(51:21):
who are not theists. They don't believe in a literal
devil, but they see the devil asa symbol of rebellion and a
freedom on the one hand. So the skepticism and the
Satanists on the one track and then on the other these
Christian nationalists in the rise of the far right who are I
think Co opting some of these new religious traditions that
Richard is alluding to with Pentecostalism and whatever to

(51:42):
say. The devil is alive and well and
active and here he is at play inall of my political enemies.
And I think what is has that group is in the minority
probably, but they have unprecedented levels of purchase
at the highest levels of our government today, I think.
Right. Yeah, I've never heard so much

(52:05):
demonic rhetoric in political discourse.
I don't know if that two track thing makes sense, but I think
as we've become more polarized, our thinking about the devil has
also become more polarized, which in and of itself is more
fodder for those who want to saythe devil is active in the
world. I think those are excellent
points. There's a really dated but
classic English history book called 1066 and all that.

(52:28):
And the phrase which runs through the whole thing is top
nation. And the story is how Britain
became top nation with the the empire.
Anyways, I think there's there'sa moment between about 1945 and
say 1952 in America where after World War Two it was undeniable
that America was top nation. They had the atomic bomb that

(52:51):
won the war in Asia. And then in 48, Russia gets the
bomb and then China becomes communist and you're starting to
do things like become, well thenbecause he shows up and you
start writing on the currency. And God we trust and Pledge of
Allegiance and all of these sorts of things.

(53:13):
And I think that's a growing awareness that something has
happened. It was going all right.
We were top nation and it was clear that God was on our side.
But we're facing godless communists in China and in
Russia, and they've got atomic bombs.
And I think this we've fallen back on that sort of

(53:33):
defensiveness again, which is soconvenient in Christian
rhetoric. Well.
I also think Richard, I think ofa couple of books.
I think of books like The Formation of a Persecuting
Society for the Shadow Gospel. There are still habits of mind
that this world view has led to,that sometimes there are even

(53:54):
subterranean, like we don't evenknow that we're organizing the
world that way. But maybe it's not explicitly
theologically Christian, but it's just this sort of way of
organizing the world in these oppositional terms that looks
very much like a kind of eschatological Christian
eschatological view, or one that's text malign influences
everywhere. That's the way the world has to

(54:15):
work, you know? Yeah, we have to put in a big
plug for that. The book, that second book that
Dave mentioned, The Shadow Gospel, which is Whitney
Phillips and Mark Brockway. It's a fabulous book.
It's by a communications professor and a sociologist, I
believe. But their fundamental argument
is that when we look at the state of particularly modern
American politics in this rise of demonic rhetoric and the

(54:38):
explicit demonization of trans folks, which is it really
replicates aspects of a satanic panic in a whole host of ways.
That demonizes immigrants, That demonizes any liberal who might
disagree with the current administration and lumps them
all into one category, even though, of course, a trans
person and an immigrant and a Democratic senator have probably

(54:59):
very little in common on the surface, but demonizes
technology is the glue that can hold them together.
And the book makes the argument that it's not just Christian
nationalism that explains this mode of thinking.
What it is is really a modern demonology that people are using
to think about all of their enemies in a very specific way
and to construct to themselves as the defenders of America as

(55:21):
top nation. Back to Richard's point.
So it's AI think. It's a book that's influenced, I
think, how all three of us thinkabout the current moment.
So is demonic rhetoric the ultimate pact with the devil?
What I'm trying to say is witch trials and lots of stories.

(55:41):
There's accusations against those who may have had to deal
with the devil or have a pact with the devil.
But this demonizing large groupsof our society, it's almost like
we have a pact with the devil against the devil.
I like it's so evil. And so it's just seems like

(56:03):
that's where the Devil pact is. Yeah, I think that the pact's a
really important point because the flip side of it is it builds
coherence and group solidarity against those people who are in
league with the devil, right? We can demonize them and they
are all together, the Democrats and the trans folk and the

(56:25):
people who want sex education inschools and whatever else.
But it also means that we are a nice, coherent, homogeneous
block and we're bound together by this.
And also it means that we're watching over the morality of
anybody within our group. Right?
Said you were actually in favourof sex education in school.

(56:45):
OK, You're not one of us. And the tiniest little
transgression means that you're moved to the other category,
right? I mean, one of the terms that we
used in our introduction to the Routledge book was
microaggressions. We've appropriated it from other
contexts, but Satan is often seen, I think, in a lot of a lot

(57:06):
of discourse now as operating through tiny, tiny little
microaggressions. It's a slippery slope argument.
If we allow sex education be taught in schools, then what
next? If we allow I, I don't know
what, whatever. Someone to take a knee at an NFL
game. Exactly what next?
They're clearly not one of us, and if you're not absolutely one

(57:30):
of us, you're against us, so we'll just demonize that as
well. Yeah, I mean, the devil is such
a powerful tool of negative selfdefinition, right, To define who
you are by what you are not. But Sarah, I think actually I
think you're asking a really important question, which is
basically in observing that people on the far right and that

(57:52):
certain groups are using the idea of the devil to demonize
and dehumanize enemies, Are theyreally the ones doing the
devil's work to some degree? If you're basically asking how
should we talk about and think about evil and what evil looks
like today? And I've thought about this a
lot because I if you would have asked me 10 years ago, is evil a

(58:12):
useful category of analysis? Historians love that question.
Is this a useful category of analysis?
Whatever, I would have said, no.It's problematic.
It's reductionist. It doesn't really tell us
anything. It's replicating, it's flawed
thinking. But actually, I think what's
hard is when we see people talking so much about evil, so
much about the demonic in ways that are clearly being used to

(58:33):
other, to demonize, to ostracize, whatever.
It doesn't give us much purchaseto use evil as a way to talk
about social evils, right? You know, housing insecurity.
Is that an evil? There is a, from my vantage
point, a genocide happening right now that we are unable to
talk about. But that's a conflict that's
involving profound levels of dehumanization and demonization

(58:57):
by the party in a position of power that is committing in my
mind, a great evil. But we almost don't have the
language to talk about that sortof evil because so much the
terrain of evil rhetoric, demonic rhetoric, is dominated
by people who are using it on the right in ways that are
really destructive. So I don't know if that's
getting at what you're asking, but I think it's a really sticky

(59:18):
problem for those of us who wantto talk about evil in the world,
but in a way that's constructiveand not so connected to that
long destructive legacy of demonic thinking.
I don't know why, but for some reason it made me think about
sort of certain segments in the US.
There's a way in which Canadiansand you get 2 of us here in
which we sort of approach what'sgoing on in the US right now.

(59:39):
And like I have seen voices who will construe sort of social
medicine or public healthcare inCanada as being this slippery
slope, this sort of thin end of the wedge where it's like nanny
state and you get sort of build up from there, build up from
there. And it becomes almost like this,
you know, by giving people the healthcare they need publicly
that somehow that becomes demonic or that gets construed

(01:00:01):
as being like something negative, right?
It allows you to put evil in various weird different boxes.
That's an interesting example, Dave, because one of the things
which just sort of we laugh at on this side of the border is
when Republicans start talking about the death panels in
Canada, that there's not enough money to treat Granny, so the

(01:00:21):
doctors just decide to kill him.Absolutely rubbish.
But the starting point is demonic.
Then it's inevitable that that'sjust a logical consequence of
this. If universal Healthcare is just
another microaggression that targeting the family and not
letting the family make its own choices, then you just pull out

(01:00:41):
whatever other features of demonic rhetoric you want.
And yeah, absolutely. Of course they have death
penalty panels in Canada, and ofcourse they're giving everybody
operations to change gender as well.
Yeah, absolutely. It's all happening here.
And then there's no space right on the other side to say
actually what is evil is lettingyou know people go bankrupt or

(01:01:03):
die because they don't have healthcare, right?
I think it actually is AI. Hadn't thought about this till
you brought it up, Sarah. But it is a fundamentally thorny
thing if people who are, I don'teven want to use a left, right
spectrum, but people who are thinking with compassion and
empathy and a broader communitarian ethos that isn't
based strictly on their family or their own race or whatever.
If people have a more empatheticway of approaching the world,

(01:01:26):
where is there space for them tosay these things are evil when
the other side is using that language so forcefully and
powerfully and so lazily to someof our points?
And what did she to me actually is about how when evil was used
in, say, late 18th, early 19th century Britain, a lot of it was
that the rhetoric of like, oh, this is evil was often used by
social reformers lamenting, for example, the state of London

(01:01:49):
right after the industrial revolution in the sort of real
pocket. I'm thinking about like Charles
Booth's map. And things like evil could be
used by social reformers saying,hey, the real problem was
someone like Jack the Ripper is not that he's inherently evil,
but that he is praying on peoplein the slums.
That's evil. And of course, I think that's a
useful way to think about something being evil.
But that's not typically how historically within

(01:02:12):
Christianity, evil has been mobilized.
It hasn't been used to talk about social ills.
It's been used to talk about either demonic groups of people
or this myth of like the pure evil figure, like Hitler, which
of course evolves everybody elseof their involvement in evil
projects. So it's a thorny.
It's always been a thorny. Thing, yeah, I think the Hitler
example is an interesting one aswell, because if you do label

(01:02:35):
him as evil, everybody else getsa pass, right?
You would just sort of seduced by evil.
Russell in his book makes a distinction.
I don't know if it's useful in getting it, what you're talking
about. Mickey, which I think is very
important, he makes a distinction between radical evil
on one hand, which he sort of thinks of is ultimately demonic

(01:02:56):
and moral social evils, which are more of the sorts of things
that you're talking about. And I think that would be a
useful way of framing things. But as as you write, as you
argue, the rhetoric of evil has been totally Co opted by people
who was thinking in terms of radical evil and what are
trivial things are labeled as radical evil and that shuts down

(01:03:19):
debate. Yeah, that's where I was going
with that. Because what you can do then is
just put it into this sort of religious freedom register and
just say you're trampling on my rights by by engaging in this
debate, in this political discussion.
We know it's evil. We know it's the devil.
I mean, I guess the take away for me, and we've already
circled around this quite a bit,but it's in some ways it's the

(01:03:41):
message that I will give to my students this semester, which is
whatever you believe about the devil, right?
Whatever you believe about God and Christianity and the world,
be mindful of people who use fear and who use the specter of
the devil to demonize others, because flip side of
demonization is dehumanization. These are parts, two sides of

(01:04:04):
the same coin. And I think history is chock a
block with dangerous examples ofwhat happens when people in
positions of power are willing to use fear and conspiratorial
thinking and ideas about the devil to to wreak havoc in a
whole host of ways. So to just pay attention and
know it, which as we sort of say, you know it when you see
it. To circle back to my first

(01:04:24):
point, which is similar, it's it's lazy, it's fundamentally
lazy and it has abhorrent consequences.
So think as Mickey was implying,Think about what's happening.
It's just too easy, particularlyin this world of a 5 second
sound bite. It's powerful rhetoric and it's

(01:04:44):
incredibly lazy and it just aligns difference and anything
which is vaguely interesting, frankly.
That was so great. Thanks for coming together to
speak with us, Doctor Raiswell, Dr. Winter and Doctor Brock.
And if you out there are like me, you want more Devil, and you
can go to our back catalog for our previous Great Devil

(01:05:07):
episode, many of them featuring Doctor Richard Raiswell.
Happy October. Join us later this month for a
special live Halloween Traditions Origins Live online
event October 26th. The link to attend will be at
end Witch hunts.org/events. Have a great today and a

(01:05:31):
beautiful tomorrow.

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