Belief in God might seemingly make a kind of sense, to explain existence. There’s less logic to Satan. If God did create everything, why include an adversary? Punishing sinners God could handle in his own shop. And, apart from his opening cameo, Satan has little role in the Bible, with God himself playing good cop/bad cop. All that smiting and genocide. Who needs a Satan?
It was Milton who really conjured the Satan we know and hate, with that epic tale of a fallen angel warring against God. Great literary stuff; nothing like it in scripture.
Yet that Miltonian Satan, for right-wing American Evangelicals, seems to loom larger and more immediate than even God or Jesus, taking on a very earthly form: liberals.
This is analyzed by Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway in their 2025 book, The Shadow Gospel. Their label for an outgrowth from traditional Christian theology, that centralizes a modern version of Milton’s Satan war. Not only demonizing antagonists but making demonology itself their guiding orientation.
With “liberals” (or “the left,” or simply Democrats) fought not merely on public policy but as literally Satanic. Yet what can that really mean? Are they unwitting tools of Satan? Or did Satan somehow create liberals to serve his purposes? What purposes, exactly? Messing up human society? Leading us into evil? Why would anyone want that?
Hello: that’s not how things work. Nobody knowingly serves evil. Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, saw themselves as good guys. Certainly true of “liberals,” their policies sincerely advocated (much more rationally!) as benevolent. At least they’re not rooted in supernaturalistic meshugas.
But psychologically, battling Satan can be more inspiriting than conventional politics. To quote the book, “humans create meaning, make sense of things, and enliven their existence in a world seen as drab, mechanistic, and soulless, and which is replete with randomness, adversity, and suffering.” All that slashed like a Gordian knot when you cast yourself as battling Satanic forces.
American Evangelicals did not come up with this manichaeism spontaneously. Revving it up was a calculated effort by cynical operators to subvert those people all the more powerfully into their thrall. Being against something psychologically trumps being for something. Any fight is itself a powerful idea. More so fighting Satan than mere political foes. Thus the Evangelical movement embraced demonology.
They also see it as a fight between people upholding “traditional values” — the way things ought to be — and “modernizers” pushing change. That’s the “liberalism” they demonize. And yet, they’re the ones who really want change — radical change — from a country where ethnic and religious minorities, and even sexual nonconformists, are equal, to one where they’re not. They want a society where their way is the only way. These “patriots” love an America that doesn’t exist and never really did; they (not the libs) hate the actual America.
The word “liberal” that’s become their demonology’s fixation has so much packed into it. Liberals being cast as destroying that ole time religion and throwing us into moral chaos. (Though the biggest source of moral confusion afflicting the world is actually religion — scrambling the brain, preventing reality-based rationality.)
On its face, the word “liberal” ought to have positive connotations. Classical liberalism, of the John Stuart Mill sort, was a philosophy vaunting individual dignity and liberty, as opposed to overweening government. Thus actually a source for what traditionally was (my own) American conservatism. In Europe “liberal” still retains that original meaning, while in America it’s taken a different one.
But even government-loving U.S. liberals aren’t remotely “communist” — another big hate word lobbed by today’s American right. Do they really even know its meaning? I’ve reviewed a book by Mark Levin hysterically screaming “Marxist” on every page. Maybe he thought that less silly sounding than “communist.” (It’s not.) To state the obvious, the number of Americans today who favor the Soviet-style “communism” that obsesses Evangelicals is perhaps around three.
A key fear point about “communism” has been godless atheism. Yet that doesn’t keep communists from working for Satan? That deity they do worship? Meantime, query the logic of Satan backing a particular political ideology. Why would he choose to so circumscribe himself? But the demonologists deem it a given that communism, or just liberalism, are ipso facto “Satanic.” It makes no sense.
Note that they also once deemed civil rights advocacy “communist.” Even harder to figure, except perhaps as conflating two bêtes noires. If “communism” threatened their “100% Americanism,” so did nonwhites. They were panicked by a nonwhite president. Satan incarnate.
Religionists have always been preoccupied too with the concept of sin, which also maps onto Satan. Not just punished by him, but egged on by him. So they see “liberal” politics as not merely mistaken but sinful — which in turn conflates with Satanic.
All this helps explain how a once reasonable conservative political outlook transmogrified into a crazed anti-reality cult. True moral chaos.
However, I don’t reciprocally consider them evil, wicked people. They too seek the good. But how they see that is confuzzled by phantasmagorical nonsense. That applies even to your rank-and-file everyday white Christian nationalist. At the top, however, there are those who, for their own purposes, cynically manipulate them, exploit their supernatural delusions. Those exploiters are evil.
You can’t advance righteousness without having your facts right. But this movement is steeped in lies. And all those who think they’re combating Satan seem to forget how devious he really is. Conning them into marching on the wrong side. Themselves the tools of the true evil that is Trump and his sick regime.
Satan, the lord of Hell, is laughing at them. The book’s final words: “we’re trapped in political hell.”
The Rational Pessimist 
