Secular Satanism

Hitler has replaced Satan as the true Devil in our post-Christian society, and more in this week's digest.

Deeply troubled musician Kanye West released a new single last week called “Heil <you know who>.” The song was promptly banned from every major music streaming service (which of course turned it into a huge internet sensation).

The song isn’t actually about Hitler. Hunter Ash on X posted an interesting analysis of it:

Kanye does us the favor of being quite explicit about his thought process in this song, so minimal extrapolation is needed: despite all his money and fame, he can’t see his kids, a primal human need. So he’s declared war on the entire postwar liberal order.

I should say that he is obviously crazy. I recognize his madness because I see it in myself: highly sensitive, highly reactive, prone to extremes. And that’s probably why he lost custody. But from his perspective, society awarded his mind with international fame and billions of dollars, yet he doesn’t have the same right to a family as the average janitor. That’s an inherently schizophrenic state of affairs, and I understand how it would produce bitterness. They’ll use his madness to make money, but also use it to take from him any hope of a fulfilling life.

So he’s given up on fitting in to the world as it is, and seeks to destroy it. His invocation of Hitler is not about some considered endorsement of the tenets of national socialism. It’s a form of secular satanism. He correctly perceives that Hitler is the devil of the modern west, much more so than Satan. He hates what society has done to him, so he adopts the maximally oppositional stance. [emphasis added]

Ash makes an insightful observation: Hitler has replaced Satan as the true Devil in our post-Christian society.

Another poster made the same point in a different way, writing, “If Ye released a song called ‘Hail Satan’ they wouldn't flinch.”

Hitler and the Nazis were always viewed as bad, but weren’t always treated the way they are now. I grew up watching re-runs of the TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes, in which a group of American World War 2 POW’s routinely outwits their hapless Nazi captors. The Mel Brooks film The Producers centered around a Broadway play called Springtime for Hitler that was designed to be a flop but instead became a huge hit. Hitler and the Nazis could be joked about, played for laughs. In the 90s, Seinfeld had an episode about the “soup nazi,” and the term nazi was regularly used as a metaphor in describing people in casual conversation. “Oh, he’s a grammar nazi.”

By contrast, Satan was still considered a big deal in some quarters. In the 1980s there were moral panics over ritual Satanic abuse in daycares. Jon Stokes notes how seriously disturbed people were about Satanic names and imagery used in some rock music, saying, “I don't think people nowadays understand how this imagery looked to us Christians when it began to circulate in this fashion the 70's & 80's, & how seriously Christians took these symbols & the very real darkness & horror they represented to us.”

I can attest that rock and roll as the literal Devil’s music was a live belief in the evangelical world in that era. (Read up on backmasking).

Today, people can’t even relate to the role Satan played in the public imagination back then, or how some people felt about these symbols.

With the decline of Christianity in America and the advent of the Negative World, Satan has been dethroned from his old position in the culture, even for many of those who believe he really exists.

But nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of the Christian Satan, society has turned to Hitler as a secular Satan. There are many comedies about Nazis. I don’t remember the last time I heard someone use the term as a metaphor in casual conversation (though I’m sure some people still do). Even the use of the “Hitler reacts” meme online appears to have diminished significantly.

Hitler is no longer just an evil totalitarian dictator, but the actual Satanic figure of our post-Christian society.

The resulting embrace of Hitler by some as a form of secular Satanism is a cultural trend I had not considered, but it one of the many unexpected negative outcomes from the decline of Christianity in America. Those who cheered and pushed for Christianity’s decline had no idea what kind of world they were creating.

The Three Worlds

The great religion data wonk Ryan Burge tweeted this interesting image showing trust in organized religion compared to other institutions in society.

He writes:

Do Americans distrust organized religion more or less than other institutions?

The way I see it, there are three eras.

Era 1, 1972-1985: They trusted religion more.

Era 2, 1985-2005: They trusted religion about the same.

Era 3, 2005-Current: They trust religion less.

While these dates are about a decade off from mine, they show very well the progression from a Positive to a Neutral to a Negative World. It’s always good to see a framing you developed show up in the data.

Faith Based Gender Wars

Our resident film critic Joseph Holmes wrote an interesting piece on gender and religion at Religion Unplugged. It riffs off of reports that a women might be cast as Aslan in the Netflix adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia.

First, it’s fairly obvious watching many of the recent films that have come out of Hollywood that it’s heavily shifting its emphasis toward a view of spirituality that is positive if it is female-centric. So many recent films have shown this pattern. Amazon’s “Hazbin Hotel” rewrites Christianity so the angels are the sexist bad guys and Satan’s daughter is good. “Nosferatu” portrays the woman as more spiritually attuned than her male counterparts and the only one who can stop evil. "Presence" (as I wrote about before) presents women as the most spiritually astute brings, downplaying the relationship the religious have with God compared to the natural giftings of the female psychic.

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As I’ve written before, Hollywood has long had a bias toward the moral superiority of women (particularly single women) even as it's given greater representation to men. Hollywood has long portrayed the women in movies as the moral conscience of the male hero, from Pepper Potts in “Iron Man” to Chani in "Dune: Part Two.” This is likely in part because Hollywood is largely politically left-leaning and single women are the most reliable Democratic voting bloc.

What’s different now is that the movies are elevating spirituality over secularism. Instead of secularism being good and faith being bad, or the secular woman being wiser than the secular man, women are now “spiritual,” while men are “religious.” Note the difference. It’s also not just positive when women are running the spiritual realm. This is the type of spirituality women gravitate toward. Women tend to want a faith that is more based in intuition and feeling, whereas men like a faith built on reason and structure.

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This is why Gerwig potentially casting a woman as Aslan makes so much sense — whether it ends up happening or not. Aslan is a religious male authority figure. But Gerwig is part of the trend of formerly religious women who still love spirituality but have rejected the church because of its supposed oppressive nature. I called this out after "Barbie" premiered that Gerwig wouldn’t be a good choice to direct "Narnia" because all her movies have shown hatred for male authority. I never expected to be proven so unbelievably correct.

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Add this all together, and we can see a growing media-driven holy war. Female, left-wing spirituality on one side, and male, conservative religion on the other. Who will win this war? It’s hard to say. It all depends on a few questions being answered.

Click over to read the whole thing.

China’s Ticking Timebomb

Bloomberg has an incredible piece about China’s falling marriage and fertility rates, and the implications for that country.

For almost two decades, Abby Gao has been planning weddings in China. She smiles fondly as she recalls once booking 58 luxury cars, including Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, for a single motorcade. Or the time she filled a wedding venue with 35,000 roses. She remembers the countless bottles of premium Moutai liquor, retailing for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars each, that she would carefully place at the center of banquet tables.

Today, the 39-year-old has diversified into children’s birthdays, forced by plummeting demand for weddings. “It’s dropped off a cliff,” said Gao, whose Beijing-based business only had about 100 wedding clients last year, down from a peak of almost 2,000 in 2012.

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Despite government endeavors, an increasing number of young Chinese espouse what they call the “no marriage, no children” philosophy. That’s driven in part by an economic slowdown, with people put off by the cost of weddings and the accompanying expectations of home ownership or gifting large sums of money to the bride’s family. Social factors are also at play as some younger Chinese reject the nation’s paternalistic culture and conservative views on a traditional, domestic role for women.

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“The costs of getting married are very high,” said Morningstar Yang, 34, an animation designer from southwest China who’s lived in the city for 10 years and was scouting for a life partner at the market. “It would be quite difficult to marry someone from Beijing,” he said, sporting a blue dress shirt and carrying a smart black leather backpack. “Most of the women will likely want a Beijing house, a car or more, which is hard for me.”

In megacities like Beijing, home prices have spiraled beyond the reach of many people, with a single square meter of apartment space in a good school district often costing more than an average yearly income. Uncertainty about future job prospects means marriage feels out of reach for many. Almost one in six Chinese aged 16 to 24 who are not full-time students are unemployed.

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“I don’t want to cook three meals a day for my family, clean up the socks in the corner and toys all over the floor,” a social media influencer who goes by the name Ling’er said on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese version of Instagram that’s also known as RedNote. “I didn’t come to this world to do laundry for men, cook and give birth to children. I just want to fill my life with happiness.”…“If I make marriage my life’s mission, I may end up making compromises or concessions or even changing myself,” she said.

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Despite the economic slowdown, social media is awash with childless influencers boasting about the financial and personal freedoms they enjoy, as well as unmarried couples flaunting carefree lifestyles that include sleeping until noon or splurging on last-minute vacations. That reflects a broader pushback against the social pressure on women to marry young. Until recently, women in China who were unmarried in their late 20s were referred to as sheng nu, or “leftover ladies.” But that phrase has gained a new dimension, with some people on social media calling highly educated women with successful careers “golden leftover ladies” to reflect the tension between social expectations and their achievements.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Here’s their chart of falling marriage levels.

Best of the Web

Nicholas Kristoff at the Times wrote a column about the sick internal documents on sexual exploitation at Porn Hub.

ABC News: US drug overdose deaths fell by nearly 27% last year - Great news

Ann Helen Petersen: The Friendship Dip

World Magazine: Moral Minority - A look at three dissident right thinkers: Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, and Steve Sailer.

Chris Arnade: Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor?

Religion News Service: Episcopal Church refuses to resettle white Afrikaners, ends partnership with US government - This move basically tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of the American left.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in World magazine in the article linked above on secular right thinkers. I also got a mention from Patrick T. Brown.

New this week:

• A deep read on the end of bourgeois values - How America’s shift from Protestant work ethic to post-Christian consumer culture unraveled the values that once defined its middle class.

• My podcast this week was with Sheluyang Peng on how Nietzsche shaped American thought.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.