‘Hail Satan’ in the Heartland: Red Counties Aren’t Immune

American Faith

On the evening of October 6, the Ottumwa City Council rose for an invocation addressed to a “dark father,” a prayer that praised the “luciferian impulse” and ended with the words “Hail Satan.” This did not happen in Portland, Brooklyn, or a coastal faculty lounge; it happened in the seat of Wapello County, Iowa, a place where Donald Trump won 65 percent of the vote in 2024.

Conservatives will be tempted to treat this as a strange local curiosity, the kind of story that circulates for a weekend and is forgotten by Monday. That would be a mistake, because Ottumwa exposes a comfortable illusion that many Christians in red America have quietly adopted: the belief that spiritual decay is a blue-state disease, that it lives in San Francisco city hall and Manhattan newsrooms, and that a county that votes the right way every four years is somehow inoculated against it. It is not, and the sooner believers abandon that illusion, the sooner they can begin to fight for the towns they assume are already safe.

The facts are not complicated. The invocation was delivered by Matt Dalbey, a former member of the council and a member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa. He spoke under an invocation policy the council adopted on January 20 by a 4 to 1 vote, which allows any resident to offer a prayer of up to two minutes and schedules speakers on a first-come, first-served basis. The city’s own agenda materials described the policy as an opportunity for local churches and their congregations, yet Dalbey has also been scheduled to deliver the invocation at the council’s November 3 meeting.

Dalbey insists the prayer “has nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity,” and his organization describes itself as non-theistic. That defense deserves to be taken apart rather than politely accepted. A man who does not believe in Satan has no need to address him as a father in a public chamber and close by hailing him, unless the purpose of the exercise is something other than devotion. The Satanic Temple’s purpose has never been especially hidden. When the group sought to deliver an invocation in Phoenix in 2016, the city council responded by abolishing opening prayer altogether and replacing it with a moment of silence. The tactic is to make public prayer so uncomfortable and so legally fraught that local governments decide it is easier to have no prayer at all, and in that sense the “non-theistic” label is not a disclaimer but a strategy.

Ottumwa has already heard the opening argument for that outcome. Council member Cara Galloway, the lone vote against the invocation policy and a member who does not stand for invocations, warned at the close of the meeting that responding to someone’s invocation was a slippery slope toward taxpayer liability and endless objections. In other words, the proposed answer to a prayer that hails Satan is not a Christian response but institutional silence, dressed up as neutrality. Christians should recognize that neutrality for what it is, because a public square emptied of prayer is not neutral ground; it is surrendered ground.

The law will not rescue believers from the work this moment requires. In Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014), the Supreme Court upheld the tradition of opening legislative sessions with prayer while warning governments against policing the content of those prayers, which means a city that opens its podium to residents cannot easily close it to the residents it dislikes. The remedy, then, is not primarily legal. It is presence, and presence is precisely what American Christianity, including red-state Christianity, has been losing.

Wapello County backed Democrats as a union stronghold into the 2000s and now votes Republican by more than 30 points, yet a changing ballot is not the same thing as a filled pew. Pew Research Center’s 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults now identify as Christian, and among self-described conservatives the Christian share has fallen from 89 percent to 82 percent. Iowa has not been spared, as the most recent U.S. Religion Census found that counties across Iowa lost at least 10 percent of their religious adherents between 2010 and 2020. Nor is this the state’s first encounter with this movement, since The Satanic Temple of Iowa placed a Baphomet display inside the Iowa State Capitol in December 2023. Voting conservative and living as the church are not the same act, and Ottumwa shows what happens when the first is mistaken for the second.

Scripture names this condition plainly. The church at Laodicea was not accused of open rebellion; it was accused of being lukewarm, comfortable, and convinced it had need of nothing (Revelation 3:15-17). That description fits far too many congregations in towns that assume the culture war is being fought somewhere else.

Thankfully, Ottumwa was not without a witness. Pastor Rick Bick of New Life Center stood after the Pledge of Allegiance and told the council, “That ‘Hail Satan’ is not welcome here,” calling the invocation a curse placed on the city that needed to be reversed. When Galloway insisted the meeting move on, Mayor Benjamin Foote overruled her and called for thirty seconds of silence. God once searched for someone who would “stand in the gap” for the land (Ezekiel 22:30), and on October 6 at least one pastor in Ottumwa did.

One man should not have to stand alone, however, and the path forward is neither mysterious nor difficult. The pastors and congregations of Ottumwa should fill every open invocation date on the council’s calendar, since the policy rewards whoever signs up first. Believers should attend the November 3 meeting in numbers, conduct themselves with the dignity the moment requires, and use the public comment period to make their convictions known. And Christians across rural Iowa and every other red state should remember that Foote won the mayor’s office last year by just 16 votes, a margin that proves city halls are won or lost by the handful of people who bother to participate.

Red counties are not immune to darkness; they are simply the places where Christians have grown most confident that it will never arrive. Ottumwa has shown that it already has, and the only question left is whether the church will answer with its presence or with its silence.

Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions or independent views expressed within this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations or publishers.