Imprecations at SatanCon
If Satanists aren’t deserving of having imprecatory Psalms prayed over them, then who is? God gave us those passages for a reason.
In late April 2023, several Christian brothers and I protested outside an unusual event taking place in Boston. The Marriott at Copley Place had decided to host “SatanCon,” the self-proclaimed largest gathering of Satanists in history. Local Christian groups had diverse responses to this travesty, ranging from instructing their congregants not to protest, to asking for prayer networks, to sending missionaries to the Satanists, to remaining silent. Even though my friends and I do not share the same denomination, we share a faith in Christ, and the conviction that this evil must be opposed. With that determination in our hearts, we began to plan for action.
I’ve had non-Christian friends speak to me about their disgust with the limp-wristed and subservient Christian response to modern evils. With that in mind, I thought about what kind of action would appeal to those men, who already have a sense of honor and truth within them but are turned away from Christ due to left-leaning churches and effeminate pastors. How could we structure a ministry, not to preach to the Satanic mob, but to the people disgusted by them? I was excited by the idea, and having experienced first-hand the modern churches’ priority for the criminal, the deviant, and the foreigner, I knew we had a neglected audience to speak to. And so, clad in American and Christian symbolism, we marched into the enemy’s stronghold, high in spirits and flanked by strong brothers.
Once there, we were almost immediately approached by a young man who asked us point-blank: “Would you preach the gospel to me?”. Of course we obliged, and having received the gospel, Luke promptly confessed Christ and was instructed to seek a faithful church, and to read the book of Scripture from which he received his name. In front of the Marriott was a very disparate crowd of orderly Catholics, vocal street preachers, Black Pentecostals, White nationalists, Messianic Jews, and a handful of the enemy they all gathered to oppose, Satanist freaks dressed in clothing as deliberately chaotic as the religion they espouse. Our crew of well-dressed young men cut a clean contrast with the Satanists. They seemed to collect adjectives like trans, gay, slovenly, ugly, disabled, diverse, obese, dirty, punk, aposematic, and malcontented with the same fervor of an old-timer collecting baseball cards. What a perfect encapsulation of the difference of our beliefs. Who would choose them over health, strength, and capability? That contrast was bright in our eyes as we shouted our prayers to Heaven.
We focused on two things to chant, the Lord’s Prayer as commonly used throughout the denominations, and several imprecatory Psalms, namely the 5th, 58th, and 140th. The language of those passages is inflammatory, as is much of Holy Scripture. That’s alright, we shouldn’t handle Satanists with kid gloves. C.S. Lewis once wrote:
When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the Divine anger. The Pagan mysteries existed to allay this consciousness, and the Epicurean philosophy claimed to deliver men from the fear of eternal punishment.
It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought good news of possible healing to men who knew that they were mortally ill. But all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure.
If this was true in Lewis’ time, it’s far more so now. It is especially true for the coddled moderns, blocked on every side from experiencing the harshness of God’s nature, and the consequences of their sinful actions. And besides, if Satanists, whose only religious belief is contradicting each and every command of the Almighty, aren’t deserving of having imprecatory Psalms prayed over them, then who is? God gave us those passages for a reason. They shouldn’t be used flippantly, but to say they are useless or prohibited is demonic neutering of Scripture, our sword of Truth.
We left Boston triumphant, disregarding the handful of scrawny Antifa photographers that tried to tail us. Another SatanCon was announced in 2024, but was canceled and never took place. Rumor has it that every person involved in planning the 2023 event has left the Satanic Temple over leadership differences, with the exception of their spokesperson. Whether an event will occur in 2025 is undetermined, but unlikely at this point.
Make them bear their guilt, O God;
let them fall by their own counsels.
—Psalm 5:10
