I’m sufficiently old to recollect the outcry over Elvis. The appearance of the hip-swivelling singer was for some a harbinger of the downfall of society. We saw the identical response to the emergence of Beatlemania. I can remember Mary Whitehouse and her opposition to the cultural revolution of the 60s which swept the West. And I can remember the derision, ridicule and even hatred she encountered. How we atheists laughed: ‘Those crazy Christians, simply because they don’t love something they need to stop everyone else from having fun with it.’
Today the early 60s seem a time of just about idyllic innocence and few can seriously say Mrs Whitehouse’s slippery slope prophecy was flawed. Fast forward to 2024 and nearly every social value of that point has been bulldozed out of the best way: we live in a society where morally anything goes with perhaps the exception of paedophilia (for the moment), and people ‘crazy Christians’ could be arrested when sharing their faith or praying on the road.
Adult Cartoon
2024 has hardly begun and we discover Amazon, the world’s premier retailer, highlighting a latest product. The adult animated musical comedy Hazbin Hotel tells the story of the princess of Hell, Charlie Morningstar. Hell has an overpopulation problem, an all-too-believable premise. So yearly Adam and the angels descend from heaven to cull demons. To avoid this, tender-hearted Charlie decides to resolve Hell’s overpopulation problem: she’s going to open a halfway house where demons could be rehabilitated and by working hard at their morality can go to heaven.
The backstory is that when God created the Earth, he created Adam with Lilith, not Eve, to be his companion. But that awful unreconstructed patriarch Adam tried to boss feminist Lilith around, and he or she wasn’t having any of that. She voluntarily left the Garden of Eden because she wasn’t prepared to tolerate patriarchal domination.
Lucifer isn’t the satanic creature of the Bible, somewhat he’s a comfortable go lucky ‘dreamer’, a free-wheeling non-conformist who got on the flawed side of grumpy old God and his thuggish enforcers, the angels. When the pair met Lucifer was drawn to Lilith’s independence and the pair fell in love.
This made God indignant and he imprisoned them in Hell. Here Lucifer, being male, became depressed and took to his bed, but being female, ‘Lilith thrived’. Then God, in what we’re assured was a ‘truly heartless move’, made war on Hell, destroying demons in an annual ‘extermination raid’. Charlie Morningstar, Lucifer and Lilith’s lesbian daughter, runs a halfway house in Hell attempting to rehabilitate outcast demons and make them acceptable to heaven.
We have Amazon, some of the powerful firms on the planet, producing a cartoon series denigrating God whilst celebrating a comfortable Lucifer and Lilith, who’s portrayed as a sort of patron saint of feminism. The myth of Lilith holds that she was Adam’s first wife while Eve was her alternative. Although historically Lilith was considered evil for becoming a demon, in recent times she has grow to be an icon of feminism. The mythical Lilith has been transformed right into a female symbol for autonomy, sexual selection, and control of 1’s own destiny.
Pop Culture
The devil is an increasingly accepted subject in popular culture. When queer singer Sam Smith appeared in satanic costume, his fans rushed to defend him. This is not any latest phenomenon. There is academic literature showing how in pre-Revolutionary Russia there was an increasing interest within the demonic amongst the population generally, especially amongst the elites.
We could have a look at this as secularists and dismiss it as an indication of the decadence of the late Romanov court and its influence. We could also point to it for example of the failure of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, it’s true that the cultural elites of Russia, who didn’t necessarily consider Lucifer actually existed, nevertheless admired the rebelliousness he symbolised and saw him as heroic, an independent rebel to be admired. This is important in attempting to know the best way wherein the Russian elites supported the revolutionaries who would ultimately destroy them in essentially the most brutal manner.
On the opposite hand remembering Ephesians 6:12, ‘For our struggle isn’t against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil within the heavenly realms’, a Christian might hold that those dabblers within the occult opened the door to the forces of chaos and destruction which within the Revolution destroyed every thing before them.
However we view the influence of the recognition of the demonic in late imperial Russia, it’s troubling that demonology is becoming ever more prevalent in mainstream culture within the West today. That Amazon is producing an ‘adult’ cartoon series which portrays Lucifer and Lilith as free-spirited victims of an absolutist mean spirited God is disturbing. Amazon wouldn’t be doing this in the event that they didn’t think there was a profitable marketplace for it.
Whether or not we consider within the existence of the satanic, we now have to concentrate on the implications for the steadiness of society once we have a good time the disruptive, the overthrow of cultural norms and the relentless pursuit of the transnormative and ‘alternative’.
What is the Christian response? We must have more to say than ‘Have nothing to do with this.’ Whatever else you say, please don’t say, ‘It was ever thus – people overreacted to Elvis way back when.’
Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister. He blogs at A Grain of Sand.
