Jan 28, 2025
From The Child and its Enemies by mk and sprout
YouTube link here: https://youtu.be/QuV0cZSUdMQ?si=4jOJw1iD7DMXb8SS
mk: Hello and welcome to the And Its Enemies, a podcast about. Queer and Neurodivergent Kids Living Out Anarchy and Youth Liberation Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.
And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create third barrel ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario. I’m 16 years old, and I’m a transmasculine lesbian poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist in the Great Lakes region.
With me today is David from Queer Satanic.
David: Howdy my name is David Johnson. I use he, him pronouns. I’m 30 or 40 years old, and I’m a Satanist and anarchist from Seattle by way of West Texas. I spent most of the past five years as the target of a series of lawsuits by an abusive religious organization.
mk: Oh, wow yeah, in this time of heightened state repression, I think a lot of us view state repression as something that’s driven by police and that type of thing, but it’s so true that high control spaces of all kinds can weaponize it, and I’m so sorry that you had to deal with that.
David: Yeah. It’s a it’s a legal system, not a justice system.
That is the important thing to keep in mind.
mk: So what exactly is queer satanic and what exactly is satanism? Can you tell us a bit more about all that for people who may not be familiar?
David: For sure. Yeah. I would start with what satanism is because I think maybe not your listeners, but in the general public, people have an idea of satanism that is mostly formed by the satanic panic of the.
Late 70s, 80s and 90s. The static panic basically was this conspiracy fantasy that there was a shadowy cabal of people at every level of society and they were worshiping a literal, supernatural evil being called the devil and they did ritual abuse and sacrifices and blood magic and all of this stuff.
And that is almost completely untrue. I don’t think at the level of there being like a conspiracy, like lots of people like that, it’s completely untrue. I think there probably have been some people who have had mental issues or they have just. Tried to justify the things they’re doing by saying the devil made me do it.
I won’t say that’s never happened, but that wasn’t a widespread thing. And for years, that’s the idea that people had about satanism and that’s never really existed. What has existed since the late 1960s and Anton LaVey is a sort of inverted Christianity. You may have seen one of the major symbols of Satanism is an inverted cross.
You just take a Latin cross, you flip it upside down, now it’s sacrilegious, now it’s blasphemous. That’s how a lot of things work with Satanism. But because Christianity is so many different things, a lot of them in contradiction with each other, a lot of them in conflict with each other what you are inverting can change a lot.
The the Satanism of Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan which was originally could have developed in San Francisco in the late 1960s and 70s it looked at Christianity as being too egalitarian too charitable too much about denying the body. Therefore, his version of Satanism was, we’re going to do the opposite of that.
We’re going to be all about power and about how you have the right to hurt anybody that comes into your home. And one of the positive things, they were actually pretty legitimately More open minded less judgmental about all kinds of sexuality, transsexuality, asexuality, that was actually for 1960s pretty good but everything else was he was surrounded by hippies and he was looking at like the kinds of Christians that were in San Francisco and going, I want the opposite of that, I want something that worships power and might I would say that’s a bad figure to take the 1 thing, about Satan is that he fought God and he didn’t win.
That’s the in the Bible. That’s the version of the story that, Satan rebelled with the 3rd of the angels. And it didn’t work out well for him. He got sent down to hell. So if you’re worshiping power and might. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to me that you would pick the devil for that.
But again, it’s not really that complicated. They just look to Christianity and flip it upside down. Alright, so that is the only form of Satanism that really exists up until closer to the present. There’s always a bunch of these offshoots that come from the Church of Satan, like the Temple of Set.
Is a group that comes about in the 70s, those group they do start to explicitly worship a supernatural deity. They’re still a lot smaller, though. A bunch of different, just family situation was messy. His daughter, 1 of his daughters, 2 of his daughters his ex, they’ll break off and form the 1st church, the original, the truth, whatever it is.
But. When it dies in the end of the 1990s, Satanism just doesn’t have a place to go up until in 2012 there was a guy named Kevin Soling who was a a landlord, I guess he was looking for like fun things to do. He wanted to make a prank documentary film about the nicest satanist you ever met, and he met a guy named Doug Meko, who now goes by Lucian GREs, and him and a third guy tried to make a prank documentary film project about satanism that at some point just became a real organization.
That’s what the Satanic Temple is. And over time, that sort of evolved into what if Satanists were progressive? What if, instead of I don’t know, being edgelords who associate with Charles Manson and, right wing things, what if Satanists supported bodily autonomy and they supported cleaning up the side of a road and that kind of thing?
And so that’s where we’re at at the present moment of what Satanism is. There is small groups of people who call themselves Satanists, who maybe do worship a literal supernatural figure or they’re demonologers, they’re Luciferians. There’s a whole bunch of folks where there’s not that many of us all together.
We’re all very weird that exists, but most of us are non theistic Satanists who use. Satan or the devil as a figure of rebellion and because the systemic temple had very good marketing, but did not live up to its ideals is also shed off a series of different collectives, organizations and so forth that are trying to live up to this ideal of if Christianity is about worshiping power, if Christianity is about saying that God is on the side of the bankers and the soldiers and the kings and all the people who have Everything, and they must deserve it.
If Christianity is the prosperity gospel and saying that you’re only a pork or you didn’t try well enough. That sounds like I’m on the side of the devil. And I want to choose the force that is rebelling against that choosing the force that says I will fight tyranny, no matter how omnipotent it is, because tyranny has to be opposed anywhere.
So that was a long description of sadism. Does that make sense?
mk: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing all that history around how it was really decentralized and based around these various groups with their incredibly different orientations toward it, like anarchism, but maybe with some Less great undertones.
David: I guess I would go back. You said decentralized the history that I’m aware of is a bunch of like highly centralized small groups.
mk: Oh, absolutely.
Yes. I guess mean that there are so many different takes on it.
David: Yeah, exactly.
mk: Yeah. So can you share a bit more about the legal side of things like what the legal developments have been with queer satanic and how you’ve navigated that?
David: I did not get around to saying what is queer satanic? Because it was not ever supposed to be a thing. I was someone who joined the satanic temple in 2019. And I was coming to it with the idea that it was a anti reactionary group. It was like, what if atheism, but it had certain positive values and community.
And we even had committees, which I don’t know that should be a green flag for other people. But for me, it was like, oh, there’s committees. You join things, you vote on stuff. There’s collaborative decision making but at some point in early 2020, it became clear that wasn’t the actual structure.
It was like the formal legal structure of. And when a series of like past abuses in the organization came to light and the leadership chose not to respond to that with anything but like insults and threats and like wanting to tell people like to get out or whatever it became apparent that this was not a group that was good or healthy.
And so me and a few other people got kicked out. And when we got kicked out, we also met other people who had to. Left or been expelled locally and actually, in fact, there’s a much bigger deal. And so I had been the social media manager of the Washington state Facebook page. I did, I would say 90 percent of the posting for it and other things.
And when they kicked me out and didn’t reach out to me, tell me anything. I basically, I couldn’t log into a discord server anymore. That’s how I found out that I wasn’t a member. I waited about a week. And then kept getting news articles sent to me and past statements from, the founders found 1 of the 1 of the founders had tried to be a cargo cult Messiah in the past found out as this whole history that Lucian Greaves or Doug Masico where he had these white nationalist ties, and he had been really big into eugenics and forceful sterilization and stuff.
And so I posted. On the Washington state chapter page, just these articles, past member statements and such. And that led to this is that temple TST suing me and 3 other people almost picked at random out of this group that they had kicked out. And they just kept coming after us in a series of lawsuits starting at the federal level.
He got dismissed. It’s I think, so they started all of this starts around April of 2020. Right as the COVID 19 pandemic is really picking up in the United States and it just seems so ludicrous to sue for members of what I thought was a legitimate religion over a Facebook page.
And we got it dismissed the 1st time in February of 2021 and they refiled and they I think got it dismissed again the next time in January of 2023. And they appealed that to the 9th circuit, and they also refiled something a couple of months later in a state court. So you can also pursue litigation through state court.
The same time you’re doing other aspects of it in federal court and that went on from April of 2020 until October 24th of 2024 when we got the last. very much. Part of the case dismissed again, and there wasn’t any appeal to it. We kept winning, but they kept filing more things and we kept having to pay our lawyer to do the legal work to answer them and get new dismissals.
And that was extraordinarily expensive stressful and time consuming.
mk: Oh, wow that really speaks to the way that the legal system can be weaponized, even when one side is obviously being petty and, trying to exert control rather than even pointing out a legitimate violation of any law.
Yeah. From a theory standpoint I understand that the Satanic Temple has been profoundly abusive, but can Satanism itself ever be relevant to youth liberation in your opinion, or even be liberatory? Or would you say that these types of groups that have used it to be incredibly high control have tainted it for the anarchist movement?
David: That’s a great question. You have some experience with knowing people. In your age group who had looked into different kinds of Satanism, is that correct?
mk: Yes, I sure have. I’ve known many teenagers who have read maybe a little bit of LeVay because they wanted to be edgy and then been immediately grossed out by the bigotry and then decided not to, and that’s my sole exposure.
David: Yeah, that’s a better reaction for sure. Yeah, I don’t think I covered this and it’s like the overall history, but Anton LeVay’s book, the the Satanic Bible. I think he wrote it like under a deadline, and so it’s a bit of a mess. I’m, I would not say it’s a great work of literature in general.
And like you said, it’s got a lot of gross stuff in there but a significant portion of the first part, which he calls the book of Satan is this literally plagiarized from a book published in 1896 called might is right by Ragnar Redbeard. His real name was Arthur Desmond. And that, that’s.
It’s a pretty grotesque book that I think is best described as proto fascism. So this is, like about 20 years before official Mussolini fascism comes about. But it shares a lot of ideas in common. Whites, it’s yeah, it’s white supremacist. It’s deeply misogynistic incredibly anti semitic.
He’s, and also I think an interesting thing about this. That sort of shows what I was saying before about the inversion being, a problematic. Ragnar Redbeard in Might is Right hates Christianity because it’s too egalitarian. It cares, and his, and this guy’s evaluation of Christianity.
It cares too much about everybody and making sure everybody has basic needs met. Now, that has not been my experience with Christianity in my life. And if that is what was happening in Christianity, I think I’d have a lot fewer problems with it. Especially at the national political level.
But this guy. Looked at Christianity and said, it’s too nice. He cares too much about people. That’s what LeVay took out of it. But I think what’s interesting is that there are older appeals to Satan, Lucifer to this idea that because the Christians. Put all of these things into they’re they blame the devil for so much.
And there’s like this joke about how once again, Satan is the logical and compassionate choice. And I think that’s a thing that showed up in probably 1st paradise lost by John Milton. That’s the famous 1. But really throughout the 19th century. And there were quite a few anarchists who brought Satan up as a liberatory figure as someone who answers the idea that.
If you, as a Christian, are saying, listen to the priests, listen to the divine right kings, listen to the ones that God is blessing, it is actually proper then to say, I choose instead as my my mascot, I choose instead as like the symbolic figure that I will associate with the guy who’s fighting that stuff.
And I don’t know, have you ever read it was these. Like Fragments by Felix Pignol. Is that a thing you’ve ever come across before?
mk: I am not familiar, but I’ll definitely do some Googling about that. I am, I really am less than aware of, I’m not too educated on Satanism as a whole, beyond the way that it, beyond the ways that it’s influenced the anarchist movement, which of course have been quite a bit.
David: And this is, that sort of thing. This is 1854 and it’s called, The philosophy of defiance or pardon for Cain and at least the first fragment that we have of it says, give me any epithets you wish. I accept them all in advance. I have only one thought and envision only one glory. It is to strike everywhere and always as much as I can to the principle of domination.
Satan and his revolt is my father and in his courage, Cain is my brother. And it goes on in that idea that if I am going to fight domination, then the worst tyrant is God. However, God is not the only tyrant and you have to strike against all of these other ways that hierarchy and domination exists.
And Mikhail Bakunin has his own problems, but he has this famous passage about an in here set step Satan, the liberator. And so to your question, is Satanism something that is salvageable? I do not know if it is worth that. However, we can point back at earlier anarchists socialists people that were looking at.
Kind of a universe around them that was based on domination and oppression and they’re picking this figure that kind of everybody was familiar with And has been imbued with great power by Christians and then saying I choose to be on this side and empower myself To fight against you in this way and I don’t know that it works for everybody and I would say that for a lot of people, that idea of just you take something that is a thing you’ve come to understand is not correct and you invert it.
And now you keep the entire structure in place. You just do the opposite. That to me is really dangerous. That’s the thing that kind of happens a lot. And the much more important thing to do is deconstruction. We have to deconstruct and pull apart these ideas that fit together and have really harmful effects.
And really think about them and then reconstruct them into something that’s more useful. You can probably use Satanism to do that, but I think like for young people in particular, not just young people, but for people looking to radically make a break with their past, they think that if I do the opposite, if I do the inversion of it, then I have done this, and I would caution against doing that because you don’t always see how you were still preserving lots of these nasty awful things.
You’re just thinking you’re doing the opposite, but you’ve returned to the same place. Does that make sense?
mk: Yeah, so you’re saying that there’s almost a reactionary side to it because it’s so much about being against Christianity rather than for anything. And therefore, from a youth liberation standpoint, it might not always be the most useful, even if it’s technically salvageable.
David: Yeah. And also you, you might want to make your own stuff because I haven’t really got into this. Just the ideology of Satanism from LeVay on has the actual ideology that exists is bad. It’s Nazi adjacent. That’s not a that’s not a pejorative.
That is not me trying to say something that is inflammatory. Anton LeVay works with, White nationalists for a bunch of years. He literally was a card carrying Nazi in the 1970s. Now, he himself was not a Nazi. He just got along well with him and his ideas of like anti egalitarianism are ones that, that obviously work well with fascists.
Most Satanists are not fascists, but most Satanists haven’t thought enough about what rebellion really looks like. And I think a lot of Satanists embrace this aesthetic idea of rebellion. Without doing any of the work of actual rebellion if you choose and and almost like consumerist way, say, I have adopted a fashion and tattoos and jewelry and I bought this book and this alter and therefore I’m a rebel.
That confuses like what it actually takes to rebel, which often involves lots of very boring choices. Lots of friction for social interactions and things. And you can fool yourself into thinking you’ve made a bigger change than you actually have. Just because you are distracted by the pageantry of Satanism, that is 1 of the nice things about Satanism is it does have pageantry and ritual.
It does allow people to have. More than like atheism, just drains the life out of things for some people you just lose a lot of things. Satanism is like adding something back in for some people, but it can trick you into thinking that you have made a more radical change that has actually taken place because you haven’t deconstructed anything.
And you’ve just painted it black and said wow, it’s so different now. I would say oftentimes it’s not that different.
mk: Yes, that absolutely makes sense. Thank you so much for expressing that perspective. I feel like the same can happen with statism to some extent. Like, when youth and teens see a problem with statism, they often pivot to DSA style socialism, thinking that it’s the opposite of the government they’ve been exposed to, rather than, questioning the institution of government.
And to some extent, that can be helpful, because, in electoral politics, getting teens to actually care about voting is a struggle. However, From an anarchist standpoint that really misses the point of what liberatory organizing can be. So Yeah, thank you for pointing out that dynamic that tends to play out with Both christian hegemony and as we can see almost every other oppressive institution So last time we chatted about this you shared something about the necessity of actually questioning oppression rather than simply inverting it the way satanism might Do you see youth doing this kind of inversion at all when it comes to ageism, and how could we grow away from it?
David: Yeah, I do see that to some extent with ageism I think it’s pretty common to have people say boomer. And I believe most of the time boomer is intended. As like an ideology or like a way of viewing and moving throughout the world and treating other people. But there is a way to slip into old people are bad and, or people from a previous generation.
They’re the ones that are responsible for this which I think misses like, all kinds of power dynamics. I think like the fact that old people tend to be more conservative. Yeah. That’s true. But I think Martin Luther King Jr and Henry Kissinger were about the same age, but Kissinger got to leave, live 40, 50 years longer.
And less dramatic ways, just if you are a poor working person, you probably are going to have health problems you get from work, from stress, or you won’t be able to go get healthcare for something that is actually preventable and treatable. And if you’re not including in your ageism analysis, all of these other things of race and class and just all of these other axes that you can be oppressed by.
I think you can miss the just like huge amount of solidarity we have with people of all ages. When you meet someone who is I don’t know, 85 years old and remembers what it was like when it was literally illegal to walk down the street with. Something like I think in New York, it was like, if you had more than 3 pieces of clothing of like the quote, unquote, wrong gender, you could be arrested for that.
That was like, into the 60s. It’s that’s a thing that seemed like shocking. How can that even be? It seems ridiculous, but it was the way that people lived and also they created lives in that time. And being able to create this cross. Yeah. Generation solidarity is important and useful in lots of ways.
And you can definitely miss that. If you just go, young people are the greatest at everything. Old people don’t know anything. They’re bad. That’s not a useful way to look at the world, even though it is simple and easy to do.
mk: Yeah, one thing I see a lot with newer youth liberationists, or people who have maybe just discovered it, is this idea that every adult is by nature going to oppress youth and teens.
And I always have to say no, it isn’t the fact that some people are older, it’s the construct of age and linear time, and the idea of compulsory education and the nuclear family that gives them this much power. Just being straight isn’t in and of itself a problem, but the fact that straight people get societal power sure is.
But I think with age it’s harder to navigate because, it feels a lot more different to youth and teens because all they’ve ever known is adults holding power over them.
David: Yeah, exactly. And, it’s just it’s hard to it’s hard to deconstruct something that is that just embanked in society.
Like you’re saying, every law has ageism baked into it and also all these cultural things about just, who you’re supposed to listen to and who is not supposed to be listened to. And so it, I think it’s easy. And also I’m sure there is some utility and just rejecting something wholesale and saying, I think all of that’s wrong, and I’m going to do the opposite. That’s a thing. I think a lot of people go through as part of their development towards something else that is more constructive, something that is more long term viable, but. It’s a thing I think people should be more aware of just you don’t want to, you don’t want to stay in that place for very long, and it has its own dangers to it.
mk: Yes, absolutely. Especially because then you’re closing yourself off to a whole network of care. One of the most youth liberationist things I’d say I try to do is having equal friendships with people who are older than me, rather than always assuming that adults hold power over me. And that’s really helped with unlearning internalized ageism.
But for a youth 13 who sees every adult ever as an oppressor, that doesn’t really work out. .
David: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like you can learn things, like you said the importance there is like how you are aware of what’s happening and like the power relationships that are actually at play.
And like you mentioned, the thing about like joining the DSA. I think that’s relevant to this, just in the sense that if you’ve identified the problem is ageism, or the problem is like the powers of age, you might miss the other ways that relationships can be toxic, abusive, etc.
I’ve solved it. There’s this one, there’s this one thing. This is the one thing. And once I fix that, it’s all fixed. That’s not how it works. This may seem like far field, but I sometimes see straight women in particular talking about how they wish they could just date other women, because then they wouldn’t have all of these problems and relationships.
And that sort of denies the full humanity of lesbian relationships. The fact that women can be awful to each other, like in very mundane ways, just because we’re humanity, right? And this is something that like you can very easily slide into there’s one problem in the world.
And if I just flip that upside down or, attack that. Then none of their problems exist. And that’s not how that’s not how these things work. And that’s less satisfying and harder. As long as you can only learn it by making the mistake. But it’d be better if you could learn it before making the mistake.
mk: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s something to be said. The idea that all bigotry comes back to the same societal forces of, coercive control and hierarchy. But at the same time, when that’s always the rhetoric, it can be hard to address things for what they are. Like, for example, when I was first organizing and hadn’t found anarchism quite yet, so I was in a lot of neoliberal spaces whenever I’d mention the existence of homophobia, whatever What people would say was, would just be, Oh, homophobia is the fault of capitalism and capitalist beauty standards.
And once capitalism is over, homophobia will be too. And it’s but what about homophobia in this very affinity group that we have the choice to not do so often? It’s a way that people let themselves off the hook in some ways. Do you see that dynamic happening at all with the. Reductive inversion of Satanism.
David: Yeah, I, and also like people just. In general so overwhelmingly Satanism is it’s a very white like space. And there are some very good historical reasons for that. Again, when Anton is I think the and Nazis are fun and white nationalists are like, not a problem.
That’s going to push out lots of other kinds of people. I don’t think it’s just that. I think a big part of it is that going back to that thing of you’ve embraced this identity of rebellion, but not done anything else. And I think that means that a lot of people coming into it feel like they’ve done all the work, and they haven’t done the work.
Yes, exactly. Like this idea
mk: that I don’t know if you’ve read the zine red flags, but it’s it’s all about ml groups Especially in smaller midwestern cities So obviously I read it because I am in the great lakes region and have to deal with this on a regular basis but their main thesis was that often people especially with white slash cis privilege will end up joining an ml group to feel like they’re doing something But completely ignore the inaction of said group, or the fact that all that the group does is like table with scenes at other people’s events and then leave.
Yeah. There can be a similar energy with the inversion around Satanism.
David: And I think, once you’ve done this thing where you’ve said the problem with this group is that they’re Christians. The problem is groups. They worship God, right? This is like a easy thing. I think a lot of expressions do.
I think they locate the problem with their church was they believe in God and that’s a superstition and you. You believe in sky daddy, or they say whatever their thing is, right? Christians are inherently bad, but then you say we’re not Christians, so we won’t be bad. It’s okay if we have the power because we aren’t the bad ones, so we’ll do good things with it.
As an anarchist, I think that’s really bad that’s a really dangerous, harmful thing. As if you haven’t reconstructed. I don’t like the
mk: existence of power. That’s harmful. Not the specific person who holds it.
David: Yeah I trust myself to some degree, but I don’t trust a future version of myself that like, unaccountable power over people for years, especially and in Satanism that happens quite a bit.
We’re like, because there aren’t these institutional guardrails because people in these groups are like coming up with it. And. Yeah. It’s very easy to come up with a group that works and is healthy and good when everybody agrees and things are going well. And it’s really hard to come up with something where but what happens if we hate each other and what happens if this person ends up being a domestic abuser?
What happens if those hypotheticals really need to be worked out ahead of time? And they often are not. And. Because this is a thing that people they adopt, like I am a satanist now and they mean it, they think in the same way. Some would say I’m Jewish. I’m Muslim, but I don’t think people a convert as easily to Judaism or Islam as the sadism supposedly, and also people don’t leave those things as easily.
And so these groups, these spaces tend to have a lot of people, coming through and burning out and cycling through and there’s there’s no institutional knowledge and no institutional accountability there. And that’s hard work. It’s really hard work to set up a group where people are actually equitable and accountable to each other, particularly when, 1 person is doing 90 percent of things.
I’m sure you deal with that all the time and other spaces that you’re in. We’re like, you want things to be fair, but there’s a. Misalignment of like how much people care or can give into some project. And so you have to balance that between like, how do I, the person who’s doing most of the work not take advantage of other people.
And also vice versa, like, how do I contribute to something that I care about when I don’t have the bandwidth to really manage it and own it or whatever. And these messy things are not simple answers and they’re not solved by just going. We don’t believe in God or we reject Christianity that doesn’t solve it because that’s almost like a veneer or a layer on top of this more fundamental thing of our hierarchy, accountability, interpersonal relationships.
mk: Yeah, so speaking of how we organize interpersonally, I was just wondering how did you organize as a kid and teen? What was your relationship to spirituality and to anti repression? And did you identify with the anarchist label at all? And what did that mean for you?
David: I, so I am the son of a Southern Baptist pastor.
I was in church three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night. And even back then one of the things that I would say, and I would still say this to this day, is that I’m not spiritual, but I am religious. Like I, I did not have a deep connection to spirituality then.
I don’t have it now. I just thought that’s the way the world works. God exists and does miracles and whatnot. And it wasn’t until I was in my late teens. And I think what it was I was studying the Bible and I was like actually studying like textual traditions and the documentary hypothesis and like Mark and priority and like these ideas about how.
When you’re a southern Baptist, when you’re an evangelical like the text is the whole thing. It’s perfect. But then like when you study that’s obviously not true. Like some sects, they use different versions of books. And there’s also like different not just translations, but like different versions of things you are translating.
That’s like that kind of chipped away at it. And then the other thing was there was a guy who was about my age and he unfortunately got cancer in his knee and they had to amputate his leg from the knee down. And then his cancer still came back. And I remembered was everybody was praying for the cancer to go away.
They’re basically praying for a miracle that God would intercede and suspend the natural rules of physics and biology and whatnot. To cure this young man of cancer, but nobody had faith that they would, that God could regrow his leg. And maybe this seems like silly to someone hearing this, but that’s obvious, but that was the 1st time that I realized that people didn’t really believe in miracles.
They just believe that, like. You might get lucky about something. And so that was like the beginning of my splits from conservative Christianity and that worldview. And what’s interesting is that because it was Southern Baptist, I don’t know what the reputation is in other parts of the country.
And West Texas, they’re pretty independent. Each individual church controls their own budget. For example they, if you remember, you get to see. What everybody’s going to do with all the money you get to vote on it. You get to have deacons, which are in effect, they’re like elected people that have extra responsibility to pay more attention to budgets and do things like that.
And my father even was someone who his organizational style as again, this is a Southern Baptist pastor in West Texas. Some will come to him and say, Hey, can we do this? And he would say, What do you require from me to do that? And they would say nothing and say, great, go do it. His organizational style was like, trying to get other people to do things for themselves.
And I have come to find that is not the typical church experience. And I understand also why people have many worse experiences with their own religious upbringing, because this was if you wanted to do something, you got people together, you informed other people what you were doing to see if it was already happening or you needed support or whatever, and then you did it.
But it wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s and got through a whole like anti theist period, like I’ve shamefully had a Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and like anyone who believes in anything supernatural is foolish, that sort of thing. But I did get through that to a place where I no longer feel that way and no longer act that way.
And. I guess the thing that I see that is most relevant is how people act and treat one another, especially within structures. And I guess I, I haven’t seen a huge difference between how atheists and Satanists and Christians, treat one another because you have really rebellious Christians who break the law to make sure that immigrants can be protected from authorities or that they go out and they like March and put themselves in the harm’s way of police batons.
And you have atheists who are, transphobic and you have Satanists who are just like, we have to follow the law no matter what. And that, that’s how I guess I got to a place where anarchism is. Important in my life and seeing that power structures, like the way that like power structures exist is like the fundamental thing.
And then people choose their own veneer, which may or may not be relevant. But the real thing is how people relate to one another and have power and accountability with each other.
mk: Yes, absolutely. I am. I was really struck by what you said about the limits of faith based beliefs and how even when we’ve been in a community where that’s really common, it seems people don’t necessarily Literally believe that and maybe they’re there for the community Like I am remember having similar revelations not so much around religion because I didn’t really grow up with that but even around people’s political views because I was raised with some Pretty typical liberal beliefs before I found anarchism and often I’d be discussing politics with people And I would come to the conclusion like okay Nobody thinks this is going to work because people are still acknowledging the harms that state power is causing Yet they’re still advocating for states to exist not because they necessarily believe it but to have community so in a way it functions similarly even to ageism and Yeah so on that topic what advice would you have for kids and teens who maybe have an interest in Satanism or alternative spirituality or anarchism?
David: This is going to sound negative, but probably Satanism is not for you. That’s what I’m saying. Probably Satanism sounds cool. And I would caution you that it’s a lot more cringe than you think. And that’s okay. It’s okay to like cringe things, but you will run into people who think Satanism is the coolest thing that’s ever been.
That’s the greatest idea. And I do want to shoot that down. And it’s just another thing a lot of very boring ways. We as a counterculture community, we do deeply suck. And alternative spirituality I think has some of these same problems. You can, to be clear, find places and communities that like give you joy and fill things within your heart, your soul, and your needs for ritual, magic, et cetera.
Like these things are possible to exist. But. It is a lot more boring and the problems that like you’re leaving behind will probably be there at whatever you show up at. And I think that we really need to do a better job of thinking about identifying. Abusive organizations and even collectives than we are at present.
Did you listen to I did a talk with the Molotov now folks a couple of years ago about a general about cults.
mk: I actually have not, but I did read your zine on the Queer Satanic website about how to identify high control spaces, especially the bit about ML groups, because I’m not sorry if this is an overshare, but at the time I knew quite a few people who were involved.
In an ML group that was starting to have increasingly bigoted views, and I was trying to find resources for them and came upon your scene actually right before I joined the channel zero network.
David: Yeah, and then I think as an anarchist, it’s very easy for me to say, oh, yeah, ML groups they’re the ones that they’re all messed up.
But this also happens in anarchist spaces. And it also happens with, I think in our conversation, it also involves like business cults, because that’s a thing that, you get out into the working world and it’s wild how many people, like they’ll say completely unironically, we’re like a family and that’s super toxic in itself both what they’re saying and the way they mean it, and it operates in this way that is really exploitative and.
I think that is a thing that as you are going out into the world and trying new things you really have to keep at the front of your mind. Like, how is this group structured now, especially formally, but also informally, you have to like not fall into the belief that we are ontologically good.
We are at our core, essentially good. Therefore, whatever we do is good. Because that just makes you miss stuff. Often because these really abusive dynamics and the fringes they often are not abusive. The fringes they’re nice. They’re fun. They’re just like cute things. There’s an example that I just remembered that today of a pretty famous called the church.
The process church of the final judgment. It’s like back in the 1960s and they had these like coffee shops and they would print these essentially zines. These like newspapers. And for anybody that came and visited that, that seemed like a very cool thing. Oh, this is it’s artistic.
And isn’t this like fun. But then the people actually working in those coffee shops, and the higher up you got in this org the closer, the more sinister it got, the way they treated people. And I don’t want to say that there is nothing about satanism or alternative spirituality, or especially anarchism.
I am a satanic anarchist. I’m a satanic, anarchist, anti fascist. That is what I am. That is how I move throughout the world. However I feel like I run into people often, especially young people who have recognized that. The world around them, what they have been taught was not true that Christianity does not work the way that they were taught, a capitalism’s abusive, et cetera.
But then they go if this isn’t true, the opposite must be true. And that is something that you really have to work at not falling into you have to build your own things. You have to, when you join other things, be skeptical all the time be skeptical about yourself and the way you’re treating other people.
I know this is not super I don’t know, like rah here’s the thing you need to go out and do. It’s not empowering in that way, but I do think it is important that as you find the things that you like and love and fill you with joy and enthusiasm that you still.
Keep this thing in the back of your head of just what else is happening here? Where’s the money going? Who is actually like making decisions here? How could I change things if I wanted to? Because it’s a very easy human thing to just like silence all of that to go I’m sure everything’s fine up until the point where you find out that things are not fine.
They have not been fine for a long while.
mk: Yes, absolutely, and I do think that’s empowering in its own way, the idea that we can question the FND groups we’re in and make sure to be in spaces that feel genuinely supportive and horizontally structured, and don’t just mirror the hierarchies we see around us even if that can be the most accessible thing to do sometimes especially as a youth and teen, because MLs neoliberal spaces are, the groups on college campuses and the groups you might see at your middle or high school.
But we always have the choice to organize somewhere that feels genuinely liberatory. So I know you mentioned your Molotov now appearance, but is there anything else you’d like to plug or share?
David: Yeah, it definitely listen to Molotov now. I’m not part of that. They’re just a fun podcast. I listened to and we’re kind enough to let me be a guest.
Once my, my, my big thing is that so queer satanic as it existed previously was just for people being sued. We’re no longer being sued, which is great, which means that what we are beyond the wibbly wobbly idea is up in the air. What is not up in the air is that we are still paying off our legal costs.
So we still are deep in the hole to our lawyers who were good enough to work for us without us fully paying them. But if you can help us to pay our lawyers down please visit queer satanic. com or a campsite.
That will also have articles be written about other satanic organizations that are abusive cool satanic orgs that are doing things like the capital area, Satanists in the Washington, D. C. area. They do moon rituals, lunar rituals, which is just like a regular way to get together and recenter themselves global order of Satan as a international a group of kind of like local collectives who like federate and work with each other.
There are people that are out there doing cool things and we try to bring more attention to them. But if you’ve heard this, you’re like, wow, that sounds so great, David, I appreciate what you did so much. The best way to show that appreciation would be to give us money for legal costs.
mk: Yeah thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey and all of your advice on figuring out what spaces are high control and how to engage with spirituality in an actually meaningful way.
So this has been David from Queer Satanic and you’re listening to The Child and His Enemies. If you wanna learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is the thechildanditsenemies.noblogs.org. I’m mk Zariel. Thanks for listening. Stay safe
