“Reverently irreverent!” — Jay Guin
“Perfect beach reading for the vacationing theologian!” — Jay Guin
Well, I didn’t actually make the back cover, but that’s only because I didn’t get a prepublication copy. If only …
So anyway, I’ve been trying to swear off book reviews for publishers. The books are often pretty bad — or at least not worth the time spent to read them. It’s just so hard to write a review of a book you don’t just love.
But The Devil Wears Nada: Satan Exposed!
Okay. Here’s the straight up. This is not for everyone. Not all your friends will appreciate the allusions to Nietzsche and Kant. And if you’re the kind of preacher who who takes offense at irreverent humor, well, save your money. This is totally irreverent — by a professor who obviously loves Jesus (but has serious problems with some of his followers).
The idea is that this professor wants to chase down Satan. So many of our churches and preachers deeply feel the presence of Satan — blaming everything from Obama’s election to sound system problems to the Devil — that it just made sense to talk to the professionals to try to find the Dark One. After all, if it’s possible to personally experience Jesus, why not Satan?
He interviews a series of pastors, professional exorcists, and Satanists to learn from their experiences. And it’s revealing.
My favorite is his interview with a Wiccan, a neo-druid priestess college student (second favorite only to the Unitarian-Universalist). He had trouble getting anything like a serious thought out of her mouth. After a page of banalities, he asked her to just tell her about her day. What did she do yesterday?
[S]he informed me that he visited a record store, another store for some incense, a coffee shop that “was not Starbucks,” a thrift store for some new clothes that were not new, and spent the day deciding where to place her new tattoo. … She then confessed to not finishing a book review for one of her classes because, as she put it, “the real world has so much more to offer.”
“Like buying stuff,” I asked.
“What?”
“I mean, basically, it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re just a typical college kid who doesn’t do their work and really enjoys shopping. I don’t see how your way of life is even remotely different from anyone else. If anything, it is the exact opposite of offering an alternative to what you referred to as ‘Westernized’ teachings. Your spiritualized anti-religious faith fits perfectly within the system. You make a wonderful capitalist, you just accessorize differently from the Christians.”
… This lovely, hairy druid was a picture-perfect example of what it means to be owned by a system that deceives us into thinking we can escape being owned. It is, forgive the pop culture reference, the matrix being the matrix. The matrix dupes us into thinking we can find our way out of the matrix by spiritualizing Eastern religions or — in her case, a religion from antiquity — as a possible way out. The fact that the matrix encourages us to do this, in order to escape it, is further proof that we are only failing deeper and deeper into the matrix precisely we think we have somehow escaped it.
It gets better, but you have to buy the book, you know. And I really loved the chapter on the Unitarian-Universalist pastor, since he seems to have ghost-written some of the articles in the recent New Wineskins issue.
For readers who suffered through some of those heterodox posts, here’s the tonic. If you’re tired of fatuous musings about how — if we’d all just love each — we could all go to heaven and sing around the Great Campfire in the Sky, and want serious thought delivered from an actual theology — by a smart writer who loves God enough to actually take his word seriously — all with the brazenness of an impenitent class clown, add this to your summer reading.
And if you think it’s time some of the worst offenders of Jesus in Christendom be revealed in all their bigotry and foolishness, they’re on display here, too.
Buy the book. Just don’t expect it to sound anything remotely like Sunday school.
People feel the presence of Satan in the same way that “Communist sympathizers” felt the presence of Joseph McCarthy. The only thing humorous about Satan is that laugh of his, when some idiot thinks they can worship him.
Wow, a third of the way through and already have two black eyes, a fractured jaw and various other scrapes, cuts and bruises. This dude is brutal and yet yanks the funny bone hard too. Don’t let the title fool you, this book is much more about us than it is about satan.