The Footnote Does Not Clean It

A warning about a prayer that arrives with an excuse

On 6 October 2026, a city council meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa, opened with a prayer. The man at the microphone was not the mayor. He was a resident, a former council member, and a member of The Satanic Temple. He asked the room to stand. He said, “Let us pray. Dear dark father.” He spoke of being unbowed by old doctrines. He asked them to embrace what he called the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge. He closed with, “It is done. Hail Satan.”

The next day he told the local paper that the prayer has nothing to do with belief in a satanic being. The Satanic Temple says the same thing on its own page. Satan, they say, is a metaphor. A symbol of rebellion. A character from a poem. Not a person. Not a power. Not someone who can hear a hail.

Read the two sentences together. One was spoken in the room. One was printed afterward. This message is about the distance between them.

The council did not write the prayer

Ottumwa did not invent this. The same text, or a close cousin of it, has opened local meetings in Florida, Alaska, Michigan, and Nevada. A board adopts an open list for invocations. Someone signs up. The words arrive. The board says it cannot discriminate, and that it does not endorse what was said.

That is the trend. It is not a secret rite inside city hall. It is not, as of this writing, a Canadian council opening. A reader here should not be left thinking their own town did this.

So this is not a charge against a mayor. The mayor in Ottumwa called for a moment of silence after a pastor asked that the hail be reversed. One council member had voted against the open policy in January and had warned that this day would come. Snarling at “the city” will not survive the video. The warning is in the words.

The garden already heard this

The first deception was not an altar and a demand to bow. It was a question about a limit. Has God really said? Then an offer. Eat. Your eyes will be opened. You will be as gods. The old word was treated as a fence around a good thing, not as a gift that kept the man and the woman alive.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”” — Genesis 3:1

The invocation in Ottumwa uses that script almost without editing. Unfettered by arcane doctrines. Eat of the tree of knowledge. Let the old comforting word die if it cannot survive your test. Stand against any authority that touches your sovereignty. Then hail the figure Scripture names as the adversary.

A metaphor does not erase an echo. If the biblical account is true, this is not a neutral poem dragged into a meeting by accident. It is the original sales pitch, filed as literature, and offered as an opening prayer.

The footnote is the stronger lure

A man who says “I worship Satan” warns the room. People step back. They know the name. A man who says “Dear dark father,” and then tells the paper he does not believe a dark father exists, keeps the posture and removes the alarm.

That is how deception works, if the biblical picture is true. The devil is called a liar and the deceiver of the whole world. He does not need the recruit to believe in him. He needs the recruit to stop believing the Cross has a claim.

“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” — 2 Corinthians 11:14

The leaders of this Temple can be atheists. The pattern can still hold. Unwitting instruments are the ordinary case. You do not have to believe in the fisherman to be on the hook. The words do the work. The footnote manages the audience.

Some who stand with that group are there for a lawsuit, a club, or a wound from a church that failed them. The invitation is still the same. It tells the wounded that the way out of bad authority is to hail the rebel, rather than to come to the One who already broke rebel authority at the Cross.

The body is not subject to your will alone

One of the Temple’s tenets says the body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone. That is not a side policy. It is a rival confession.

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” — 1 Corinthians 6:19–20

The Cross does not flatter the will. It tells the truth about the will, and offers a death and a mercy the will did not write. A teaching that baptises autonomy as wisdom, and names the biblical adversary as the champion of that wisdom, is aimed away from that mercy. The atheist footnote does not turn it back.

A picture is not the payment. A symbol is not a safe place to stay. We have said that before. Come off the picture. The work is finished in Christ, not in a metaphor that borrows His enemy’s name.

What the church should not do

Do not return the hail. Do not make the meeting a brawl. A pastor may ask, as one did in that room, that the name not be welcomed. He does not have to take the chamber by force to be faithful.

Do not take up a flag as the answer. Christianity is not a civilizational costume, and a council that allows an open list is not thereby the bride. The West is not the bride. A church that shouts in the chamber is not thereby more Christian than a church that tells the truth in plain speech and then goes home to pray.

Do not hunt the speaker as if the ministry holds the office of prophet. We do not. This is a warning from Scripture about a pattern already on the record. It is not a date. It is not a curse spoken back. It is not a claim that we know the secret of every heart in that room.

Hear it as it was spoken

Where a board is proud of an open list, this prayer will be offered again. The answer is not a new revelation. The answer is to hear the words as they were spoken, and not let the footnote talk you out of them.

Dear dark father was a prayer. Hail Satan was the close. The explanation came later, for the paper. Believe the sentence that was prayed. Then come back to the Cross, where the rebel’s claim was already answered, and where you do not have to be your own last court.

Watch. Do not be naive. Do not be cruel. The name was used. The footnote does not clean it.