Dune takes place in a world steeped in religion. At its forefront is a warning of the way religion can be used to control societies, which makes it ripe for lessons on how people and societies can respond. I don’t see The Litany Against Fear often cited as one, but I think it can be taken as both a warning against religious manipulation, and a mantra for escaping it.
I’ll admit it: I’ve never read Dune, or watched the David Lynch film. My only direct exposure is Part 1 of Villeneuve’s version, the rest is what has filtered to me through culture. The Litany Against Fear is one of those parts, and some good old fashioned “high thoughts” philosophizing I came to see it as a filter for viewing attitudes around and within evangelicalism, atheism, and Satanism.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert, Dune
Fear may be the most powerful emotion a human has. It can make us abandon our principles, betray our loved ones, perform acts we would consider abhorrent if fear were not manipulating us. And this makes fear a useful tool for those seeking to control others.
I know I’m not revealing some grand secret of the universe here. But it’s been on my mind because of how prevalent fear-based manipulation seems to be today. With all of the irrational, largely hate-based arguments on everything from fear of the government, to fear of immigrants, to fear of losing cultural relevance, it appears that the evangelical right in this country has lost their damn minds.
They’ve lost their minds to fear. Because fear is the emotional version of a “thought-terminating cliche,” those handy phrases that people like to toss out to end a conversation rather than confront it. They will say “I’m entitled to my opinion” or “god works in mysterious ways” to protect themselves from facing their fear of the unknown, or the fear that they might be wrong. These are almost passive responses, deployed without much if any conscious thought. Mantras made to guide one’s thoughts away from thinking. (And indeed another favorite is “you think too much.”)
This is why much of their screaming appears to be nonsense. From drivel about kneeling being disrespectful when it’s a historical sign of deference, to fear of celebrities literally being controlled by demons, the reason it doesn’t make sense is because fear has killed their minds.
They’ll never admit it’s fear controlling them, because fear comes from deep in the subconscious. Our lizard brains are ill equipped to bring context to it because in prehistoric times the context was obvious. A creeping set of eyes in the dark, a lunging predator, a raging wildfire. We needed instinct to survive these threats; “thinking too much” would only get in the way. But when a fear is more existential than immediate, and especially when it’s invented and imposed on us by others, our conscious brain is left grasping to make sense of the source. And our brains are incredibly efficient at finding patterns to make sense of what we’re experiencing, even when no such patterns exist.
When a person is in this state of emotional turmoil, it takes only the slightest suggestion to direct their brain to whatever pattern an outsider wants them to find. They’ll tell you it’s immigrants, or transgender people, or an ambiguous concept like “woke” causing their fear. These excuses usually tap into fears that may already be present, like a fear that one’s culture or religion is being erased. And the fearful lizard brain overrides the rational, allowing it to be manipulated.
Atheists certainly aren’t immune to being manipulated by fear either. I’m reading the book We of Little Faith by Kate Cohen, which was partly inspired by a news clip from 2013. After a tornado came through a town in Oklahoma leaving twenty-four dead and hundreds injured, Wolf Blitzer asked a woman whose house was destroyed about how lucky she felt to have evacuated and survived:
“You gotta thank the Lord, right?” he asked. Vitsmum paused. Blitzer pushed: “Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?”
“I’m actually an atheist,” she said.
But, as Cohen points out, she didn’t quite say “I’m actually an atheist.” She paused, looked down, shrugged apologetically, and had to be prodded into answering. She stuttered, “I-I-I’m,” with a nervous chuckle. And after her admission, she said “I don’t blame anybody for thanking the Lord.”
I’m not here to trash Vitsmun. Her response, while uncertain and deferential, was still brave. Oklahoma is in the “bible belt” after all, where revealing one’s self as an unbeliever can be harmful or dangerous. For all the talk of loving thy neighbor and hating sins but loving sinners, a great many Christians respond to unbelief with shunning, ostracization, even violence. And Vitsmun had just revealed her unbelief on the evening news with barely enough time to think about what she was doing.
Evangelicals lash out against atheists to protect themselves from confronting their faith, and in turn that provokes our own fear. We very often hide ourselves so as not to make a scene. We call ourselves things like “not very religious.” We say things like “I was raised Catholic.” We use labels like “culturally Christian.” Anything to avoid even testing whether we might be bringing a Christian wrath upon us.
Unlike the religious, atheists have no church, or leader, or central authority to help us oppose this. There is no unity in disbelief. There is no community to be found in the concept of not finding something true. When atheists do find community it’s not around disbelief, but around finding shared beliefs like humanism and Enlightenment principles. But these are not atheism, and not all atheists will seek out community around them or even ascribe to them.
The result is that the evangelicals don’t take atheists seriously. The fact of our existence may threaten their belief system, but they believe they have an almighty power on their side. So when we cower and kowtow to them by hiding ourselves (and apologizing for it when we don’t), they believe we are showing them that we too fear their god.
Christians don’t fear atheists. They do fear Satanists though. Modern Satanists are atheists, but that makes no difference to those immersed in doctrines made of fearful minds in darkened times. Those inclined to conspiratorial fears will insist that we do worship the devil, and that our insistence to the contrary is just a front. Others will accept our non-theism but still claim we are unknowingly being influenced by Satan to do his work. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, as the saying goes, was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
Just as fear is a powerful tool for churches to use to keep their followers in line, Satanism shows us this tool can also be used by the opposition. When a Florida school district spent months ignoring the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s requests to have atheist literature available in schools alongside the bibles that were already there, delaying proceedings until deadlines had passed in order to deny the atheists a voice, it took bringing in The Satanic Temple to make progress. (Scroll past the videos for the article.)
This is partially because atheism isn’t a religion and so its protection under law, if any, is unclear. Satanism is a religion, so the law pays attention. But we often see Christians accept Jewish and, occasionally, other “mainstream” religious iconography. Religious protections only played a small part. What really got the bibles out of school was fear.
I’m glad this tactic works, but when it does I can’t help but think that Christians must not believe their god is very powerful. They appear to think he can be defeated by a handful of people in t-shirts and jeans handing out coloring books. In their minds, their god is so threatened by Satan that they shirk at mere mention of the name, and they seem to have no confidence that their supposed holy text can survive the challenge of a word search or a connect-the-dots picture. How truly mighty Satan must be!
And in a way he is. Because, despite being fictional, a great many ex-Christians find strength in the idea of invoking him in acts of “therapeutic blasphemy.” This is the power of the unbaptism ritual. One does not need to believe that Satan is real to derive strength from hailing him. For an ex-Christian to stand and proudly Hail Satan, to burn a page from a bible and be smudged with the ash, is not an act of rebellion directed at the faithful. The ritual is one of confronting one’s own fears – the deep-seated and existential ones that organized religion uses to control us. It is a breaking of chains.
One of The Satanic Temple’s seminal texts, The Revolt of the Angels, ends with the statement that “we have destroyed [god] if in ourselves we have destroyed Ignorance and Fear.”
The lesson of Revolt is what to do; the Litany Against Fear suggests a way to do it. In embracing Satan we face our fears born of religious ignorance. Blasphemous acts bring those fears forward. We permit the fear to pass over and through us, and when it has gone past, we allow our rational mind to see that nothing has come of it.
We confront our irrational fear of god, and see that where the fear has gone there is nothing. Only we remain.
Hail Satan. 🤘
