By Peter Keough

Two books chase the devil’s tail as they examine America’s evil ways.

The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by Randall Sullivan. Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pp, $30.

The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia by Arthur Goldwag. Penguin, 304 pp, $19.

The title of The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, journalist Randall Sullivan’s engrossing, provocative, and disappointing exploration of evil, refers to the Charles Baudelaire quote “la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!” Perhaps, but a better trick has been how he has convinced some that they are Christians and that they should accuse those they hate and fear and disagree with of being Satanists, as has been a tactic of the right these days.

Sullivan doesn’t look much into that development, but he does pursue some intriguing but inconclusive investigations into cases of possible diabolical activity. These he intercuts with a robust history of how philosophers, prophets, theologians, and phonies from Heraclitus to C.S. Lewis, from the Book of Genesis to William Guy Carr’s Pawns in the Game (1955), have confronted the existence, nature, and origins of evil.

He begins ominously enough with a preface describing a transformative experience he had in Mostar in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Bosnian War, one of the subjects of his 2007 book The Miracle Detective. It had been the scene of heinous atrocities two years before his arrival and was still “under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots.” Here he “began to recognize ‘the problem of evil’ as an obstacle to religious faith…I asked myself, as so many had before me, ‘How can a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good abide such depravity?’”

Sounds like a rhetorical question. But a mass exorcism, an encounter with a dapper, malevolent dandy in Rome, and his young son’s account of a red-eyed dog who visits him at night makes him think otherwise. But even if the devil exists — and he’s the one who causes bad things to happen — does personifying evil exonerate the deity who created the malignant being in the first place? That is one of a number of tricky paradoxes Sullivan explores in his survey of the millennia-long philosophical and theological debates on these issues.

Less on point are the instances of seeming diabolism. In 2015, in Catemaco, Vera Cruz, Mexico, he witnessed the “Hour of the Witches,” an annual ceremony run by a gran brujo (“great witch”) in which hundreds dedicated themselves to Satan. At times the account comes close to ethnic stereotyping, as when he quotes Antonio Zavaleta, a University of Texas anthropologist, who says “In the Mexican culture, things that would be seen by you and me as clearly defined evil aren’t seen that way at all.”

Rather than seeming like “clearly defined evil,” the rites as described in these pages sound like a debased relic of an ancient, bloodthirsty culture, gruesome and kitschy, marketed to satisfy the appetites of cartel killers and morbidly minded tourists. The ritual involves brutal animal sacrifice and, as he watches, Sullivan expresses unease at the sexualized, pre-pubescent girls enlisted to perform them — “that combination of soft, childlike facial features and a nubile brown body that seems to be the ultimate aphrodisiac for many Latin men.”

Besides being borderline xenophobic, Sullivan’s attempt to track down proof of the existence of  the Devil in Mexico seems misdirected. To support his contention that the country is the ‘Devil’s Playground’ he cites Pope Francis who said in 2015 that “I think the devil is punishing Mexico with great fury.” The truth is, the Pope and Sullivan might fare better looking for evil instead in the Church’s centuries of priestly sexual abuse and cover-ups.

Le Songe de Tartini, Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1824. Photo: Wiki Common

Sullivan’s other case study takes place closer to home, however, but it too proves inconclusive and, as with the Mexican sojourn, haphazardly integrated with his intermittent survey of philosophical and theological speculations about evil. It involves the death of a 17-year-old boy found hanging from a tree in Childress, Texas in 1988. Whether the cause was suicide or foul play was irrevocably muddled by the incompetence and corruption of the local law enforcement. That, and by ongoing nationwide hysteria and witch hunt.

“The people of Childress,” explains Sullivan, “had not even a vague apprehension that they were living through what the American media before long would be calling ‘the satanic panic.’” This mania had been sparked by the 1980 book Michelle Remembers by Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Larry Pazder and his patient, co-author, and wife Michelle Smith. In it, the latter, after undergoing hypnosis to recover repressed memories, recalled ritual abuse suffered when she was five years at the hands of devil worshippers. These claims were quickly discredited, but not before a wave of baseless conspiracy theories about diabolical cults committing similar atrocities against children spread across the United States. The media, law enforcement, and the psychiatric profession all fell for it. The mania spawned prosecutions and convictions, ruining numerous lives.

Sullivan doesn’t dwell long on the origins and consequences of this mass delusion, nor does he reflect on the likelihood that those who are the most vociferous in their condemnation of the satanic are in fact projecting their own taboo desires onto others. But in The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia, Arthur Goldwag relates this seemingly ephemeral phenomenon to recurrent themes in American culture going back to the earliest colonial days, tracing it to the Salem witch trials and connecting it to the MAGA belief that Democrats and highly placed elites head an underground cabal of cannibals and pedophiles.

Drawing and expanding on insights from Richard Hofstadter’s seminal 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Goldwag points out how this schizoid consciousness derives from, as Hofstadter puts it, “‘qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness…conspiratorial fantasy and suspicious discontent.’” In the mode of Sullivan, tracing the origins and nature of evil through history, Goldwag takes on the thankless task of doing the same with conspiracy theories, finding their roots not so much in anti-Semitism and racism as, surprisingly, anti-Catholicism. Yes, it’s the papists that are behind it all, as we always suspected.

In pursuing this shadow history he covers some of the same names and follies as does Sullivan and further contextualizes them. Among the more interesting characters are Léo Taxil, regarded as perhaps the greatest fraudster of all time, who had published wildly popular accounts about a group of Satan-worshipping freemasons called the Palladists. Then, at a press conference in which Taxil had promised he was going to supply more exposés of the cult, he revealed that he had made it all up to embarrass the Catholic Church.

There is Albert Pike, whom Goldwag cursorily describes as “a leader and major theorist of the Scottish Rite, one of the most speculative and esoteric varieties of Freemasonry; he was also a Confederate general, an avowed white supremacist, and active in the early KKK.” But in Sullivan’s book Pike looms much larger, revealed by no less than Taxil as the “satanic pope,” who…

You can see how addictive this might be. In addition to providing an outlet for grievances real and imagined, such conspiracy thinking renders meaningful a universe which otherwise might seem chaotic, malevolent, and beyond one’s control. Then throw in the power of the title psychological phenomenon dissected in Leon Festinger’s A Th­eory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957). A person, when challenged by a reality that conflicts with their delusions, will cling to their delusions. Thus the likelihood of convincing 30% or so of American voters that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, or that the January 6 riots were not an FBI inside job, seems slim indeed.

Nonetheless, one looks forward to the time when today’s imbecilic ideas slide into the trash heap of history with the more entertaining, rigorous, and now largely forgotten aberrations of the past, to a time when Trump himself will be remembered, if at all, as a buzzword for ignorance, hatred, arrogance, and willful self-destruction. Even then, Goldwag warns us, we will not be safe. “I don’t believe we will ever see the last of Trumpism,” he writes,

even after Donald Trump leaves the political stage. In time, another demagogue will rise in his place, and use the same narratives that he did to arouse the same kinds of discontented voters. What keeps me up at night— and what impelled me to write this book— is the worry that we might not recognize his successor until it is too late. It might be too late already.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).