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“Technically speaking the Satanists,” Simen Midgaard wrote in 1995, “form a Christian sect” (Moynihan 345). Because Satan “is as Christian as Jesus” (345), “you can't believe in the Devil and still fight Christendom,” Michael Moynihan lucidly comments (256). In other words, adults who fear that youth who turn to Satan turn away from Christianity fail to see that in fact they remain deep within the fold. Whatever Satanism might signify in an individual case, as a cultural symptom it does not represent a break with, but rather an inversion of Christian norms and ideals: “youthful Satanism is an extreme breed of Christianity where serenity, truth and honesty exchange gods for their opposite” (345). The “youthful” Satanist exchanges the officially, perhaps unbearably, loving Holy Family of Christianity for a darkly parodic anti-family: it is widely understood that, when Anton Lavey, founder of the Church of Satan, advised his followers to sacrifice thousands of children daily, he was humorously recommending masturbation.
Children and adolescents do not invent their religions, nor design the symbolic order(s) in which they seek to play a meaningful role; rather, they inherit them and, like their parents and others, use them to configure or re-configure oedipal constellations. Freud thought religion was “patently infantile” (74), derived “from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it” (72). If the religious beliefs of an adult belie his infantile feelings, what do the religious beliefs of a young person express? Perhaps, given the intersubjective nature of family romance, they reveal certain repressed feelings his adult intimates have about him—feelings not his own (and to which adults respond with the uncanny horror of unavowed self-recognition). Christianity, Americas unofficial official religion, provides us with our paradigmatic family, comprising one “enormously exalted father” (Freud 74), one receptive virgin mother, and one perfect sacr