Satanic prayer causes uproar at city council meeting

CHAD DRURY Courier staff writer


OTTUMWA — An invocation at the beginning of Tuesday's Ottumwa City Council meeting overshadowed everything else that took place over the course of 80 minutes.

Resident and former council member Matt Dalbey read a satanic prayer — capped off by "Hail Satan" — to kick off the meeting at City Hall, leading to a reaction from New Life Center pastor Rick Bick during a contentious opening few minutes of the meeting.

In a private message, Dalbey said the prayer is used by the Satanic Temple of Iowa, of which he is a member, "but has nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity."

The Satanic Temple of Iowa is "a resolutely non-theistic" religious organization that follows seven core tenants, according to its website.

Soon after Dalbey left the podium and after the council, staff and audience recited the Pledge of Allegiance, Bick had his turn, and was out of turn with the meeting's protocol of speaking on agenda items.

"Let's just reverse this curse that was put on our city. That 'Hail Satan' is not welcome here," Bick said.

Council member Cara Galloway, who has never stood for an invocation, said that Bick should speak during the portion of the meeting where citizens can speak on either agenda or non-agenda items; Bick spoke after the roll call was taken and the council was to discuss the consent agenda.

"It needs to be done now," he said. "I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city. Most of you know that, and we need to just stop and reverse it."

Mayor Benjamin Foote then called for a 30-second moment of silence "to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time," but again, Galloway said "it was time to move forward" before being overruled by the mayor.

Dalbey's invocation was within the scope of the city's invocation policy, which was approved Jan. 20, with Galloway the only council member to vote against it. In part, the policy says:

Where Is Mike Pence’s Faith?

He was an outspoken evangelical. Now Trump’s VP pick hides his beliefs under a bushel.

By Craig Fehrman

July 16 2016 1:51 PM



Way back in 1994, when Mike Pence was a twice-defeated candidate for Congress, an unemployed dad trying to launch a syndicated radio show, and an entry on nobody’s VP shortlist, he told a reporter about casting his first vote in a presidential election. It was 1980, Carter vs. Reagan, and Pence could only chuckle that he’d gone with the wrong man. He’d voted for Carter, Pence explained, because he “was a good Christian. Beyond that, there was a sense of, ‘Why would you elect a movie star?’ ”

These days, Pence talks about Reagan a bit differently. During his recent (and successful) audition to be the running mate of a television star, Pence paid Donald Trump the highest sort of Republican praise. “I think he is someone who has connected with everyday Americans like no one since Ronald Reagan,” Pence told reporters.

That Gipper pivot says a lot about how Pence has shifted over the years, as he’s moved from the media to Congress to the Indiana statehouse—how he’s become less candid, less human, and more shamelessly fixated on stoking his career. Pence’s religious beliefs still shape his politics as surely as they did when he voted for Carter. But as part of this transformation, he has alloyed his faith with political expediency, keeping his evangelicalism at the center of his worldview, even as he’s become ever less willing to discuss it.

Pence has a strange conversion narrative. He grew up in a big Irish Catholic family of Democrats in central Indiana, serving as an altar boy, attending parochial schools, and idolizing another liberal president: JFK.

But in 1978, while a freshman at Indiana’s Hanover College, he converted to evangelical Christianity through the influence of a nondenominational fellowship group. “I simply made a personal decision for Christ,” Pence told me in 2012, when I was working on a profile of him after he’d won the gubernatorial race.

Though he was now born-again, Pence’s faith didn’t transform quickly or simply. (Whose ever does?) Post-college, he kept attending Mass and worked as a youth minister at a Catholic church; he even applied to Washington, D.C.’s Catholic University with plans to become a priest. As late as 1994, Pence still described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.”