The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil - Hardcover

Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.

A serpent, a monster, a seducer, and a destroyer--the devil threatened early Americans with real power from an unseen world. How is it, then, that contemporary intellectuals generally dismiss the great Author of Sin as a foolish illusion? To explain why Satan has vanished from modern minds, Delbanco first explores the premodern religious views of such determined witch hunters as Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather, men deeply fearful of Satan and his wiles. Then he shows how, bit by bit, modern precepts and social patterns drove Satan from the consciousness of leading Americans, making irony, not faith, their preferred spiritual posture when confronting evil. Surprisingly, it was the generation who lived through the Civil War that most decisively closed the metaphysical doors on Satan. For the horror of that war defied interpretation within inherited religious doctrine. Yet even in today's world, millions of Americans still--like Sewall and Mather--do believe in Satan. What is more, Delbanco admits that in locking Satan out of their philosophies, secular thinkers have unintentionally sterilized the imagination and muffled the conscience. Indeed, some modern thinkers have created surrogate Satans for themselves by demonizing people who differ from them in politics or culture. Better, the author advises, to see in the world's evils a reflection of our own incompleteness and inadequacy. Thought-provoking reading for believers and nonbelievers alike. Bryce Christensen