Friday, October 9, 2026 · Independent editorial

A city council in Iowa opened with Hail Satan and one pastor refused to sit down

We opened Breitbart this Friday morning and scrolled past Christmas cards turned into winter cards at a Scottish school and Gavin Newsom considering sparing 563 California death row inmates and we checked Breitbart politics and MXM News where the homepage would not give us anything but the words October 9 and the Live Action news listing where all we got back was a security checkpoint so we will not pretend to know what was on it and there on the Breitbart faith page sat the story a Christian should not scroll past — Iowa Pastor Stands Up After Former City Council Member Hails Satan in Prayer: ‘That’s Not Welcome Here’ along with a second Breitbart report headlined WATCH — Iowa Pastor Fights ‘Hail Satan’ Prayer at City Council Meeting: ‘Let’s Just Reverse That Curse’.

Breitbart reports that at the October 6 meeting of the Ottumwa, Iowa, city council former council member Matthew Dalbey delivered the opening “prayer” to the “dark father” and its faith-page report quotes him urging the room to “embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old” and declaring that “That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise” before he closed with Hail Satan and walked away from the podium. That same Breitbart report says New Life Center Pastor Rick Bick then stood behind the microphone and said “Let’s just reverse that curse that was put on our city. That ending with ‘Hail Satan’ and ‘Hail dark god,’ that’s not welcome here,” and when Councilmember Cara Galloway said his comments should wait until the end of the meeting he answered “It needs to be done now. I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city.”

Fox News in a piece by Lindsay Kornick published October 7 reports that Mayor Benjamin Foote requested 30 seconds of silence for prayer or reflection and overruled Galloway and that Foote told Fox News Digital “This is not a reflection of our community” and that the invocation “does not represent the faith or the values of families who call this city home.” Fox cites the Ottumwa Courier for the city adopting an invocation policy in January that says it does not endorse any faith and for Dalbey, a member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa, saying in a private message that the prayer is commonly used by the temple “but has nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity.” Fox also quotes council member Bill Hoffman, who it says left the room during the prayer, saying “I'm a Christian man with Christian values. That doesn't mean I don't want to observe his First Amendment right.” The Des Moines Register in a piece by Lucia Cheng reports that Dalbey is also scheduled to provide the invocation at the Nov. 3 city council meeting, and Nov. 3 is also Election Day.

The prayer Dalbey read asked people to embrace the impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and anybody who has opened a Bible to its third chapter knows exactly whose sales pitch that was in the garden, the old promise that you can be as gods, and here it was read aloud into the record of a small Iowa city as if it were just one more civic blessing on the way to the consent agenda.

And we can hear the objection already because Galloway made it herself at the end of the meeting, telling her colleagues according to Fox that “we need to remember that we are up here to be neutral and allow viewpoints because we've opened up invocations,” and there is a real point in that because Christians of all people should be slow to want a government that decides whose prayers are allowed. But neutral is not the same as silent and the First Amendment that let Dalbey say what he said is the same First Amendment that let a pastor stand up and answer him, and Hoffman struck the balance when he walked out of the prayer and still said he wanted to observe the man’s First Amendment right.

What moved us was one pastor who would not wait for the end of the meeting. Scripture tells us we do not wrestle against flesh and blood and it tells us to resist the devil and he will flee and it never once tells the people of God to file their concerns for later public comment. Bick asked the room to reverse a curse, and the mayor gave it thirty seconds of silence for prayer or reflection, and that is how a Christian answers a curse, not with a mob but with a prayer said out loud and on the record.

Christian first means the name of Jesus is not one more viewpoint on the agenda but the name above every name and that we owe Him our voice in the council chamber and the booth before we owe anything to anyone else. American second means we defend the free speech of the man we disagree with while refusing to pretend every prayer points to the same place. Republican third means the GOP is not the point and no party owns that microphone. Somewhere in Ottumwa on Tuesday, November 3, a man is scheduled to open another council meeting and on that same day Christians will walk into the booth, so carry this question in with you and ask which of the names on that ballot would stand up when the room went quiet and which would tell you to wait until the end of the meeting, and then vote like the pastor who would not sit down.

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