Can you make a pact with the devil?

Is pop music all the Devil's work...?

A few days ago I got into a conversation with my wife about why some bands get really popular and not others. It’s far from a straightforward case of “the most popular bands are the best / most talented”. The particular example we were talking about was The Smiths vs Pink Floyd: I was listening to a song by The Smiths, and wondered out loud why people rave about Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, but rarely enthuse about The Queen is Dead by The Smiths. I remember once being at a BBQ where a friend put on Dark Side of the Moon… I’ve never been at a BBQ where someone has played a Smiths album. (Except on Gavin & Stacey, God bless Doris!)

The next day I caught sight of a heading that grabbed my attention, a post by James Delingpole:

Why You Can No Longer Listen to The Dark Side of the Moon

The subtitle says it all - “How Pop Music - ALL Pop Music, Even Music By Your Favourite Artistes - Is The Devil's Work”. Delingpole believes that pop music is a Satanic tool to influence us in a negative direction. A few years ago I would have dismissed this as ridiculous hyperbole. Today, however, I’m not so sure.

Not long ago a friend sent me over this video by former DJ Mark Devlin, who goes into a lot of detail with the occult connections in the music industry:

I’m not an expert in the music industry so I will leave those links there for you to read / watch and digest in your own time if you are interested. But what I’d like to do in this piece is to analyse, from a Christian perspective, what it might mean to ‘make a pact with Satan’ and how that might help to understand what’s going on in the music industry.

Satan - the prince of this world

Satan is described several times in the New Testament as “the prince of this world” (John 14:30, 16:11) or “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) or “the god of this age” (2 Corinthians 4:4). This is not to say that Satan has true power and control, but rather that there is a worldly scheme of authority and power which stands against God, and Satan is the ruler over this. This is why the world is often contrasted with God (e.g. James 4:4, “anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God”). The world in itself is not intrinsically evil — it was made by and for God — but ‘the world’ in the New Testament often stands for the system of the world which stands in opposition to and rejection of God.

Let me quote from the New Bible Dictionary entry on this topic:

And so, very frequently in the NT, and particularly in the Johanninne writings, the word kosmos [Greek word translated ‘world’] has a sinister significance. It is not the world as God intended it to be, but ‘this world’ set over against God, following its own wisdom and living by the light of its own reason (1 Cor. 1:21), not recognising the Source of all true life and illumination (Jn. 1:10). The two dominant characteristics of ‘this world’ are pride, born of man’s failure to accept his creaturely estate and his dependence on the Creator, which leads him to act as though he were lord and giver of life; and covetousness, which causes him to desire and possess all that is attractive to his physical senses (1 Jn. 2:16).
NBD: ‘World’

There’s a spiritual battle going on between Satan — prince of this world — and Christ, the king of creation. Although the war has been decisively won, and there will come a day when that victory will be made complete, Satan is seeking continually to defend his dominion of this world and keep people in the dark, away from Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4). He is seeking to keep people enslaved in their pride — that is, their independence from God — and their coveteousness.

And, make no mistake, Satan is continually active in this task. Hugh Latimer was one of the most famous preachers of the English Reformation, and he once preached a sermon where he said:

And now I would ask a strange question: who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you: it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his [diocese]; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will he is ever at home; the diligentest preacher in all the realm; he is ever at his plough: no lording nor loitering can hinder him; he is ever applying his business, ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you. And his office is to hinder religion, to maintain superstition, to set up idolatry, to teach all kind of popery. He is ready as he can be wished for to set forth his plough; to devise as many ways as can be to deface and obscure God’s glory . . . Oh that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine, as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel!

I think these words strike as hard now as they did when Latimer first preached this sermon in 1548. I particularly like the middle section: “He is never out of his diocese… he is ever at his plough… he is ever applying his business.” One of the reasons I think the church has gone so horribly wrong over the last few years is that many have simply overlooked the activity of Satan in the world. Secularism has blinded many people to spiritual realities. By contrast, Latimer says, we should always be on the lookout for Satan and guard against his schemes. As the apostle Peter says, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

The upshot of all this when it comes to the matter of pop music is that I think it is entirely plausible that Satan would use it to keep people enslaved in their pride and covetousness. In fact, I would go further than that: not simply plausible, but it is IMPOSSIBLE that Satan would NOT be using pop music in this way. In the same way that I believe he would also seek to use films, TV shows, popular fiction, and so on — things which ordinary people consume, things which shape their worldview.

So we have established that Satan must be active in today’s pop music. Let’s turn to think about how to understand musicians selling their souls or making pacts with the devil.

Can you sell your soul to Satan?

When I think of someone selling their soul to Satan, it conjures up images of someone on in the middle of a forest on a dark night performing some horrible occultist ritual. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of thing went on — and if you watch the Mark Devlin video you’ll hear some of the things which have happened. I don’t doubt there are some people who have literally sought to make some kind of pact with Satan for worldly success. But is that always the case? Do we have to believe that EVERY famous and successful artist has made a literal pact with the devil?

Let’s think about this from a Biblical perspective. The Bible doesn’t contain any examples of people making deals with the devil per se. However, Satan does seem to offer a deal with Christ during the temptation in the wilderness:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
Matthew 4:8-9

So, Satan offers Christ “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour” in exchange for his worship. It was, in a sense, a deal with the devil — although one Christ comprehensively rejected!

Jesus said elsewhere:

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
Mark 8:35-37

You could gain the whole world, and yet forfeit your soul. Those who consider the things of this world as more valuable than Christ will forfeit their souls. So, to sell your soul is, in a sense, to set Christ at naught and to think the things of this life are everything.

If you put these things together, I think we have a helpful way of interpreting what is going on.

Anyone who sets worldly success as the most important thing in their lives has sold their soul. Anyone who craves worldly success above everything else will be willing to sacrifice anything to get it. Personal / musical integrity, morality, fans, friends and family… all will be sacrificed on the altar of fame and fortune.

The key thing is, I do not believe someone has to make a literal pact with the devil in order to sell their soul. In fact, in a sense, everyone who is not following Christ has some kind of pact with the devil: the only options are belonging to the domain of darkness or the Kingdom of God (Colossians 1:13). It should not be surprising to us that those who are not explicitly on the side of Christ are pushing messages which in some way belong to the domain of darkness — that’s simply where they belong, whether they understand that or not. However, some people have gone far down that road, for example those who explicitly pushed the covid vaccines (as James Delingpole mentioned).

But there is another important angle. As we saw during the whole covid-19 scamdemic, there were tiers of politicians and the media. I believe many of those at the top knew exactly what they were doing — for example, check out the Covid Dossier, a collection of evidence that covid was a military/intelligence operation even though it was presented to us at the time as public health. However, covid was enabled by countless bureaucrats, journalists, councillors, and the like, who simply put their head down and didn’t question. They did what they were told and didn’t ask questions.

If that sounds to you like ‘I was just following orders’, it should. I’m often minded of Hannah Arendt’s piece A Report on the Banality of Evil, about how Adolf Eichmann — an office worker who never once fired a gun or killed anybody — calmly and dispassionately organised the logistics that sent millions of Jews to concentration camps and gas chambers.

C.S. Lewis once remarked in his piece The Inner Ring:

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

Note: I did a podcast last July about the Inner Ring which you might enjoy.

The upshot of all this is that not everyone in the music industry — or any industry — would need to have sold its soul to the devil to be deeply influenced by evil. All it would take was a few key players, and a lot of cowards with few principles who are prepared to go along with it.

Lessons for us

I’d like to finish this piece on a positive and practical note. I’ve already given a couple of hints as to where we’re going here, but let me spell out what I believe we need to learn from all this.

#1: Don’t be naive

Like I said before, I think the church has been stunningly naive over the last few years. It’s almost as if the church has forgotten everything in the Bible about the existence of Satan and the capacity of the human heart for evil.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on my blog about Why Christians should be ‘conspiracy theorists’. There I said:

Too often I think people are unwilling to investigate ‘conspiracy theories’ because they don’t believe that people could be so wicked – especially not in the Western world. I believe that Christians should be able to rise above this: we should not have a rose-tinted view of the human heart. Is that not why democracy was invented in the first place – so that power could be held accountable? So, why should we think that – even in a democratic country – our leaders are immune from the influence of evil?

Think about this question: who does it benefit to demonise ‘conspiracy theorists’? It seems to me that it’s a rather ingenious way for the rich and powerful to avoid having to answer tough questions.

I spent most of my life living in a little naive bubble where I basically gave those with power and authority a free pass. Looking back now, I can’t believe I could have been so foolish. Especially not given what the Bible says about the sinfulness of the human heart! We must not underestimate Satan and the power of evil. That’s not to say we should be afraid of it — far from it. Christ has won the victory. In fact, I believe that understanding the depth of the power of evil gives us a greater sense of Christ’s victory — when we realise what we have been saved from. Christ’s victory over evil was not a cheap thing, but achieved at great cost. When we truly realise the cost, we can truly respond in gratitude.

#2: Recognise our temptation to cowardice

For some reason, earlier on I was thinking back to a conversation I had a few years ago with a couple of people from church about our response to covid. One person in particular was on a similar page to me when it came to thinking it was all nonsense. However, she kept her head down, wore a mask, and didn’t speak up about it. Even though she agreed with me, I was the one who took the flak as I refused to wear a mask and spoke up publicly about how wrong it all was.

How different would those long months have been if all the people who recognised how wrong it was had actually spoken out and refused to comply? How different would it have been if more people had had the bravery to back up their beliefs with action?

Of course, it applies to much more than covid: all of us are confronted with the choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing. The choice may appear trivial at the time: the choice to overlook a boss who is bullying another employee; the choice to overlook a friend’s temper; the choice to look the other way when you see something bad happen. I believe these are tests, sent by God. And, the thing is, I believe that those tests make a difference. If we consistently look the other way, rather than speaking up for righteousness, it will hurt us and take us down the wrong path.

I wonder whether this is exactly what has happened in the music industry — not so much a case of everybody selling their soul to Satan, but rather everybody choosing to look the other way and not get involved. It doesn’t matter, the end goal is the same. Let me quote once again from C.S. Lewis, this time from Mere Christianity:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself …

What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure—or enjoy—for ever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not.

Lewis pictures life as a series of choices we make which leave a mark upon the soul — either good or bad. I think he’s right: every day we face the choice in many situations of taking the path of faith or the path of ‘unfaith’. We have the choice of turning to God or away from him in virtually every decision that we make. If we consistently overlook evil and turn away from God, it will leave a mark on that soul — and that mark will grow and grow until we do not even recognise evil for what it is, even without our own souls.

I believe this is how evil flourishes in the world. We need to be aware of it, not simply to guard against it in others, but to guard against it in ourselves. We must not be complicit in or overlook evil. As Solzhenitsyn said, “let the lie come into the world, let it triumph even, but not through me.”

Postscript: Is there hope for the music industry?

I said at the start that I’m not an expert on the music industry, and indeed I am not! However, I think James Delingpole may be painting too bleak a picture of the industry. Let me give a few examples.

Firstly, Muse. I have been a fan of Muse for a long time (although I did drift off for a while with the Drones album). But their latest album, Will of the People, is brilliant and most definitely ‘awake’: Matt Bellamy has written songs before about MK Ultra, for example. But I think their song Compliance is going to be one of the songs of the decade. It explains how the powers that be exert their control over us:

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the Will of the People album is that it hasn’t been played much on the radio. It must have taken integrity for them to write an album which they must have surely known wouldn’t get much traction in the mainstream media. I also think the entire music industry can’t be entirely taken over if Muse could publish an album like that.

Secondly, I mentioned The Smiths earlier. I like Johnny Marr a lot, I think he’s a great guitarist and musician. He seems to be a genuinely thoughtful person. I don’t know him, obviously, but he has been married since he was young and has remained faithful to his wife and loved her and his children — which I think says a lot about his character. Hardly the actions of someone who had sold their soul!

Morrissey himself has been cancelled (his album ‘Bonfire of Teenagers’ remains unpublished because the title track was about his anger over the Manchester Arena Bombing). He’s also said some thoughtful things about other contemporary issues which shows that he is not simply regurgitating the status quo but, I believe, seeking to think for himself. Perhaps that’s why The Smiths never achieved the wide popularity of Pink Floyd and the like, despite the fact that I prefer their music?

Thirdly, there were a number of artists who spoke out during covid — for example Eric Clapton and Right Said Fred (who wrote the song Spiritual War). Other artists like Richard Ashcroft refused to perform when there were covid restrictions. There have definitely been those who have put principle above personal gain.

Lest I be misunderstood, please do not think that I am making the claim that any mentioned here are Christians or anything like that! But rather, I think it does demonstrate that the picture of the music industry is a little more nuanced than ‘everybody is a Satanist’!

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