Ottumwa Mayor Benjamin Foote called for 30 seconds of silence after a pastor demanded the city reverse a “curse” during Tuesday’s city council meeting.
The disruption came after former council member Matt Dalbey, a member of the Satanic Temple of Iowa, delivered the meeting’s opening invocation with a prayer that included “Dear dark father” and “Hail Satan.” Dalbey, who stepped up under a January-approved policy allowing invocations from any faith or philosophy, told the Ottumwa Courier afterwards that he has “nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity.”
“Let us embrace the Luciferianian impulse to eat at the tree of knowledge,” Dalbey said during the prayer. “Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions not their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations.”
Some attendees in the standing crowd appeared perplexed as Dalbey continued, while at least one person promptly sat down. When he finished, council members turned to face the American flag and recited the pledge of allegiance without comment.
New Life Center pastor Rick Bick then headed straight for the podium and refused to wait for the public comment section.
“That ‘Hail Satan’ is not welcome here,” Bick told the council, according to footage from the Ottumwa Courier.
“It needs to be done now,” he said after council members asked him to wait.
“I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city,” Bick continued. “Most of you know that, and we need to just stop and reverse it.”
Foote then intervened with the 30 seconds of silence “to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time.” Council members attempted to move forward with the meeting, but the mayor insisted on continuing the silence.
Council Member Cara Galloway, the sole vote against the January invocation policy, raised concerns at the meeting’s close about the legislation she had warned would create problems.
“I think we’ve opened ourselves up for others to object or respond to others’ invocations, and we need to remember that we are up here to be neutral,” Galloway said.
“I think I specifically referenced that having someone from the church of Satan or a prayer about Satan when we talked about that, that this could happen and we would need to allow it,” she added.
The Satanic Temple of Iowa describes itself as “resolutely non-theistic,” consistent with most predominant Satanic churches that do not worship Lucifer as a deity but instead emphasize individualism and personal freedoms.
The January policy that enabled Dalbey’s appearance passed over Galloway’s objection, setting the stage for Tuesday’s confrontation between religious freedom and community values in the southeast Iowa city of roughly 25,000 residents.