The Devil Doesn't Want Your Worship. He Wants You to Think.

From overpowered anime protagonists to Satanist revolutionaries and the peculiar habit of confusing authority with morality.

I was rewatching a delightful little isekai anime called The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure: Serving Gods Who Go Too Far when, as conversations sometimes do, my thoughts wandered into unexpected territory.

By the time I was finished, I had traveled through several fantasy universes, visited Hell, contemplated the theology of Satanism, and arrived at a rather uncomfortable question about political and religious authority.

All because of a five-year-old boy who doesn't know his own strength.

When Power Becomes Ordinary

Cain, the protagonist of The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure, is reincarnated into a fantasy world and blessed by several gods with powers so absurd that the world's greatest warriors and magicians might as well be children playing with wooden swords.

Yet Cain desperately tries to behave like an ordinary noble child.

The problem is that he has no meaningful conception of what ordinary means.

When his parents hire a swordsmanship instructor and a magic tutor, he casually demonstrates abilities that astonish both professionals. He isn't showing off. He's doing what he thinks a student should do: demonstrating what he already knows.

In another scene, Cain approaches the royal knights to dispose of monster carcasses he's collected. When shown a large storage room, he complains that it's too small.

The vice-captain is understandably confused.

Cain sheepishly explains that he's brought only monsters he's personally killed, including an Earth Dragon—a creature considered a national-level catastrophe.

Then he begins emptying his magical storage.

And keeps emptying it.

Until the training grounds are buried beneath mountains of dead monsters.

To Cain, this is perfectly ordinary.

It reminded me of Lloyd Belladonna from Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town.

Lloyd grows up in a village populated by people so extraordinarily powerful that he genuinely believes himself weak.

When asked how long it took him to reach the city from his village, he dejectedly admits it took three days.

His listener assumes he traveled by train.

No, Lloyd explains. He ran.

His brother could have done it in less than a day.

Lloyd isn't being modest. He genuinely believes his performance was disappointing.

gBoth characters illustrate a fascinating distinction: our understanding of what's normal depends almost entirely on what we're accustomed to experiencing.

And that thought reminded me of another fantasy series.

The Witch Who Couldn't Summon Her Slippers

In Anne Bishop's Black Jewels universe, magical power is represented by colored Jewels. Black is the most powerful.

Jaenelle Angelline is born with so much power that the existing classification system is practically meaningless.

She possesses abilities that others can barely comprehend, yet struggles with the simplest magical tasks.

Ordinary people can summon objects with casual spells. Jaenelle's attempts at similarly mundane magic can produce catastrophic results.

After several books, she finally manages something wonderfully insignificant: summoning her slippers to her feet.

And she's delighted.

Imagine possessing the power to reshape the world but being unable to retrieve your slippers without risking a geological catastrophe.

Her greatest achievement isn't learning to wield more power. It's learning to wield less.

But the Black Jewels series also introduces one of my favorite naming conventions in fantasy literature.

One of its central characters is named Saetan Daemon SaDiablo.

Yes. Really.

And he's the High Lord of Hell.

Naturally, he's also one of the most compassionate, protective, and sympathetic characters in the series.

The irony is deliberate.

In Bishop's world, the ruler of Hell is not inherently evil, just as those claiming righteousness are not necessarily good.

Which raises a question that has occupied philosophers for millennia:

Does authority establish morality, or must authority itself be judged by moral standards?

And that question reminded me of a conversation from another book.

When the Devil Conquered Heaven

In March to the Stars, part of David Weber and John Ringo's Empire of Man series, Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic discusses the unusual religious history of her homeworld, Armagh.

Armagh was once ruled by a corrupt, oppressive theocracy.

Those who opposed the regime were secularists, including atheists who rejected the religious establishment's political authority.

But the regime refused to recognize the legitimacy of their opposition.

Instead, it branded its enemies Satanists.

Disciples of the Devil.

Servants of evil.

The implication was obvious: if the government represented God, anyone opposing the government must necessarily represent Satan.

It's a convenient arrangement.

You don't have to answer someone's arguments if you've already declared their existence a theological offense.

But the rebels did something wonderfully subversive.

They accepted the label.

If the regime insisted on calling them Satanists, then Satanists they would become.

And they constructed a theology around their newly adopted identity.

In their mythology, Lucifer was not the wicked angel who rebelled against a righteous God. He was the loyal angel who resisted a rebellion by other angels who had usurped divine authority.

The traditional narrative was inverted.

The supposed forces of Heaven became the oppressors.

The supposed forces of Hell became the resistance.

And from that mythology emerged a remarkable philosophical proposition:

If the Devil conquered Heaven, he would have no choice but to assume heavenly attributes.

Think about that.

If Heaven represents justice, goodness, and moral responsibility, then conquering it presents the Devil with a dilemma.

He can assume those responsibilities, becoming something fundamentally different from what he was.

Or he can preserve his wickedness, in which case Heaven ceases to be Heaven in any meaningful moral sense.

The title doesn't create the virtue.

The virtue defines whether the title deserves respect.

The Armagh rebels eventually won their civil war. Satanism became the dominant religion, while the new constitutional order protected religious freedom.

The people accused of worshipping evil had established a society in which even their former religious opponents could practice their faith.

Their victory wasn't simply over a government.

It was over the proposition that political authority and moral righteousness were interchangeable.

The Devil Has Had Enough of His Followers

And that brings me to one of my favorite scenes from the television series Lucifer.

In the episode “#TeamLucifer,” Lucifer Morningstar encounters a group of supposed Satanists conducting a ritual.

These people claim to honor the Devil, worship rebellion, and celebrate defiance.

Lucifer is appalled.

Not because they worship Satan.

Because they haven't understood the first thing about what he represents.

He berates them for behaving like obedient sheep and demands to know where their free will has gone.

The cultists enthusiastically applaud.

Lucifer tells them to stop applauding.

They cheer louder.

It's a magnificent piece of comedy, but also a surprisingly effective philosophical argument.

They are so committed to following the symbol of rebellion that they've forgotten how to rebel.

They want someone to tell them how to be independent.

Someone to instruct them in free thought.

Someone to give them permission to exercise free will.

The contradiction is almost perfect.

And it recalls the famous scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, when Brian tells an enormous crowd that they're all individuals.

The crowd obediently repeats that they're all individuals.

Except for one man who objects.

He's the only one who actually understands the message.

The Authoritarian's Favorite Trick

All of this brings us, inevitably, to contemporary politics.

One of authoritarianism's oldest and most effective techniques is to claim exclusive ownership of moral legitimacy.

The ruler doesn't merely disagree with opponents.

The ruler represents righteousness.

The opposition represents wickedness.

Under this framework, political disagreements become moral emergencies. Compromise becomes betrayal. Dissent becomes heresy.

And evidence becomes secondary to allegiance.

This is particularly dangerous when political authority is wrapped in religious language.

We can see the tension in contemporary American debates over Christian nationalism, religious liberty, and the relationship between church and state.

Donald Trump's political movement has included prominent appeals to religious identity, while critics of Christian nationalism argue that conflating a particular religious tradition with national identity threatens equal citizenship.

Of course, religious voters are not a monolith, and religious political participation is not inherently authoritarian. Believers have the same right as anyone else to advocate their values.

The problem begins when someone claims that disagreement with their political program is equivalent to disagreement with God.

At that point, democracy faces a philosophical contradiction.

Democracy requires accepting that political opponents can possess legitimate interests, exercise legitimate rights, and sometimes win legitimate elections.

A political worldview that defines the opposition as inherently illegitimate has considerable difficulty accepting those premises.

And there's a particularly revealing test.

What happens when the people claiming to defend freedom finally acquire enough power to restrict someone else's freedom?

Do they preserve the principles they championed while powerless?

Or do they decide that freedom was only ever meant for people like themselves?

That's what makes the fictional history of Armagh so interesting.

The rebels could have replaced the old theocracy with a new one.

Instead, they established a constitutional system protecting religious freedom.

They didn't merely exchange one set of rulers for another.

They rejected the premise that rulers should dictate belief.

The Difference Between Having Power and Deserving It

There is a thread connecting all these otherwise unrelated stories.

Cain has overwhelming power but voluntarily submits to social rules that he could easily ignore.

Lloyd possesses extraordinary strength but doesn't consider himself superior to anyone.

Jaenelle has nearly unimaginable magical abilities, yet takes genuine pleasure in finally learning something ordinary.

Saetan rules Hell without embodying the evil traditionally associated with it.

The rebels of Armagh adopt the Devil's name while establishing principles of religious liberty.

And Lucifer himself refuses to become the object of unquestioning worship.

Each story, in its own way, separates power from moral worth.

They remind us that the ability to command obedience is not the same thing as deserving obedience.

A king can be wrong.

A priest can be cruel.

A rebel can be righteous.

And someone called the Devil can understand freedom better than the people claiming to speak for Heaven.

None of this proves that rebellion is inherently virtuous, of course. History provides more than enough examples of revolutionaries who became the very tyrants they overthrew.

The test is never merely whom someone opposes.

It's what they do when they possess power themselves.

Do they use it to protect the freedom of others?

Or merely to eliminate those who disagree?

The Question That Matters

Perhaps that's the most important lesson hiding beneath all these fantasy adventures and theological inversions.

Morality cannot be established by a title, an office, a religious affiliation, or a claim of divine endorsement.

It must be demonstrated through conduct.

Anyone can proclaim themselves righteous.

Anyone can announce that God is on their side.

Anyone can declare their opponents evil.

Those are claims.

They aren't evidence.

And if your understanding of morality requires you to abandon independent judgment whenever someone invokes divine authority, perhaps you have confused obedience with virtue.

Which brings us back to Lucifer, standing before a crowd of enthusiastic worshippers, desperately trying to make them understand that free will means thinking for themselves.

They applaud.

He protests.

They applaud harder.

It's funny because it's absurd.

It's disturbing because it's familiar.

The Devil, apparently, doesn't want your worship.

He wants you to use your damned brain.

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And to think, this entire train of thought began with a five-year-old anime protagonist trying to dispose of a few monster carcasses.

I really should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.