The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared

It is a truth rarely acknowledged within the hallowed walls of university history departments that journalists often write better and more readable histories than professional academics. Too often, we specialists are mired in the weeds, reluctant to proffer anything other than the most nuanced, qualified conclusions about events and their consequences. By contrast, journalists—skilled in both archival research and evocative reportage—produce histories that translate complicated historical issues into engaging narratives that seek to show not just what happened but why the past is relevant and worth understanding. Unfortunately, this is not the case with investigative reporter Randall Sullivan’s The Devil’s Best Trick. Put bluntly—for there can be no sugar coating this—it is a poorly researched, critically uniformed, error-strewn mess.Sullivan prefaces his work reflecting on his experiences as a war correspondent in Bosnia in 1995. There, in the shattered remains of Mostar, he recounts, he began to wonder how an omnipotent, benevolent God could permit the horrors that had been perpetrated in the region. Upon his return to Rome later that summer, he continues, he had an uncanny encounter in the Piazza Navona with “an elegantly dressed man” whose face manifested “a sort of malevolent drollery that did not entirely mask the suffocating rage beneath it.” When the man then let loose “a mad cackle,” he states, “I felt absolutely certain he wasn’t human. I knew it” (ix). His anxiety was only assuaged by grabbing tight hold of the scapular medal he wore and whispering in the man’s direction, “You can’t touch me.” This encounter was the impetus for The Devil’s Best Trick: a work, he says, intended to establish whether the Devil exists, and—if he does—to determine to what people are referring when they speak of the Devil (180).Although the back cover describes the book as “part investigative reporting, part religious and cultural history,” given the opening anecdote and that fact that the apparently malevolent figure he encountered was repulsed through recourse to a Christian talisman, Sullivan’s conclusions are hardly a surprise. Indeed, he comes to argue, the modern world has become an ideal stomping ground for the Devil, for its complexities, nuances, ambiguities, and uncertainties allow the prince of evil to lurk undetected, hiding—as it were—in plain sight in the wreckage of the breakdown of social consensus (168). This is summed up in the book’s title, an allusion to Charles Baudelaire’s 1869 prose poem, “Le Joueur Généreux” (“The Generous Gambler”): “Mes chers frères, n’oubliez jamais quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!” (My dear brothers, never forget when you hear the praises of progress and enlightenment that the Devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!)Sullivan’s book is divided into four unconnected sections. The first concerns the death of seventeen-year-old Tate Rowland in Childress, Texas in 1988. Though Rowland’s death was adjudged by law enforcement to have been suicide, townsfolk quickly became convinced that the boy had actually been sacrificed to Satan by members of a Devil-worshipping cult (41). That Rowland’s much older sister Teri Trosper died three years later—and that the coroner botched the initial autopsy concluding that she had died of natural causes before an exhumation found that she had been murdered—only served to add fuel to popular speculation about a Satanic conspiracy, and to create a media frenzy in the process. Juxtaposed with the account of the Childress deaths, Sullivan weaves a potted history of the Devil from his roots in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity to the French Decadents and Taxil hoax at the end of the nineteenth century.These sections are followed by a short transitional excursus reflecting on the American serial killers Lawrence Bittaker (active with his partner Roy Norris in 1979) and Westley Allan Dodd (active in 1989). Sullivan had been present in court for parts of Bittaker’s trial in 1981 and heard a recording of the two men torturing one of their victims. While everyone present was deeply affected by what they heard, Sullivan notes that Bittaker seemed to be enjoying the process. Yet Sullivan finds himself more troubled by Dodd’s case. Though his crimes were similarly abhorrent, Dodd converted to Catholicism while he awaited his death sentence to be carried out. While Sullivan could readily accept that “something alien, radically inhuman, something that took pleasure in suffering” had entered into Bittaker’s soul (177), Dodd’s conversion seemed sincere, its apparent authenticity confirmed by his chaplain, making it impossible to assert definitively if this killer was evil or not.The idea that it is difficult to find moral certainties even when reflecting on the actions of a serial killer like Dodd—the notion that the Devil hides within ambiguity—causes Sullivan to look elsewhere for clarity. This serves as the pretext for the book’s final section: a sort of auto-ethnographic Heart-of-Darkness-style legend trip to Catemaco in Mexico. Mexico, Sullivan asserts, is a place where the line between good and evil is clear. It is a place where the Devil is “not a symbol or a concept, but an actual being from whom one might either flee or seek favors” (201)—somewhere “sorcerers and shamans hold a place of importance that is incomprehensible to most Americans” (8). “An intimacy with evil,” he writes, “was characteristic of the people of this region long before the arrival of Hernán Cortés” in the sixteenth century (226), and the contemporary practice of Brujería (witchcraft), and the pernicious influence of drug cartels collude to make “a convincing case that the Devil [is] running the show in this part of the world” (228). Baldly, he asserts that Mexico “is the epicenter of the Devil’s power on earth” (279). It is a place where “real” Black Masses are still performed (245).This book is rife with profound problems. However, I will confine my comments only to two areas: methodology and research.The Devil’s Best Trick is not a skeptic’s investigation. In itself, this is not a problem. Many works of exceptionally fine scholarship have been written by people of faith. Indeed, historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, who opened the field of Devil studies through his quartet of volumes detailing the history of the Devil (1977–1986), was a committed Catholic. But Russell approached the study of the Devil as an historical concept, a notion that developed over time in response to historical circumstances (Russell 1984: 23). But while Sullivan lauds Russell—for some reason describing him as “one of the least acknowledged great scholars of the twentieth century” (112; my italics)—he has no sense of the Devil’s historicity. Rather than construing the Devil as a figure whose identity and nature are honed over the centuries through a dialogue between experience, received wisdom, authority, and events, he sees the Devil as a transhistorical, ontologically stable entity. For him, theologians seem more akin to archaeologists in that they are engaged in a process of slowly uncovering the remains of a complete and perfect relic laid down centuries ago. They are not thinkers grappling with how to reconcile the sacred text’s very sketchy portrait of the Devil with people’s experiences in a world believed to be perfectly good.It is this view of the Devil that allows Sullivan to ignore the historicity of Mexican religious practice and the social and functional spaces it occupies, and to view it through the stultifying, binary lens of demonism. He has no interest in trying to understand why particular traditions have developed, and he completely ignores the vast scholarly literature on colonialism and the way power remakes traditional belief systems. Instead, he behaves exactly as centuries of condescending external observers have done when venturing into what were to them alien lands, cherry picking instances of practice which he deems demonic, damning the whole culture in the process.He is troubled in the first instance by the contemporary cult around Santa Muerte as practiced by many contemporary Mexican Catholics (230–33). Rather than perceiving it as a function of a dialectic between indigenous spirit belief and missionary Catholicism, it is, to him, merely demonic. He is equally unequivocal about the practice of Brujería. He has no interest in the fact that it is a product of colonialism, a syncretistic blending of indigenous belief, that of the African slaves transported to the region, and Catholic culture, fusing in a context where religion has a functional dimension to it. To him, it is overt Devil worship in precisely the way that he understands it.Sullivan’s reluctance to engage with either circumstance or context is also apparent in his account of the events in Childress. The deaths of Rowland and Trosper occurred at the height of the Satanic panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States. All the tropes are there: a ouija board (16); suspicious teenagers dressed in black (16); the discovery of an apparent “altar” with a cow’s skull lodged in it near the Rowland suicide site (41); strange, unidentified chanting and occult symbols at Rowland’s grave (42); suspicions that the police were being forced to cover things up by some unknown forces (81). Indeed, at some point between the two deaths, some 450 people turned out to a public meeting in Childress at which a self-proclaimed “occult expert” regaled the audience with a story about a satanic cult survivor who had been forced to drink a cocktail of drugs, blood, and urine in preparation for sacrifice (105). While Sullivan does devote six pages to discussing the infamous 1980 Michelle Remembers and the McMartin daycare case (1983–1990)—both of which center on allegations of the ritual satanic abuse of children and were instrumental in fomenting the panic—he refuses to go so far as to suggest that what happened in Childress could have been part of the same cultural hysteria. Indeed, he concludes that the Devil “had somehow, some way, been involved in the boy’s death [i.e., Rowland], and in all that had transpired in the small Texas town in the weeks and months and years afterward” (298).But this utter lack of critical reflection is only part of the problem with this book, for it is riddled with egregious and basic errors in fact: while some Gnostics were dualists, dualism and Gnosticism are not the same thing (48); St. Augustine was never a gnostic (52), nor were the Cathars (68); medieval nominalism has nothing to do with predestination (65 and 88); William of Ockham was not semi-Pelagian (65); Innocent VIII was not alive in 1184 (68); the bull which began the medieval inquisition was not Summis desiderantes (68); Erasmus of Rotterdam did not live from 1366 to 1436, nor were his followers targeted by the Spanish inquisition (75); the Malleus maleficarum did not serve as the “handbook of the Spanish Inquisition” nor was it the “operating manual of the witch hunts . . . in the two centuries that followed” its publication (73); Renaissance humanism is not the belief “that judgments should be based on rationality and empiricism rather than articles of faith” (75); witchcraft accusations were not “a sentence of certain death” (76); Bittaker is no longer alive (178). This is anything but an exhaustive list.There are many points where Sullivan characterizes the positions of particular theologians or philosophers in ways that are completely unrecognizable to me. But given that the book is devoid of footnotes and that he rarely provides even the titles of the works he is purporting to discuss in the body of the text, I have been unable to determine from what sources he draws his conclusions. That said, the book does include a bibliography broken down according to chapter. But what is most striking about this is that aside from Russell’s books and Elaine Pagels’ excellent 1995 Origins of Satan, Sullivan seems not to have used any of the burgeoning scholarship on the Devil or demonism published over the last 25 years. Indeed, he does not seem to have read the important works of Stuart Clark, Robert Muchembled, Bill Ellis, Philip Almond, Ryan Stokes, Alain Boureau, Neil Forsyth, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Scott Poole, Nancy Caciola, Fernando Cervantes, Sarah Hughes, Michael Bailey, or Joseph Laycock, to mention just a few of the more outstanding general authors in the field.One is meant to conclude a review with something positive. But I have nothing. This really is a dreadful book. The level of critical and intellectual disinterest is profound. And frankly, Atlantic Monthly Press should be embarrassed at the number of basic errors in fact it has reproduced under its imprint. Journalists may sometimes write exceptionally good histories, but they still need to do their research and engage with their subject on something more than the most facile level.

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