An Iowa city council meeting opened Tuesday with an invocation that ended with “Hail Satan,” prompting a local pastor to call the remarks a curse and demand an immediate response.
The Ottumwa City Council held its regular meeting October 6 at City Hall. Resident and former council member Matt Dalbey delivered the invocation before the Pledge of Allegiance.
The city’s official recording shows Dalbey beginning, “Dear dark father,” and later urging listeners to “embrace the luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.” He closed with, “It is done. Hail Satan.”
Dalbey told the Ottumwa Courier in a private message that the text is used by The Satanic Temple of Iowa, of which he is a member, “but has nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity.” The Satanic Temple states that it does not believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural and organizes its beliefs around seven tenets.
Pastor Calls For Immediate Response
After the Pledge, New Life Center pastor Rick Bick spoke as the council prepared to move into its agenda. “Let’s just reverse this curse that was put on our city. That ‘Hail Satan’ is not welcome here,” Bick said, according to the Courier.
Council member Cara Galloway objected to addressing the matter outside the meeting’s designated public-comment period and urged the council to proceed with its agenda. Of note, Galloway has never stood for an invocation, per the Courier.
Bick pressed for an immediate response. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city. Most of you know that, and we need to just stop and reverse it,” he said.
Mayor Benjamin Foote then called for “30 second time of prayer,” which he quickly reframed as a “time of silence,” adding, “to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time” before the council resumed business.
At the end of the meeting, Galloway renewed the concerns she raised when the council created the invocation policy. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own, and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing for others to object or respond,” she said, according to the Courier.
Policy Opened Invocations To Differing Beliefs
The council adopted Resolution 18-2026 on January 20 by a 4-1 vote, with Galloway casting the only dissenting vote. The policy allows any Ottumwa resident to volunteer for an invocation of no more than two minutes and schedules speakers on a first-come, first-served basis.
The policy says the city does not endorse or prefer any faith. Instead, it says the council seeks to respect “the diversity of both organized and unorganized religious denominations, as well as other faiths, belief systems, or the lack thereof” among Ottumwa residents. The rules also bar speakers from using an invocation to recruit others or disparage different beliefs.
City Administrator Philip Rath said Wednesday on KBIZ’s “Dialogue” program that an open policy requires allowing differing beliefs and that amending it “could open it up for a potential suit down the road,” the Courier reported.
The city posted Wednesday that it had fielded calls throughout the day, saying “some calls have been cordial, while many have been rude and full of profanities,” the Courier reported. The city added that officials do not receive invocation remarks in advance and do not automatically endorse what a speaker says.
The Larger Questions
Ottumwa’s controversy now raises larger questions than who gets two minutes at the microphone:
Who do voters want representing them on the council?
How far should religious accommodation extend in a government meeting?
The October 6 meeting answered what the policy allows. The debate now turns to whether Ottumwa residents believe that policy reflects the community they want their council to represent.
