The Devil Wears Izod

I used to think the Devil was an egg.

Not the kind I ate for breakfast on Saturday mornings. My Devil was a small red egg with horns, a cape and an angry expression. He wobbled threateningly on my shoulder whenever I was tempted to steal a piece of candy from the Brach’s bin at the supermarket or sass my preschool teachers.

I realize now that the image must’ve come from deviled eggs, a Baptist potluck specialty in my small Georgia town. No matter how we pictured him, Satan was a very real presence in all of our lives. Our pastor warned us about his dark deeds each Sunday in sermons like Will You Burn in the Fiery Pit? and Alcohol: Satan’s Beverage of Choice. Our parents invoked his name whenever we fought with our siblings or refused to clean our plates. As a result, my friends and I never worried about monsters in the closet; it was the Devil who was lurking in the shadows of our bedrooms.

By the time I was seven, I was convinced that, despite my nightly prayers and diligence with the toothbrush, Satan had somehow managed to infiltrate my soul. What else could explain me hiding my older brother’s new wristwatch in the deepest recesses of our storage closet? Things came to a head one Sunday when I excused myself from the sermon to go to the bathroom. As I dawdled in front of the mirror, I happened to look down and see a postcard on the floor. Curious, I picked it up and turned it over. Go to hell, it said. Interpreting it as a direct message from Heaven, I dropped the card and ran back to the sanctuary in terror.

“Mama,” I whispered, “I just invited Jesus into my heart.”

”In the ladies room?” she whispered skeptically.

“I need to be baptized, or else!” I insisted. “Jesus said so.”

One month later, I dogpaddled across the baptismal swimming pool at the front of the sanctuary, treading water until the preacher stopped talking and dunked me. The congregation laughed, but I didn’t care. I was free from the devil’s clutches at last!

Still, Satan was such a driving force among our Baptist neighbors that when my family moved to Atlanta and joined a United Methodist church, we all breathed a sigh of relief. United Methodists weren’t really into the whole Beelzebub deal. They kept hellfire and brimstone at bay with extra-large air conditioning units, comfortably upholstered pews, and lots of talk of redemption. At my youth group meetings, Satan seemed to have no more impact than an extra from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’d make a cameo appearance every now and then in the teenage dramedy of our lives, provoking good girls to get pregnant and straight-A students to use drugs.

I went on to college and forgot about religion for a while, save for the times when I had a big final coming up and suddenly remembered the Power of Prayer. It wasn’t until I married and found myself with a ready-made family consisting of a husband and two stepdaughters that I decided it was time to reclaim my religion and give the God thing another go.

I discovered upon my return to church that a strange thing had happened while I was out. The Devil had all but disappeared. From what I could gather, the big churches had gotten even bigger by deciding that the way to win back heathen families like ours was to present themselves as havens for social media-savvy consumers. Satan, with his ridiculous pitchfork, unmoisturized skin and teeth that badly needed capping, did not fit the bill.

Simply put, the Devil had gone out of style.

As far as I can tell, he’s been relegated (along with sport coats, ties and hymnals) to the small country churches that dot the edges of larger towns, the ones we pass sometimes on the way to megachurch and think to ourselves, “Isn’t that quaint?” before laughing at the hokey sayings on the billboards outside.

At our own massive sanctuary, any evidence of The Devil has been carefully  sanitized. We pretend we’re all next-door neighbors, even though most us have never met. Lucifer may be lurking somewhere outside, but if we sing loudly and smile brightly and keep our eyes shut during the prayers, we can probably keep him at bay until he gives up and heads for a smaller congregation.

What a comfort it is to know that the smartest and most sophisticated of us have managed to banish Satan from our lives, warding off his return with charitable donations to the Red Cross and Life is Good tire covers. And yet, sometimes I could swear I still catch a glimpse of the old Devil I used to know in the cocky stride of my neighbor, in the tone of my gossipy girlfriends’ voices, and, fleetingly, in my own eyes when I look in the mirror.