The Devil Got The Microphone — Ghana Should Pay Attention

“It is done. Hail, Satan!”

Those are not words most Ghanaians expect to hear at the opening of a public meeting.

But perhaps that is precisely why the story deserves our attention.

In Ottumwa, Iowa, former council member and Satanic Temple member Matt Dalbey delivered a Satanic invocation before the city council. He spoke of embracing the “Luciferian impulse” to eat from the tree of knowledge and urged listeners to abandon what he described as the comforting delusions of the past.

Then he finished:

“It is done. Hail, Satan!”

It is easy to dismiss the episode as an American oddity.

That would be a mistake.

The uncomfortable question underneath it has a distinctly Ghanaian relevance:

When government opens a public space for religion, does that space belong to the religious majority—or does it belong to everybody?

Ottumwa’s invocation policy reportedly allows residents to offer prayers regardless of religious affiliation or belief system.

That means the city has to live with an obvious consequence: once government says the microphone is open to religious expression, it cannot simply close it when somebody uses that freedom in a way the majority finds offensive.

That principle is not particularly exotic to Ghana.

Religion is woven deeply into Ghanaian public life. Christian prayers are commonplace at official ceremonies, political gatherings, schools, workplaces and public events. Muslims and members of other faith traditions also participate in the country’s public religious life.

And because Christianity is overwhelmingly visible in Ghanaian society, there is a tendency to treat Christian prayer in public institutions as almost invisible—as though it is simply part of the furniture.

That is precisely when the question of neutrality becomes worth asking.

What happens when the person at the microphone is not Christian?

What happens when it is a Muslim?

An African traditional religious practitioner?

An atheist?

Someone from a smaller religious community?

Or, eventually, someone whose beliefs many Ghanaians find deeply offensive?

Would we still say the public institution should apply the same rule?

That is the real test.

Nobody is being asked to believe in Satanism. Nobody is being asked to approve of Dalbey’s words. And nobody has to pretend that provocative speech is suddenly respectable because somebody calls it religion.

The question is whether government should decide which beliefs are acceptable enough to receive public recognition.

That question matters in Ghana because we have become accustomed to religious expression in official spaces.

Prayers before meetings. Prayers before political events. Prayers at state functions. Invocations before ceremonies.

Most of the time, nobody objects because the words are familiar.

But neutrality is easy when everybody is comfortable.

It becomes difficult when someone stands up and prays to a God—or invokes a belief system—that the majority rejects.

That is where the principle is actually tested.

There is a danger in assuming that because Ghana is a predominantly Christian country, Christian religious expression should automatically receive a special place in every public institution.

Majority culture and government neutrality are not the same thing.

A democratic state does not become more neutral because the majority happens to share the religion being expressed.

And this is where the Iowa story becomes a useful mirror for Ghana.

We should ask ourselves what our rules actually say.

If a government institution allows prayer, is it genuinely open to all lawful religious viewpoints?

If it is not, who decides which prayers are legitimate?

And on what authority?

If the answer is simply, “We would never allow something like Satanism,” then we have stopped talking about neutrality. We are talking about government choosing which religious beliefs deserve official space.

There is another uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps some Ghanaians do not actually want religious neutrality. Perhaps what they want is a public sphere in which their own religious traditions receive special treatment because they are the majority.

There is nothing wrong with a private citizen believing that.

But government is different.

The state belongs to the Christian, the Muslim, the traditionalist, the atheist and the person who is still figuring out what they believe.

That is why the Satanic invocation in Iowa matters here.

Not because Ghana is about to start opening municipal meetings with “Hail, Satan.”

It isn’t.

It matters because the easiest time to defend religious freedom is when the religion being expressed is our own.

The difficult moment comes when the person at the microphone says something we find offensive.

That is when we discover whether we believe in freedom of religion—or simply freedom for familiar religion.

Ghana does not have to copy America’s approach. Our constitutional framework, institutions and social circumstances are our own. But we should be willing to confront the same basic question before it confronts us in a more complicated form.

When the state opens the door to religion, who gets to walk through it?

If the answer is “only the people we agree with,” then that is not religious neutrality.

It is religious preference wearing the clothes of tradition.

And traditions, however respectable, should never be confused with constitutional principles.

So yes, the words “Hail, Satan!” may sound outrageous in a council chamber.

They may sound even more outrageous to many Ghanaians.

But perhaps the most useful thing about the episode is precisely that discomfort.

It forces us to ask a question we rarely ask when the prayer sounds familiar:

Would we defend the same rule if the person standing at the microphone believed something we profoundly rejected?

If the answer is no, then the problem is not the Satanist at the microphone.

The problem is that we never really believed the microphone belonged to everyone.