In Ottumwa, Iowa, the city council’s meetings follow a fixed order. First the invocation, then the Pledge of Allegiance, then the consent agenda, where routine business goes through in a single vote. On the evening of Tuesday, October 6, the order held for a few minutes, then broke over a question no rulebook had covered: at what point on the agenda does a city lift a curse?
The man at the podium was Matt Dalbey, an Ottumwa resident who spent eight years on the same council and left it in 2021. He is also a Satanist. “Thank you mayor, council. Let us pray,” he began, according to Matthew Gault’s report for 404 Media. “Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times.”
The prayer is a standard text of the Satanic Temple of Iowa. It asks that people be judged by what they do and not by whether they obey “arbitrary social norms,” that solutions be reasoned “with agnosticism in all things,” and that believers resist “any and all arbitrary authority.” Read closely, it is a short sermon against sermons. It ended on the line that mattered to the people in the room:
It is done. Hail Satan.
The order of business
The audience stood for the Pledge as soon as he finished. Then a pastor, Rick Bick, came forward. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”
Councilor Cara Galloway objected on grounds of procedure: “Mayor, that should be done at the end.” Bick would not wait. The curse, he said, had been laid when the words were spoken, “and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.” Then he offered a 30-second “time of prayer,” and corrected himself mid-phrase to “time of silence.”
Accounts of who said that differ. The 404 Media transcript puts the words in the pastor’s mouth. A report carried by Yahoo News gives them to Mayor Benjamin Foote. Both versions agree on what happened next. “No,” Galloway said. “We are at the consent agenda. I’m sorry, but it’s time to move forward. The invocation happened.” The mayor overruled her. “As mayor of this city,” Foote said, he was asking for “a moment of silence to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time.”
That was the compromise: silence with no stated subject, so that each person could fill it as they wished. Galloway sat through it with her head up and her arms folded. About an hour later she gave the council her verdict. Inviting invocations, she said, “means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own,” and answering one is “a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers.” She added: “This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”
A form that asks for nothing
She had raised those concerns before. The council approved invocations on January 20, and Galloway cast the only vote against. She warned then that Satanists might come to pray, and that everyone would have to accept it. The policy lets residents volunteer and schedules them more or less in the order they sign up. Under the rules, city staff may not review or limit what an invocation says before it is given. The city has been taking calls about the prayer since Tuesday night.
To pray, a resident fills in an electronic form that asks which organization they represent. “None” is an accepted answer. Dalbey has signed up three times this year and wrote “none” every time. He was due to speak on September 1 but had to work. His next slot is November 3. “I plan on being there in November, absolutely,” he said.
Here is the irony of the arrangement. A council that wanted to put faith into its proceedings, and was told by law to stay neutral among faiths, wrote a form that cannot tell a pastor from a provocateur. The ritual sounds ancient. Its gatekeeper is a dropdown menu.
Ten years in the rotunda
The scene in Ottumwa repeats a fight that has gone on for a decade, 90 miles or so up the road, at the state capitol in Des Moines. In 2016 a religious liberty group put a Christian nativity scene in the building, and atheists answered later that year with a display honoring the Bill of Rights. In 2023 the Satanic Temple put up a pentagram of red ribbon under a mirror-masked ram’s head invoking Baphomet. A man wrecked it and was charged with a hate crime. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated misdemeanor criminal mischief and the felony charge was dropped, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
In 2024, the year Governor Kim Reynolds signed a state law meant to protect religious freedom, officials stopped the Satanists from holding their winter celebration in the rotunda. The Temple says it was refused again in 2025. On August 13 the ACLU of Iowa sued the state in federal court on the Temple’s behalf, asking a judge to order the Department of Administrative Services to allow a holiday event this December. The planned program included carols, coloring pages, ornament-making and a Krampus costume contest. “The government should not favor one religious belief over another,” said Rita Bettis Austen, the ACLU of Iowa’s legal director.
The nonbeliever’s prayer
Dalbey calls himself a sincere member of the Temple. He also stresses that it is “an organization of nontheists, people who don’t believe in any deities or supernatural beings.” On that account, the dark father addressed in Ottumwa is a figure of speech. The pastor’s curse was real only to those who believed in it, and they were the majority in the room.
His motive, he says, is the Constitution. “I’m a constitutionalist,” he said. When the council adopted the rule, “the implication I got was that we were again starting to mix religion into the government.” He would welcome its repeal. When he sat on the council, he recalled, requests for invocations came in several times, and the city’s attorney warned that opening the door once opens it “to any and all people who want to present. That’s the law.”
He sees larger forces behind it: “a rise of Christian nationalism in this country,” which he believes is “trying to grasp and get a hold of controlling our politics, our laws and our government.” If any one religion is allowed to dominate politics, he warned, America could “slide right back” toward “a monarchy where the church ruled the country.”
Those are his fears, and they are bigger than Ottumwa. The town’s own question is smaller and comes back on November 3, when the invocation opens the meeting again and the council has to decide in advance whether a reply belongs at the start of the agenda or at the end.