According to AC II, this "vicious turning to fleshly things" is one of the two pillars of original sin, the other being man's innate inability to fear God and trust in him. By this logic, the Supreme Court affirmed a Satanic Statement and thus conferred upon one aspect of original sin the luster of con- stitutionality. As high school students in Germany used to write under philosophical or mathematical term papers in my youth, "quod erat demonstrandum" (QED, which is, what had to be proven).

As I said, this is meant tongue-in-cheek. When contemplating same-sex marriage, the nine Supreme Court justices were perhaps even unaware that an official Church of Satan existed in the United States. But a church the CoS is nonetheless, albeit a church of "skeptical atheists," as it declares itself. Like other weird American cults it counted celebrated entertainers among members, for example, Jayne Mansfield, Liberace, and Sammy Davis Jr., and -- still with us -- the controversial singer Brian Hugh Warner, a.k.a. Marilyn Manson. The fact that this sect is made up of atheists does not automatically disqualify it frombeing called a religion; the Buddha, too, denied the existence of an eternal omnipotent God, creator of the world.

But then the tiny Church of Satan might not be altogether atheistic. "We Satanists are . . . our own 'Gods,' and as beneficent 'deities' we can offer love to those who deserve it and deliver our wrath (within reasonable limits) upon those who seek to cause us -- or that which we cherish -- harm," states its official website.4 Again a trifle tongue-in-cheek, I posit that this makes the CoS a small denomination within a much larger popular religion spawned by today's narcissism epidemic5 that is posing an acute threat to ordered society in North America and Western Europe. Let's call it the Church of Me. Its practitioners endeavor to sit on their own altar and kneel in front of it, worshiping themselves.

So it is actually this larger Church of Me championing con- cupiscence, which has just been established by the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. This is the second time the court ruled in favor of one particular faith group while dis- missing the beliefs of most others. The first time this happened was in 1973 when it found a mother's "right" to an abortion con- stitutional. This ruling has since resulted in the deaths of 58 million unborn American babies, according to abortion coun- ters relentlessly ticking away on the Internet.6

When I termed narcissism a new faith in my chapter of Where Christ Is Present: A Theology for all Seasons on the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation,7 an eminent theologian whose scholarship I much admire described my musings as "eccentric and bizarre." I have no problem with that label. We live in bi- zarre times, which might just require eccentric analysis in the sense that Webster's Unabridged Dictionary uses to define the term, namely, as "deviating from the norm . . . ; odd; whimsical; peculiar; unconventional.

How more bizarre can times become when the highest court of the most powerful nation in the world legalized the liquida- tion of the most innocent human beings, and when even con- servative media such as The Wall Street Journal and Fox News trivialize the resulting genocide as a "social issue" while the number of its victims is approaching a level ten times higher than the Holocaust's?

How much more bizarre can a civilization become when that same High Court elevated a concupiscent behavior Pla- to rejected as para physin (against nature) 2,400 years ago to the level of matrimony, which most religions other than the Church of Me consider holy? One is tempted to agree with Kirill I, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, who chastised the Occident's trend toward same-sex marriage as an "apocalyptic symptom."8In 2013, Joel Stein described our bizarre aeon of the Millenni- als in a Time magazine cover story titled "The Me, Me, Me Gen-eration," as an "era of the quantified self."9 He went on to say:

Millennials are a generation mostly of teens and 20-some- things known for constantly holding up cameras, taking pictures of themselves and posting them online. They are narcissistic, overconfident, entitled and lazy. Their self- centeredness could bring about the end of civilization as we know it.10

The present era of the quantified self began with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s. It was then that the term "Me Genera-tion" first appeared. The Church of Satan was founded in that period, in 1966.

But the CoS was only a small offshoot of the substantial New Age religion promoted by Harvard lecturer and drug guru Timothy Leary, who coined the maxim, "Do your own thing," which still captivates Western societies to this day.The slogan "Do your own thing" was simply a snappier paraphrase of a tenet proclaimed decades earlier by English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875--1947), who took pride in call- ing himself "the wickedest man in the world."

Crowley was the author of The Book of the Law, which he claimed had been revealed to him by Aiwass, a communicator of Horus, the Egyptian god of war, in a hotel room in Cairo in April 1904. The book's central statement is "Do as Thou Wilt. This is the whole of the law.""We are not for the poor and sad," Aiwass allegedly told Crowley. "Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire are of us. . . . We have nothing to do with the outcast and the unfit. . . . Let them die in their misery. . . . [S] tamp down the wretched and the weak. . . . Pity not the fallen!. . . I console not, I hate the consoled and the consoler. . . . I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong."11

Crowley was thus the true father of today's concupiscent and narcissistic New Age religion preaching sexual libertinage and total self-gratification, while rejecting empathy with the weak; significantly this lack of compassion is today the mark of the Millennial Generation, as research of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking has shown in an unsettling way, accord- ing to Joel Stein. "Not only do Millennials lack the kind of em-pathy that allows them to feel concerned for others, but they have trouble even intellectually understanding others' point of view,"12 Stein wrote.Timothy Leary called himself Crowley's successor. He was not the only cult leader adopting Crowley's command, "Do as Thou Wilt. This is the whole of the law." L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, did the same.I am still arguing tongue-in-cheek, but at this point it be- comes difficult not to resort to Teutonic earnestness when pondering the Supreme Court's decision to champion the con cupiscent, narcissistic, New Age Church of Me over the proscription of para physin behavior by natural law, to wit Plato, or revealed law as outlined by the apostle Paul (Rom 1:26--27).This is of course not an exclusively American phenomenon but burgeoning in other Western cultures as well. In Germa- ny, traditionally a fertile breeding ground of spiritual weird- ness, Thomas Klie, a professor of practical theology at Rostock University, has coined probably the most fitting term for the narcissist religion on both sides of the Atlantic. He calls it an "empty-vessel faith."

Studying esotericism among young Germans, Klie found that while they might affirm a "creative principle" larger than the individual himself, this does not mean much: "While the Christian believes in a Creator God to whom he owes his life, esotericists cannot bear the thought of any aspect of their existence being beyond their control. . . . In esotericism the believer is his own creator."13Thus while in the minds of this generation the divine might be greater than the Me, the Me nevertheless trumps the divine. Klie defines this worldview as "container spirituality" in the sense that spirituality mere- ly provides an empty vessel ready to be filled by the believer himself according to his whim. It is hard to think of a more accurate definition of the narcissism epidemic in the West, a plague against which a backlash seems to be emerging on both sides of the Atlantic.

My successor as director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Capistrano Beach, California, Prof. Jeffrey Mallinson of Concordia University Irvine, reports that today's student generation is haunted by "a sense of abandonment." The same applies to their contemporaries in Europe. The hun- dreds of thousands of young Frenchmen demonstrating in the summer of 2013 against their country's legalization of homosexual "marriages" angrily charged their parents' generation, the European equivalent of the U.S. Baby Boomers, "You have left us without any values."

Matching this, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk told the editors of Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland, "We are living in a state of permanent improvisation."14 He said this in a video interview appropriately titled Zerbricht unsere Gesellschaft? (Is our society falling apart?). To put my personal spin to this: A Me-centered society devoid of a sense of empathy, living in a state of permanent improvisation, not passing on values, and abandoning its young has only one place to go: Tohuwabohu, the chaos that preceded creation. Hence one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's most evocative observa- tions in his prison letters seems as timely today as it was under the Hitler regime in Germany seventy years ago: "One may ask whether there have ever before in human history been people with so little ground under their feet."15 At a time when mil- lions of Muslim migrants are flooding Europe one must be forgiven for wondering if the once-Christian Occident's narcis- sistic lack of ground under its feet might not render it defense- less against a religion more robust and even more lethal than the wobbly faith of the Church of Me.

Which brings me back to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in favor of concupiscence and against the natural and the revealed law of Plato and Paul, respectively: If Americans believe that they will be spared the perils threatening their European cousins just because they attend church more often, they are kidding themselves, especially as that church trashes natural and revealed law by performing same-sex weddings and trivializes abortion clinics as "women's health centers," as did the pastor of one of my previous congregations.

As this point, I find it no longer possible to present myself as an eccentric writing tongue-in-cheek prose about our bizarre aeon, for what we have here is indeed the bona fide establishment of a church: the Church of Narcissus, the Church of Me, the Church of Satan, the Church of Concupiscence, the Empty-Vessel Church, the Church of a dark "God" who knows no compassion and will not save, but guide us instead to our doom.

Footnotes

1. http://www.churchofsatan.com/nine-satanic-statements.php
2. Paul McCain, ed., Concordia, The Lutheran Confessions, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006); 32.
3. Ibid, 79.
4. http://www.churchofsatan.com/index.php
5. Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic(New York: Free Press, 2009)
6. http://www.numberofabortions.com/
7. Uwe Siemon-Netto, "Vocation vs. Narcissus," in Where Christ Is Present, ed. John Warwick Montgomery and Gene Edward Veith (Corona: NRP Books, 2015), 149--64. See this article for further reading on the topic.
8. "Zeichen der Endzeit im Westen," http://www.idea.de/thema-des-tages/artikel/zeichen-der-endzeit-im-westen-839.html, accessed 25 July 2013
9. Joel Stein, "The Me, Me, Me, Generation," Time, 20 May 2013,28--36.
10. Ibid.
11. Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (Cape Neddick: SamuelWeiser, 1976), 2:17--21.
12. Stein, "The Me, Me, Me, Generation."
13. Evelyn Finger, "Die Renaissance der Unvernunft: Sehnsucht nach dem Selbst," Zeit Online, 6 June 2013.14. Peter Sloterdijk, "Zerbricht unsere Gesellschaft? Standpunkte," Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 5 May 2013. 15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 3.