The Death of Satan: How American Have Lost the Sense of Evil

The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. Andrew Delbanco. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

The image of a demon on the cover of this book appears, appropriately, as an example of what he criticizes: depictions of Satan as a creature completely unfamiliar to us. Evil, Delbanco argues, looks like you and me-it exists within all of us-and our failure to understand this leads him to make disturbing pronouncements. He believes that if American society continues to define evil and sin as either a social disorder or "the fundamentalist demonizing of the other, we shall have no way of confronting the most challenging experiences of our private and public lives" (234). To lose the sense of evil would serve Satan's ultimate design for humanity: the incapacity to confront him within ourselves.

Delbanco traverses the intellectual terrain of literary figures, theologians; and philosophers from the Puritans to postmodernists to get...