“Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lᴏʀᴅ” (Psalm 32:10). A culture that would embrace Ozzy Osbourne’s occultic idolatry desperately needs such “steadfast love” today. So know that, Darwin to the contrary, you are here on purpose for a purpose: God created you “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).

Ozzy Osbourne died yesterday at the age of seventy-six. 

He was especially famous (or infamous) for biting the head off a dead bat during a concert in Des Moines. This is unsurprising; the Associated Press calls him “the gloomy, demon-invoking lead singer” of his band (tellingly titled “Black Sabbath”) and the “drug-and-alcohol ravaged id” of heavy metal. His band’s eponymously-titled first album was released in 1970 and sold nearly five million albums; Black Sabbath sold more than seventy-five million albums total.

Osbourne was known as the “Prince of Darkness,” a term employed in John Milton’s Paradise Lost to refer to Satan as the embodiment of evil. To understand the cultural insight Osbourne’s career illustrates, ask yourself whether his music celebrating themes of horror, doom, paranoia, drug abuse, and the occult would have been popular (or even possible) twenty years earlier.

What Happens When We Kill God

Now let’s turn to our second news item: Monday was the one-hundredth anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial conclusion.

At issue was Tennessee’s law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The high school teacher being prosecuted, John T. Scopes, was found guilty and fined $100, although the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality while upholding the law against evolution as constitutional.

In many ways, the cultural conflict revealed by the trial has been exacerbated by the normalization of evolutionary theory that it produced for many.

From then until now, battles over abortion, sexual “liberation,” and LGBTQ ideology have been won resoundingly by their proponents. Even the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade did not lower the number of abortions in America.

This is tragically logical: If human life is the coincidental product of chaotic evolutionary forces, there are no external or objective authorities by which to value or protect it. Mothers are then free to abort their babies (“My body, my choice”); people are free to have sex with anyone who consents (“If it feels good, do it”); marriage is whatever we define it to be (“Love is love”).

Friedrich Nietzsche accused atheists of his day of having no idea of the significance of their atheism. As historian Carl Trueman notes, “Killing God, [Nietzsche] points out, requires that his assassins themselves rise to the challenge of being gods, of becoming those who create meaning and value.”

You don’t have to listen to the nihilism of a Black Sabbath song to know how this is working out for us.

“Did You Have a Good Time?”

I fear that American religion has been partly to blame for the moral trajectory of American society, especially in recent years.

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