Iowa City Council Erupts After Satanic Prayer Invocation at Meeting

The Ottumwa City Council meeting on Tuesday morning began like most others—with an invocation. But this one ended with words that would fracture the room: "Hail Satan."

Matt Dalbey, a former council member and member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa, stood to open the meeting with a prayer invoking the "dark father" and asking attendees to "embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat from the tree of knowledge." He concluded with the satanic salute. After the council recited the Pledge of Allegiance and took roll, the room's equilibrium broke. Rick Bick, a pastor at New Life Center, interrupted the proceedings to demand immediate action. He called what Dalbey had said a "curse" placed on the city and insisted it needed to be reversed before the meeting continued. "It needs to be done now," Bick said, his voice cutting through the formal proceedings. "When he said 'Hail Satan'... we need to just stop and reverse it."

Council member Cara Galloway attempted to move the meeting forward, suggesting Bick save his comments for the public discussion period. But Bick would not yield. Mayor Benjamin Foote intervened by requesting thirty seconds of silence for prayer or reflection—a gesture that both acknowledged the disruption and attempted to contain it. Later, Foote told Fox News Digital that the invocation did not represent Ottumwa's values. "This is not a reflection of our community," he said. "The invocation read at the start of Tuesday's meeting does not represent the faith or the values of families who call this city home."

The real tension, however, lay not in Dalbey's prayer itself but in the policy that made it possible. In January, Ottumwa had adopted an invocation policy designed to respect religious diversity. The policy explicitly stated it did not endorse any faith or denomination but aimed "to acknowledge and express the City Council's respect for the diversity of both organized and unorganized religious denominations, as well as other faiths, belief systems, or the lack thereof." It was, in theory, neutral. In practice, it had opened a door that some now wanted closed.

Galloway, speaking after the meeting concluded, pointed out that she had warned about exactly this scenario. She had raised concerns about the invocation policy from the start, she said, and had even specifically mentioned the possibility of someone from the Church of Satan delivering a prayer. "I think I even specifically referenced that having someone from the Church of Satan or a prayer about Satan when we talked about that, that this could happen, and we would need to allow it," she explained. She worried that the policy created a "slippery slope"—one that would expose the city to financial liability and invite endless objections and counter-invocations. "We've opened ourselves up for others to object or respond to others' invocations," she said. "And we need to remember that we are up here to be neutral and allow viewpoints because we've opened up invocations."

Dalbey, in a private message to the Ottumwa Courier, defended the prayer as a standard invocation used by his temple that "has nothing to do with the belief in a satanic deity." Council member Bill Hoffman, a Christian, chose to leave the room during the prayer and returned for the Pledge of Allegiance. But he defended Dalbey's right to speak. "I'm a Christian man with Christian values. That doesn't mean I don't want to observe his First Amendment right. It just means that I want to use my rights not to observe that," Hoffman said. He expected the invocation policy itself would come under discussion in future meetings, and he made clear the council did not endorse the content of Dalbey's prayer.

What had begun as an attempt to honor religious pluralism had instead exposed the fragility of that ideal in practice. The city now faces a choice: defend the policy as written, knowing it will invite more provocative invocations, or modify it in ways that might satisfy the majority but risk accusations of discrimination. The January policy was meant to settle the question of whose voice gets heard at the table. Tuesday's meeting suggested the question was far from settled.