“That wasn’t God. It was the devil.”

If you are anything like me then you have heard this line. You’ve probably said it yourself, once, before you knew better. It sounds like a part of theology. You think it’s Divine but it’s actually a magic trick — and the person disappearing isn’t the abuser.

Instead it’s any trace of accountability.

What that line actually does to a survivor

When you tell someone “that wasn’t God, that was the devil,” you think you’re defending God. You think you are protecting people. You think you are acting in good faith.

I can remember a few years ago someone I used to attend church with was arrested. His charges were multiple counts of child exploitation. I knew this man’s parents, and my in-laws attended church with them. When his arrest became public, when it became known that he had even harmed kids within his own church community, the narrative of guilt comepletley shifted.

This man had done something so egregious that his church community couldn’t wrap their heads around it. So instead of pushing deeper, to get to the why, they took the easy way out and decided to blame the devil instead. Now that the narrative had shifted, this evil man wasn’t evil because he did something so terrible, but instead the devil was the reason why he chose to do those things. The man wasn’t at fault at all because the devil made him do it.

None of this was about the man who was arrested anymore. It was about the community around him. They knew what he had done to those kids. They knew, and instead of turning that anger toward him, they turned it toward the devil. And the kids he hurt had to sit in those same pews and watch it happen.

Now what is actually happening when this occurs is, you’re handing the survivor a question they will spend years trying not to ask out loud: if God was real and God was good and God was watching — why didn’t God stop it?

Most survivors don’t get to that question directly. It’s too dangerous. So it gets rerouted, and it usually lands in one of two places:

It must have been me. If God intervenes for good people, and God didn’t intervene for me, some broken math starts running in the background: I wasn’t worth protecting. I did something to deserve this. I didn’t pray hard enough, believe hard enough, resist hard enough. The self-blame isn’t a personality flaw. It’s the only place left for the logic to go once “God was there but chose not to act” has been made unspeakable.

Then comes the doubt

It must not have really happened — not the way I remember it. If naming what was done to you means indicting God by proximity, some part of the brain will quietly start editing the memory instead. Minimizing. Softening. “Maybe I’m exaggerating.” Your mind will tell you that you are weak. That you are too sinful to stand on your own. You aren’t broken. You just have a nervous system protecting a belief system you were taught you were never allowed to question.

Either way, the survivor absorbs the cost. The theology stays clean. That’s the trade this line is built to make.

What it does for everyone else

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud in the sermon or the small group: “that wasn’t God, it was bad people” isn’t really theology. It’s a control mechanism that’s been used for centuries.

If the harm gets filed under the devil, or spiritual warfare, then nobody in the room has to do anything. There’s no elder to confront. No pastor to remove. No policy to change. No pattern to investigate. You can grieve “spiritual warfare” forever
and never once have to sit across from the man who did it and make him answer for it. This is why institutions love this framework. It’s not because they’re theologically sophisticated about the problem of evil. It’s because diffusing, cosmic blame is
unaccountable blame. You cannot depose Satan. You cannot subpoena “brokenness.” You cannot put “the enemy” on an accountability plan. But you absolutely can do those things to a youth pastor, a deacon, a lead elder. This only works if the institution is willing to say his name instead of hiding behind a theological abstraction built for exactly this purpose.

Real repentance is a specific, costly thing

The word gets thrown around in these spaces like it means feeling bad or saying sorry in front of the church. It doesn’t.

Repentance — metanoia — means turning. Not turning inward toward your own guilt feelings. Turning away from the thinking and the behavior that caused the damage, and walking a different, verifiable direction.
It requires:

Naming precisely what was done, without softening language

Naming who did it — not “the enemy,” not “this broken world,” a person

Facing the actual cost to the actual person harmed

Structural change so it cannot happen again the same way

“That wasn’t God, it was the devil” skips every one of these steps. It performs the feeling of spiritual seriousness — gravity, cosmic language, a nod toward evil — while doing none of the actual work repentance requires. It’s absolution without confession. And it’s usually given to the institution, not by it.

What accountability actually requires

If you want to protect God’s name in the way you claim to, the move isn’t to deflect onto Satan. It’s the opposite: hold the actual human being who did the actual harm to actual account, in public, with real consequences. That’s not an attack on God. That’s the only thing that was ever going to prove God wasn’t complicit in the silence.

Either the people in that room were paying attention and did nothing, or the story you’re telling about who was watching was never true to begin with. “Not my circus” is not a defense. It’s a confession, dressed up as theology.