In Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era satirical novel The Master and Margarita (written, with an early draft destroyed by its author, during Josef Stalin’s rule but not published fully until 1967), the devil arrives in Moscow as a well-dressed human with a coterie of freakish imps—among them a giant black cat who walks upright and drinks vodka—to wreak havoc on an atheist society. When I encountered the book nearly twenty years ago, I was in my first semester of learning Russian and was preparing to study in St. Peters- burg for the summer. The idea of the devil appearing in this way was oddly fascinating to me, and I applied for and received a grant for a project that, in retrospect, seems ill-advised: I walked up to random Russians in St. Petersburg and Moscow and, in my rudimentary Russian, asked them how they thought the devil looked and acted.
The responses were varied—He’s half-man, half-beast; He’s got a beautiful voice; He’s got no voice because people speak for him—but not one person said they didn’t believe in such a being. When I told this to Randall Sullivan, an investigative journalist and the author of 2024’s The Devil’s Best Trick, a history of belief in and portrayals of Satan, he wasn’t surprised, pointing out that one of the most consistently popular genres in Hollywood is horror movies with satanic themes. “What terrifies people most seems to be the idea of supernatural evil,” he said. “It wouldn’t terrify them if they had absolutely no belief in it. In a weird way, I think all these horror films are connecting people to some level of spirituality. Because if any part of you believes in this supernatural evil, then you’re believing in God.”
Sullivan’s career as a magazine writer and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone has led him through some dark, mainly secular corners of American culture. He’s written about the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., the “cursed” treasure hunters of Nova Scotia’s Oak Island, the last years of Michael Jackson’s life, and the infamous “Billionaire Boys Club” of Los Angeles. But religion wasn’t a cornerstone of his upbringing, and his work didn’t center around matters of faith until he was posted in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war there in the early 1990s. He had been investigating people’s visions of the Virgin Mary in different parts of the world—and the Catholic Church’s response to them—when he had an experience on what is known as the Mountain of the Cross, in the town of Medjugorje, that led him to convert to Catholicism.
As the war drew to a close, Sullivan also witnessed and was told about exorcisms, and during a stop in Rome on the way back to the United States, he was confronted by a presence that he believed was the embodiment of evil. As he sat in Piazza Navona, he was approached by a well-dressed man who was shouting in an unknown language; no one else on the piazza appeared to notice him, but he was staring directly at Sullivan, and said, “I’ll catch you later.” Sullivan believes the encounter was somehow the result of his conversion in Medjugorje—that the man was some type of demon.
As a new convert, he returned home with a heart full of these experiences and a head full of questions surrounding faith. The Devil’s Best Trick is the result of a decades-long examination of those questions. As part of the research, Sullivan traveled to Catemaco, a town in Mexico famous for its practice of brujeria (witchcraft).
I met Sullivan twice over a weekend in the small Oregon beach town of Gearhart, and we talked at his wife’s small psychotherapy office. In an interesting role reversal, I sat on the couch reserved for her patients, while he sat in her chair. It was mid-November, gray and rainy, and I was at the tail end of a dark few months, with multiple deaths among family and friends. At times in our conversations about faith and God I was searching for answers beyond the purposes of this interview. While I wrestled with my agnosticism, he shared intensely personal anecdotes. After our last conversation, I drove to the end of the road and walked a path to the beach that took me through windswept dunes. As I reached the shore, the clouds parted and the sun appeared. I snapped a photo and texted it to Sullivan with a note: Maybe not a coincidence. His response: You know what I think.
[Not all conversations are as linear and succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.]
Randall Sullivan
© Delores Sullivan
Cohen: Do you believe the devil is a singular being?
Sullivan: I do. I think it’s a single entity, a spirit. I’m not talking about a red-skinned hominid with horns and hooves. I’m talking about a spirit of evil that is a universal absolute.
Cohen: Intellectually, was it hard to wrap your brain around this at first?
Sullivan: There was a certain amount of separation between the part of me that believed and the critical mind, almost like they were operating on parallel but separate tracks. I guess there’s a kind of schizophrenia in that, but I needed to have both to feel like myself. There was a part of me that was very skeptical and another part of me that knew without being able to explain how. One attempt to reconcile the two was to do a deep study of the history of the devil and where the idea of the devil came from. I had some interesting conversations about the Muslim devil and how evil is understood in Eastern religions, Buddhism in particular, but mostly I focused on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the monotheistic tradition preceding that. The devil and monotheism came along simultaneously. Zoroaster probably was the first to suggest the existence of the devil.
Cohen: Do you believe this spirit is responsible for the atrocities that humans commit?
Sullivan: No, the devil doesn’t make anybody do anything.
Cohen: Then what’s its role?
Sullivan: Saint Gregory the Great, more than a millennium ago, said the devil makes suggestions and offers encouragement. That makes sense to me. I do believe in possession, but, as my friend Michelle told me when we were about to walk into a Black Mass in the Mexican jungle, evil can only get into you if you let it. I believe it works through influence. The devil whispers in our ears. I’m not saying anybody hears a voice, but the idea to do something wrong comes into a person’s mind, and then they make a choice. That idea may offer some sort of pleasure or relief or gratification. I think the devil encourages evil, enjoys evil, cultivates evil.
Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?
Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.
Cohen: Do you find that faith helps you understand the presence of evil?
Sullivan: I think it’s been easier for me to face it, because I feel like I have some protection. I can risk looking at it head-on because I know there’s something else with me. I have company. I felt that way at the Black Mass and around the brujos in Mexico: that I wasn’t alone. God or his agents were there with me.
I like to say I was raised with the Jesse Ventura view of religion—that it’s a crutch for the feeble and the weak-minded. That was my parents’ position on the matter. I went to church a couple of times when I was young, just out of curiosity, but I can’t say I was compelled to go. So I didn’t have any religious orientation. There must have been some unconscious part of me that wanted something more. Then, in Bosnia, I had the experience that God, for some reason, gave me his full attention for a short time. It initially terrified me, but ultimately it broke through my skepticism. My whole attitude about Christianity and religion and faith changed.
I think God allows evil, and it’s hard to explain what I mean by that. I don’t think evil comes from God, or that God causes evil, although that was the belief even in early Judaism. But it has to be allowed because free will has to be absolute, or else it’s not free.
Cohen: Can you describe that experience?
Sullivan: I was staying in Medjugorje, which was called the Peace Center, a site of Catholic devotion. The UN and the EU kept their headquarters there because it was safe. The center had formed around this group of young people who claimed they were having visions of the Virgin Mary. They were mostly peasants, except for one, Mirjana, a university-educated, quite sophisticated woman from Sarajevo. I ended up staying in her home.
We were talking outside one day about the place and what it meant to the country and to its people. At one point, when we were talking about these apparitions of the Virgin Mary, she looked sort of startled and said, “You don’t believe. You’re not a believer.” She was very upset, almost like I had deceived her; she had assumed that whoever sent me to stay with her did so because I was a Catholic. She said, “You must go to the Mountain of the Cross right now and find out whether you believe or not.” We had this argument standing outside on a brutally hot day—it was like a hundred degrees out. Finally I said, “Fuck it, OK, fine,” and I left without knowing where I was going. There were two main roads in the village, and I walked down one of them in the searing heat, wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts and hiking boots. I realized I was walking toward Križevac, which they call the Mountain of the Cross—the stations of the cross are laid out on it. So I started walking up the mountain, and I was not very far up when this knot of black clouds formed right over my head. I mean, this was the most localized thunderstorm you could possibly imagine, and it was unbelievably intense: the thunder was deafening, and there were lightning strikes all around. I had this overwhelming sense that there is a God, and he was really pissed at me for my insolent attitude. I expected to be struck dead any moment, but I decided to keep going. By then a torrential rain was falling, so I was soaked, and I started hearing singing in French coming from close by.
I moved toward it, and there was a group of nuns kneeling and praying at the fourth station. I was in such a state of terror and confusion that I just knelt with them and started praying. I didn’t even know their prayers; I was just saying my own private prayers: I’m really sorry if I offended you. At this moment I believe you’re real. So I followed these nuns as they moved up the mountain. They’d stop at each station of the cross to pray, and I’d stop with them, kneeling in the mud on my bare knees. Something shifted in me as we moved up, and by the time we got to the top, I felt like I belonged with them. So I knelt in front of the cross at the final station, really trying to pray, and a young woman—I assumed she must have been with the nuns, but she wasn’t wearing a nun’s habit—placed a cloth over my shoulders to sort of protect me from the rain, and then I closed my eyes and went back to praying. The sun came out, and I could feel the weather warming and drying. When I finally opened my eyes, there was nobody there.
It seemed hard to believe that they could have gone without my noticing. I don’t know why, but I felt this need to find them. So I ran down the mountain, and when I got to the bottom, I asked the workers at a concession stand if they’d seen a group of nuns, and they said, “No, you’ve been the only person on the mountain all day.” And I thought, Is it possible they slipped by? So I climbed the entire mountain again, looking for someplace where they could have gone off to the side. But there was none. By then it was back to 100 degrees, and my clothes were dry, and I was actually in bliss, but scared—sort of a strange combination of terror and rapture. As I went back down the mountain, I wondered, Did I hallucinate this? What just happened? When I got to the village, everyone was talking about the thunderstorm and how incredible it was. I told someone that I’d been on the mountain during it, and they were like, “Oh my God, this means something.” I also still had the cloth when I got to the bottom of the mountain, so there was some physical evidence that this had really happened.
Eventually I accepted that something miraculous had taken place. For some reason, I’d been given this break for scoffing at the idea of faith. The last thing that had happened on the mountain before I’d opened my eyes was I’d realized that the terror of God I felt was totally misplaced; that there was never any anger or threat, and I shared a laugh with God or Jesus or somebody. That was when I opened my eyes and realized I was alone.
After that, I started going to Mass every day, and the Franciscans—everybody in the village—took a special interest in me. They arranged for me to receive the sacraments and become a Catholic.
Cohen: And you feel you have a relationship with God?
Sullivan: I do. Sometimes—a lot of the time—I feel like I’m not holding up my end. But I always feel it’s there. At the same time there’s this rational mind that feels obligated to question and even to doubt. You have to live with the doubt. It’s part of faith. I am still a practicing Catholic but far less rigorous than a lot of people are about it. I pray every day, but I don’t go to church regularly, and I’m willing to criticize the Catholic Church. My daughter, who was a more devout Catholic than me when she was young, has now fallen away from religion because of her justifiable scorn for so many things that the Catholic Church has done. And I’ve had to come to terms with that reality: Many priests have abused their office. Many Catholics don’t embody Christian values. But the underlying faith is real, and I still believe in it.
Cohen: So how did converting to Catholicism affect your relationship with the idea of evil?
Sullivan: In my work at the time I was being exposed to evil in a sustained way. I had never been in a war zone before. I’d never seen that kind of focused violence and terror. I was interviewing people who would tell me unbelievably horrible stories. I had the sense that the whole country had been infected by evil. A man might tell me how the Serbs murdered his father, raped his mother, made him watch, and then cut off his hand. And all over something that had supposedly happened two hundred years earlier, like “Your great-grandfather stole my great-grandfather’s land.” This was happening all over the country. Criminal gangs were running half the war.
The woman I was staying with in Medjugorje— Mirjana—in our very first conversation, before she learned that I wasn’t a believer, said, “You know, the devil exists.” We hadn’t been talking about it at all, so I was taken aback. And she said, “I can tell you don’t think so, but the devil exists.” She started telling me about her own experiences, and I was still sort of keeping that at arm’s length, thinking, Oh, this woman thinks she talks to the Virgin Mary every day. But then I got really close to Slavko, a priest who had a PhD in psychology; he told me about an exorcism he had just participated in. The priests had tested the person being exorcised by coming in and out of the room with a vessel used to hold the Host—a monstrance, it’s called. Every time they would come into the room with the consecrated Host, the woman with the demon inside her would go into screams and spasms. When they’d come in with a Host that hadn’t been consecrated, there’d be no reaction. He said, “You tell me. What could possibly explain that?”
And then there was my last night in Medjugorje, which was the night of the annual youth festival, a big event for young Catholics from all over Europe. This was right at the climax of the war. The Srebrenica massacre had just happened. [In July 1995 more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb army, the first legally recognized genocide in Europe since the end of World War II.—Ed.] All of the young men in Medjugorje were being called up for the final push to end the war. But the town decided to go ahead with the festival, even though the EU had warned people not to come, saying it was way too dangerous. Thousands of people came anyway, especially from Eastern Europe. The final night of the festival was just the most ecstatic, intense thing I’ve ever experienced. I was caught up in this sense of the forces of light overcoming the forces of darkness. But as it was happening, I started hearing strange sounds, like barks and yelps, and then people in the crowd shouting, “Fuck you, Jesus!” and things like that. My friend Slavko, whom I’d always thought of as this somewhat secular priest, came through the crowd swinging a monstrance like it was a weapon. Some people would have this terrible reaction to it. They would start screaming or barking or saying the most obscenely blasphemous thing you can imagine. So I was taking all this in and feeling a little bit out of my body when I started hearing the sound to my left of somebody coughing, but it was not like a cough I’d ever heard before. It was a really deep, really dry cough, like somebody trying to bring up a lung. I went to see what was going on, and there was a young woman on the ground, and all these people were gathered around her and praying an exorcism prayer. You wouldn’t believe that a young girl could have produced such a deep, guttural sound. She was foaming from her mouth, and the foam just kept coming, like it was endless. And she started screaming all these angry words in languages I didn’t recognize. And then as the festival came to a climax, she just went into this position that, honestly, a world-class gymnast could not have held. She was on her heels and the crown of her head, and she let out this sound, and also a smell that was like you stepped into a graveyard with fifty open graves. And then it was over. Somehow I got back to my hotel, but I don’t remember how, and I woke up the next morning sleeping on my balcony, freezing and shivering because I had nothing on.
By the time I returned to the US, after also experiencing what had happened in the piazza in Rome, I had an absolute belief in everything that had happened. I was so deep into what I’d experienced there that I just could not reengage with American culture, which was pretty difficult for me as a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
Cohen: Do you believe the things that happen to you, or things that happen in general, are God’s will?
Sullivan: I don’t think God wills someone to murder or rape a child. Does God will cancer? I think God allows evil, and it’s hard to explain what I mean by that. I don’t think evil comes from God, or that God causes evil, although that was the belief even in early Judaism. But it has to be allowed because free will has to be absolute, or else it’s not free. In Mexico I was almost eaten by a crocodile. Afterward I was meditating on natural evil and thinking about Jeffrey Burton Russell, the great scholar of evil, who said anything that causes pain to a sentient being is evil. Would the crocodile be evil if it had eaten me? I would hate to be eaten by a crocodile [laughs], but I don’t know that I’d call the animal evil. It does exist in a world that has evil in it though. God created a world that somehow includes things like cancer and crocodiles.
I think Thomas Aquinas wrote the best explanation of this, which is that it wouldn’t have been possible for God to create a world without imperfection, without dissonance, without evil, because then he would have been duplicating himself. Instead he created a world of sentient beings who can decide for themselves what they will or won’t do. That includes the most terrible, evil thing you could imagine, because it’s a choice someone could make.
When working on the book about the devil, I wrestled intensely with the story of serial killer Westley Allan Dodd. He was one of the two most terrifying murderers I’ve ever been around—I saw him in court during his trial—and I’ve been around quite a few murderers. Near the end of his life he claimed he’d found Jesus. The idea that he could somehow be saved—my mind just could not accept that. But on some level it made sense that the choice is always there. As Aquinas said, the only thing that exists besides God is free moral choice.
When I’m confronted by something that seems true but that my mind just cannot accept, I have to give that over to God.
Cohen: Which is assuming that we all live in the same moral universe.
Sullivan: Well, we all live in the same universe. You can say morality is subjective or relative, but there’s a general agreement on what’s moral and what’s not. You’re not living by the Book of Leviticus, are you? Or the Muslim dietary laws? They’re all different in their own standards of morality. How much of those details define morality, I’m not sure. But almost everyone recognizes good and evil. Now, there are people who embrace evil. You can say they don’t know what good is, but if you actually talk to one of these monstrous murderers—to the extent that any of them are willing to talk—they will tell you they see the distinction and know they can choose the other way.
Cohen: There’s a case in North Carolina now of a woman who allegedly killed her adopted children. In the house where she lived, there were locks at the top of the doors that the children couldn’t reach. A relative of the woman said he helped her dismember one of the bodies and put it in a garbage can. Reading about this, I immediately thought, What happened to this person to allow her to make those choices? Free will becomes more difficult to accept when a person is that broken.
Sullivan: I’m sure it was a process. She wasn’t that person in the womb, or at two years old. It happened following a series of events and, ultimately, choices. Was she doing it because it gave her pleasure to murder children, or just because they were in her way? I was once asked to define some of the characteristics of evil that are consistent across cultures, and one of them is a delight in or indifference to human suffering. I’ve seen over and over how some people delight in human suffering, and it starts out as a kind of indifference. Initially they don’t really care, and in not caring, they start to look for connection or stimulation, and that becomes actually enjoying suffering. Maybe it relieves their own suffering.
I don’t understand the details of how someone gets to be that person. This woman made a series of choices. Was she possessed by a demon? Maybe. I don’t know. Was Westley Allan Dodd possessed by a demon? He never claimed that. Mark David Chapman says he was when he killed John Lennon. Maybe that’s just an excuse, or maybe it’s true, but either way, he still made the choice. It’s assumed possessions can happen gradually but that some level of choice by the individual is involved.
Cohen: Does your faith lead you to believe that someone who makes such choices can be forgiven or absolved?
Sullivan: My faith says they can. My mind says in some cases they can’t. So that’s the struggle. I was talking to the prison chaplain who converted Westley Allan Dodd and went through all of his confessions with him, right up to the point that he was hanged. The chaplain was telling me how Dodd was totally transformed and saved—how he could testify powerfully to his belief in God. But at the same time, Dodd was saying that he needed to be killed, because he was too dangerous. If released, he would do the same thing. The idea of doing these terrible things to a child was still associated with some kind of pleasure in his consciousness, even though he claimed to have been saved.
I told this chaplain I thought there were some things you just can’t come back from. And his response was, “Where do you draw that line? You want to create categories of sin, but sin is sin. You want to be forgiven for your sins. So how can you say what sins can be forgiven and who should be forgiven?” All I can say is that I’m not the arbiter. I can’t make my mind embrace the idea that Westley Allan Dodd was saved. But I can accept it as something beyond my understanding. And that’s what you come to again and again in matters of faith. Who can fathom this creation? It’s too much, it’s too complicated. When I’m confronted by something that seems true but that my mind just cannot accept, I have to give that over to God. It’s beyond my capacity. So I accept my limitations. I’ll never know. But the fact that I don’t have an answer doesn’t mean that I don’t have faith.
Cohen: Do you read the Bible?
Sullivan: Yeah, although I’m sporadic about it. You could say, I read it in fits. [Laughs.] Maybe fugues would be a better word. I know the Gospels way better than I do the Old Testament.
I don’t take everything in the Bible literally, especially in the Old Testament. I think a lot of the stories are true, but how much is metaphor? I’m fine with believing that creation was a billion-year-long process and not the work of seven days.
Cohen: In writing about the history of the devil, you explored a lot of literary movements, like the Romantics and the Decadents. To me, this should include the authors of the Bible. Do you find any of these narratives more legitimate or accurate than others? I say this as a person with limited faith, because they all seem like ways to explain the world around us when we don’t have answers.
Sullivan: I think the authors of the Gospels were trying to describe what they saw and experienced, or in some cases what they’d heard. Some of them were one or two places removed from actually being there. In the Old Testament people were passing down stories of events that had happened a long time before. That doesn’t mean they’re not true, but they may contain a certain element of myth. And some books of the Bible were written by prophets describing their revelations. No matter what a beautiful revelation someone is receiving, it’s still passing through the imperfect medium of a human being.
I think all of us who aren’t writing scripture have mixed motives. Self-expression may be the underlying force, but self-aggrandizement, the desire to become famous, all of those venal aspects of being human are part of it. Modern literature is often, not always, associated with a wish to put aside the weight of the past and fashion something that stands on its own, in its own time and place.
Cohen: Returning to the idea of the devil: Do you believe this spirit can take physical form and appear to people?
Sullivan: I do think that can happen. I don’t think the other people on the Piazza Navona in Rome that day saw the guy or heard him. He was creating a spectacle. And nobody was even turning their head. I was so perplexed that nobody was noticing the scene this guy was making. And then he approached me and spoke to me. Point being that maybe I was the only one seeing him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.
It was an ominous encounter, and I felt as if what he, or it, didn’t say, but I was hearing in some way, was “Yeah, you’re really caught up in God right now, but it won’t last, and I’ll get you in the end.”
Cohen: Since that encounter in Rome, have you been in that presence again?
Sullivan: Not like that. The only time I felt something akin to it was going into the Devil’s Cave at the top of White Monkey Mountain outside Catemaco in Mexico. I felt this dark, oppressive spirit around me and on me. But I haven’t had another encounter with a being who manifested physically. Honestly, I don’t know how to define it. I’ve told myself he was just a sketchy offender from a rich family, but that doesn’t explain why no one else seemed to notice him. I just know I had an overwhelming sense that the man wasn’t human in that moment. It could have been a demon. It could have been a possessed person. I’m not capable of defining what that was. I just had the experience, and it affected me powerfully.
Cohen: You’ve talked of not being able to wrap your head around the idea of hell. Do you believe in heaven?
Sullivan: I find it a lot easier to believe in heaven than I do to believe in hell. [Laughs.] But I can’t conceive it. Any idea that I can come up with sounds like something that would be really nice for a while, but for eternity? I can’t conceive of eternity.
I did have this hour, long after I was in Medjugorje, when I was at the airport in San Francisco, and I started thinking about God, and how all this looks to God, and how we all look to God. And all of a sudden I saw it, or felt it. This state came over me that I didn’t induce from inside. It was the most beautiful hour of my entire life. I felt suffused with a tremendous sense of compassion for every person I saw. It was like love, but it was not like anything else I’ve ever experienced before or since. In fact, one of the things I pray for when I pray is to have that experience again.
While it was happening, I wanted everything to stay like that forever. I didn’t have any sense of myself at all. I was able to look at every person and see their flaws, and the things that were even creepy about some of them, or their anxieties or whatever. But I saw it through eyes filled with compassion. It seemed like God was telling me, This is how it looks to me.
That experience is my idea of heaven: this sense that it’s all compassion. It was a state I could have existed in forever. But as soon as I thought about not wanting it to end, I knew it was going to end. That’s the nature of the human mind.
Cohen: Since that experience, do you have more faith in people?
Sullivan: I’m not sure. I mean, it is a kind of a touchstone. When I feel disgusted with people or humanity or myself, I can remember how I felt then. But I can’t replicate that feeling. I can’t come back to it on my own, except in fleeting moments, usually in prayer or meditation. Certainly, between then and now, I have become more compassionate in my view of other people. I don’t know how much of that is age and experience, and my relationship with my wife has really taught me a lot about compassion. But that particular hour I got might have been the linchpin of the whole thing. The fact that I got that for an hour gave me faith in myself. Like I can be saved. I yearn for it to come back, but it hasn’t.
Cohen: We’ve published a number of interviews in The Sun in which the interviewer has asked the interviewee if they believe the moral arc of the universe bends toward good. Do you believe that?
Sullivan: Yes.
I believe that people are more good than bad. I’ve seen plenty of evil, pettiness, meanness, nastiness, jealousy, but I tend to think of those as petty sins, forgivable and transitory. Ultimately, underneath that, people are drawn to good and wish for good
Cohen: Did you believe that before you discovered your faith?
Sullivan: [Long pause.] I’m not sure I can answer that. I wasn’t a cynic. I was somewhat cynical, but I wouldn’t have been able to answer the question as clearly as I did just now. I would have wanted to believe that the answer was yes, but I wouldn’t have felt I could say yes with quite the same certainty.
Cohen: Even after being in a war zone and seeing all the terrible things you’ve seen?
Sullivan: I believe that people are more good than bad. I’ve seen plenty of evil, pettiness, meanness, nastiness, jealousy, but I tend to think of those as petty sins, forgivable and transitory. Ultimately, underneath that, people are drawn to good and wish for good. If there’s an accident, the natural instinct of most people is to try to help. Now, there are certainly people who aren’t that way. Some might enjoy the suffering or the injury, might even enjoy causing it, but I still think they’re a distinct minority. The vast majority of people have good intentions.
[We ended our first conversation there. On the second day Sullivan walked in without saying hello, sat down, and started talking.]
The question about whether the moral arc of the universe inclines toward goodness: I said yes, and you asked me why, and I didn’t give a good answer. I was thinking about it last night, and I realized it’s Alexei Navalny [the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist who died in a prison in the Far North of Russia in 2024—Ed.]. I believe that so long as even one person has the courage and the moral strength to do what he did, good holds the upper hand. I’ve never been asked to make a sacrifice of the magnitude of the one he made, and if I were, I doubt I’d have the courage or the conscience to do it. But I can honor his sacrifice with the belief that it has not just accelerated the fall of the Putin regime but contributed to overcoming darkness in general. That’s all the evidence I need that the moral arc of the universe is inclining toward good and that good will be the ultimate outcome. I have to believe his sacrifice was worth it.
The New York Times and The New Yorker have both endeavored to make Navalny into some kind of a secular saint. They don’t seem to want to mention the fact that he was a Christian. At his sentencing in February of 2021, he announced that he’d become a Christian. He knew that would make him an object of ridicule for a lot of his colleagues in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, since they were mainly atheists, and he had been a militant atheist. But he found that converting made it much easier for him to do the things he needed to do. He spoke of the Bible and said he didn’t have to think about it like he used to, because all he had to do was follow the instructions in that book. Even though he didn’t like being in prison, he felt good about the fact that he was there, because he knew that he’d done what the Bible told him to do.
Cohen: I’ve recently been reading Deliver Me from Nowhere, about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, and I’ve been listening to that album a lot, while also experiencing a lot of death. In the last month my grandmother died, my cat died, a friend’s mother died, and, just last week, a friend died. And as desolate and dark as that album is, it ends with the song “Reason to Believe,” which has been on in my rental car for the past day. So I’ve been driving around thinking: No matter what happens, how do people find a reason to believe in something?
You mentioned yesterday that you’re not a cynic. I feel like I have a pretty deep cynicism, and it prevents me from embracing belief in a higher power. That cynic considers faith to be a balm, just a way to get through the seemingly random difficult things that happen to us in life. My cat dying was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to stomach in a long time, because I had to watch her die. She lost half her body weight in a very short time. We buried her in our backyard, and I had to dig that grave. I was thinking about her this morning and carrying that sadness around, and I got out of the car in front of a jewelry store on a commercial street in Astoria. In the window was a black cat figurine on top of a Ouija board. My cat was a black cat. The skeptic in me says, Well, it’s just a random thing. But the part of me that does have some sense of spirituality, if you can call it that, says, No, there’s something there. I don’t know if that’s a reason to believe.
Sullivan: First, the fact that something is a balm doesn’t mean it’s not true. In fact, if anything, it’s evidence that it is true. If that thought soothes you, then it’s because it’s true. That is my belief. The ontological belief for the existence of God is that, because we can conceive there’s a God, then there is a God. As far as the cat goes, I will just say that there’s only two ways of looking at existence: either everything’s a coincidence or nothing is. I’m on the “nothing is” side of that argument.
Not everything that’s not a coincidence is equally significant though. [Laughs.] Some things mean a lot more than others.
Cohen: Do you believe that if people are inherently good, that when we enter the world, we come with a surplus of goodness?
Sullivan: Are we inherently good when we’re born? We’re innocent. I think of my own children’s births, and they seemed perfectly innocent and perfectly good, even though their first response to life was to squall. [Laughs.] But something in them really quickly absorbs the fact—true for most babies, thankfully—that they are loved. They’re cared for, and that’s kind of a continuation of what they were experiencing in the womb. You’re taken care of. You can just be. Loving parents can convince you of that.
Cohen: It’s hard!
Sullivan: [Laughs.] I know. I had twins when I was in my forties. I was taking care of twins all by myself, which I did quite a bit of, since I ended up with full custody of them by the time I was well into my fifties. So I had to raise them as teenagers by myself. It isn’t quite what Navalny faced [laughs], but I will say my Christian faith helped me a lot with that. The belief that this was the one completely good and right thing that I could do. Whatever my shortcomings were as a person, I was going to do it as well as I was capable of.
Cohen: Back to the crocodile in Mexico and natural evil. I’m curious as to your perspective about what our relationship is to natural evil. As humans, we tend to consider ourselves not part of the natural world.
Sullivan: Well, we are and we aren’t. I believe we are spiritual beings inhabiting human bodies. In general, natural evil is something to be avoided. As I was walking toward White Monkey Mountain, this Mexican woman was telling me what all the dangers were. There were slugs that could paralyze you, and there were jaguars in the trees. I got to the side of the laguna, and it was so beautiful. I had worked up a sweat, so I bent over to scoop some water, and she called out, “There are crocodiles there.” And suddenly this rock—what I thought was a rock—started to move.
I can’t think of the crocodile as evil. I see it as just a crocodile being what a crocodile is. But if it killed someone I loved, I would consider it evil. So it’s this totally subjective interpretation of its being evil or not.
Cohen: Going back to Springsteen’s Nebraska. The first song was inspired by the movie Badlands, which itself is based on the Charles Starkweather case. [Over a two-month period from 1957 to 1958, Starkweather, nineteen, killed eleven people, most while accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. He was executed in 1959.—Ed.] There’s a line in the song where the character is asked why he did what he did, and he says, “There’s just a meanness in this world.” People said a lot of the same things about him that you’ve said about Westley Allan Dodd—that there was nothing obvious that would have caused him to do this. And why did this young girl go along with it? I suppose that reading your book about the devil, and then reading Deliver Me from Nowhere while all this death was happening in my life, made me think a lot about faith. Because for me, I don’t know. I’ve just never bought it.
Sullivan: You’ve never bought the whole God idea?
Cohen: Not growing up with a specific religion as a guideline, I suppose, nothing has cracked me open.
Sullivan: Are you wanting to be cracked open?
Cohen: I think sometimes.
Sullivan: Well, if the door hasn’t opened for you . . . I mean, if what happened on Križevac hadn’t happened to me, I don’t think I would have become a Catholic or a Christian. For some reason I got hit over the head with it.
Cohen: Did you want to be?
Sullivan: I think there was a longing inside me, but I just didn’t really believe. But I wanted that revelation of faith. The only times I’d really experienced it were on LSD or psilocybin. I don’t think I really acknowledged a spiritual dimension in life until the first time I took LSD as a teenager.
Cohen: You felt that was a spiritual experience?
Sullivan: It was. I did have a sense of a spiritual reality, but this Christian stuff: I just thought, That’s not me. I wasn’t raised in it. I didn’t have any background in it. But there may have been some unconscious yearning. And when I walked on the mountain that day, I had this “show me” attitude. I was kind of smart-ass cynical, as opposed to really cynical. It wasn’t as if I was looking for something exactly. I just felt, OK, I’ve got to climb this mountain. And mainly I was afraid that there would be nothing. I’ll never know why what happened, happened, but of all the explanations that you could give, I felt absolutely like it was not a coincidence. I was on the mountain, standing under this unbelievable thunder-and-lightning storm, and I could look out over the entire valley, the village— everything was still in bright sunlight. It was still 100 degrees out there, and I was in this drenching rain with lightning bolts falling all around me. Monstrous thunder. And I was the only person on the mountain. Those nuns were there, but then they weren’t.
I felt God, but I felt God through Jesus. It was a big Jesus moment for me, and the capper was having this great laugh with Jesus, laughing uproariously and feeling like he was laughing with me, at the absurdity of my fear: that it had taken something like this to get through to me. Some people just have to be hit over the head. Doesn’t mean that won’t happen to you at some point. Maybe the door has already opened, and you didn’t see it, or you didn’t go through it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t open again. Which isn’t to say I think you should walk around looking for the door to open. Because we have absolutely zero control over that.
