The sympathetic devil trope has become such a mainstay of popular fiction as to be a Pop Cult zombie meme. Audiences – even pro writers – now take for granted that a demon could choose to do good or even repent and gain salvation. Few people see anything weird about that idea, which is featured prominently in the works of Nail Gaiman and Arthur C. Clarke, but attained full cultural penetration through anime and manga.

“So what?” many of you are asking right now. “It’s fantasy. Anything’s possible! Why can’t our demons be different?”

For one, let’s remember that a lot of the same folks who claim the fantasy genre gives carte blanche to make archetypal villains sympathetic get up in arms over heroic orcs.

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We not only know for a moral certainty that demons exist based on Scripture, their existence is a logical conclusion from the hierarchy of being. Here we have nonliving matter (rocks and stuff), living but non-sentient material beings (plants), living, sentient, but non-sapient material beings (animals), living, sentient, and sapient matter-spirit composite beings (men), and the Spirit of Life, Logos, and Being Himself (God).

Sharp readers noticed a major gap in that progression. Nature abhors a vacuum. And just as a missing atomic number on the periodic table is a sure indicator of an as-yet undiscovered element, a blank space in the spectrum of being isn’t empty. We just can’t see what’s there.

And what’s there is living, sapient, purely spiritual being. AKA angels. And as every second-grader before the Millennial generation used to know, demons are evil angels.

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