Funny. If I were Satan, I'd pick a very powerful, influential nation, and then come as a priest or pastor or other powerful religious figure, whereupon I'd dedicate myself to pouring poison into peoples' heads in Jesus' name. I'd start by encouraging otherwise normal people to ignore their consciences, their common sense and their intellects, by convincing them that willful ignorance is a virtue, and by strongly encouraging them to treat anyone who seems smarter or better educated than they are with suspicion and hatred. Or indeed, anyone different from them.
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Then I'd convince them that science and medicine were based on lies and unprovable assumptions, encourage the spread of superstition and pseudoscience, and attempt to re-frame the debate so that it looked as if all "facts" were merely strongly-held opinions, that all opinions were completely equal and equally deserving of time in the public arena, and therefore pseudoscience was on an equal footing with actual scientific research. If possible, I'd use the law as a bludgeon to accomplish this even faster, using unethical lawyers and amoral snake-oil salesmen to do my work for me. I'd paint scientists and doctors as villains and patsies and paint their work as suspect based on purely ideological grounds, and drain away funding for vital scientific and medical research. While doing so, I'd try to starve the public school system of money and resources in hopes of breaking it, so that education complete with critical thinking skills could be completely hamstrung (this might not be particularly difficult, since no one likes to pay taxes and many people can be persuaded to jump at the chance to elect someone who promises to lower them by any means necessary, even if it means voting against one's long-term interests). Then I'd push networks of private schools that were accountable to no one except themselves or my cults as an alternative to the broken, collapsing mess, which would be run by my most loyal servants.
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I'd encourage my followers to adopt political positions entirely on anger, hatred, greed, the conviction that everyone who wasn't exactly like them was out to get them, and a frothing lust to see people punished for their misdeeds...real or imagined, it would make no difference, just so long as someone was punished.
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My people would back candidates who were picked on the basis of their loyalty to the movement, their ignorance and their insanity, and they would struggle to reverse the progress in civil rights dedicated men and women had made over the last century. As many legal protections would be removed from citizens as possible, in the name of efficiency and national security--and a lot of it would be based on racism and religions discrimination. Most of it would be, actually. I would sell my followers on near-constant government monitoring, even as I convinced them that the enemies of my faith were the ones who actually wanted it--in fact, my servants would LOUDLY denounce the opposition for this, even as they quietly rammed through ever-more draconian legislation dedicated to stripping citizens of even basic privacy and power. I would push hard to give regime-friendly media and communications the ability to monitor and report their own customers because as long as the feds weren't the ones doing it, the public had nothing to complain about--if they didn't want to consent to their communications being monitored, they could use another company or not communicate at all. This would help prevent those who didn't tow the party line and other would-be rabble-rousers from networking effectively, since I would do my best to privatize all means of communication. I would also relax regulations that kept telecommunications companies from gobbling each other up, because among many other things, that would cut down on peoples' ability to choose a company that WASN'T regime-friendly and didn't monitor. I would do the same thing with media and print, easing regulations against monopolies and allowing larger media outlets to consume smaller ones, and I would make certain that the resultant giant corporate media conglomerates would know exactly what side their bread was buttered on; this would ensure that most publicly-available information was disseminated by the fewest (and most loyal) mouthpieces possible, making it trivially easy to spin or stifle the news in ways that were useful to me and my servants and that made it much harder for citizens to educate themselves reliably. I'd see to it that my corporate organs dumbed-down and simplified all issues to the point of complete uselessness...but boy, they'd look great on a tee shirt or a bumper sticker, or being chanted by legions of enraged people--which is what you need when you need to motivate mobs into a frenzy.
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My chief servants would sell their devotees on heresies that suggested that God wanted them to get rich, that Jesus hated all taxes, social services, and ANY control exerted over corporations whatsoever--this would help starve the government of funds needed to carry out essential functions like infrastructure maintenance and welfare, lock up money in fewer and fewer hands so that more and more people could be forced into poverty and destitution and KEPT there permanently, and concentrate political and economic power into the hands of people with no public accountability at all, save to their chief stockholders. With government corrupted and stripped of its power to regulate the largest mega-corporations, smaller businesses would fail, unable to compete in the market, or would be gobbled up by larger predatory corporations that were increasingly loyal to my regime. I would use unethical, amoral lawyers and special lobbying groups to chip away at the legal barriers protecting government from being co-opted by the biggest moneyed interests, by declaring corporations to be people and that therefore the exchange of money was protected free speech. Government would eventually become a blunt instrument in the hands of corporate power, to be wielded as the most powerful companies saw fit. Eventually it would be impossible for common citizens to effect change at any level, and the average citizen would be stripped of all power and a voice forever. Wherever possible, I would limit the Federal government's ability to investigate or intervene in the legal affairs of states--but only when it came to stopping local abuses of power and citizenry by local and state authorities. Obviously, peaceful assembly for the purpose of giving citizens power over their own lives is the LAST thing we need, so labor unions would have to go. My corporate mouthpieces would paint unions as the villains at every turn, while championing the CEOs of the biggest and most powerful corporations--my REAL followers--as both embattled heroes fighting horrible oppression and the ultimate driving force behind the economy.
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And when the people hurt and disenfranchised by my followers' economic, political, legal and social policies were angry, terrified and miserable and looking around for people to blame for their pain, I would make certain they had plenty of scapegoats handy so that when the time finally came, all that fury and energy could be directed to useful ends.
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I'd convince them that "salvation" involved paying lip-service to Jesus, mindless obedience and nothing else, and that they could basically do necromancy--you know, casting out 'demons,' 'spiritual warfare,' controlling the weather, and all that rot--simply by calling on the name of Christ as if His name was some sort of cheap carnival magical charm. The New Jesus would be a blond-haired, blue-eyed American good ol' boy, draped in an American flag, with the founding fathers as his apostles--my churches would be centers of paranoid nationalism and martial, jingoistic fervor...and greed, greed, greed.
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My followers would chip away at the walls separating church and state until nothing existed to protect one from the other, and neither was shielded from private corporations with dangerous agendas. My loyal media mouthpieces would also play games with language, subtly redefining words and using the names and concepts used by the political opposition as a hateful slur until it was shameful or even dangerous to publicly admit to being opposed to us. This would serve to silence opposition, and would shift the Overton window farther and farther toward authoritarian fascism. And, even as my followers gained more and more power and fought desperately to suppress dissent, I would endlessly drum it into my followers' heads that they were a victimized minority, even though they live in a country where 80% of the population nominally belongs to their own religion, and struggling against horrific oppression worse than anyone had ever suffered before in history.
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My followers would idolize the military--I'd make sure they believed that Jesus was a fighting man, in love with violence and bloodshed, and that soldiers that shed blood in His name were truly blessed. One of the few valid functions of government under my system would be the military...and my followers would be encouraged to use it every chance they got, in the bloodiest possible ways they could. Military conquest would become the new black--after all, that's "what Jesus would want."
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Some of my followers would believe that Jesus was coming Any Day Now, that there was no need to plan for the future or take ANY positive action since Jesus would take care of everything when the time finally came, endlessly imagining signs in the heavens and on Earth that weren't even there. Others would be made to believe that the Lord wanted them to remake the Earth into a twisted dystopian nightmare by any means necessary. These broad factions would help to create between them a political climate of such confusion and insanity that it would force the adoption of national policies guaranteed to hurt the greatest number of people possible, expand the wealth, power and privilege of the wealthiest and most powerful private citizens at the expensive of literally everyone else, drive huge wedges between people and nations, and do the greatest damage to the greatest number possible.
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And always, always, my servants would foster the unholy union of callousness, gluttony and greed, and call it good. My religion would do its level best to fuse apocalyptic religion with the comedy stylings of Ayn Rand. Compassionless "conservatism" would gradually displace Goldwater-style ethical conservatism among my followers. Compassion for the victims of misfortune would be replaced instead with indifference, hostility and barely-concealed glee that a filthy sinner got what he deserved for being unlucky and/or stupid. In fact, one of the heresies I would spread is that wealth, power and material success were the surest signs of the Lord's approval, and that misfortune and calamity were reliable indications of His righteous and holy anger. My new Christianoid mega-cult would give people all the justification they would ever need for their greed, and would take great pains to paint anyone raising a voice in dissent as being motivated solely by envy of the faithful.
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But most of all, I'd encourage blind obedience in my flock, convince them that Jesus wanted them to mindlessly follow my cynical, jaded servants' every command, and make bigotry, self-righteous pride, hatred, anger, envy, greed, gluttony and the lust for personal advancement at any cost the core values of my religion, which would be dressed in the trappings of Christianity like pancake makeup and pearls on a cheap, streetwalking whore...and together, led by my powerful and faithful servants, my faithful followers would march arm and arm off the nearest cliff, pushing everyone else off ahead of them, chanting simple-minded slogans and singing hossannahs to their own righteousness all the while.
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That's what I would do, anyway. You know, if I were actually Satan.
