Pride and the Return of the Ancient gods: Baal, Ashtoreth, and Molech
🏳️🌈 Pride and the Unholy Trinity: Baal, Ashtoreth, and Molech Reborn
The modern Pride movement is not simply a political force or a cultural trend — it is a spiritual rebellion. Beneath the rainbow banners and corporate slogans lies something far older and far more sinister than most people realize: the reawakening of ancient paganism.
What we now celebrate as “Pride” is, in truth, the resurrection of the unholy trinity of Baal, Ashtoreth, and Molech — the very idols that drew ancient Israel into judgment and exile. These were not merely cultural figures; Scripture identifies them as demons[^1], and the rituals offered to them were nothing less than spiritual war against the living God.
This pagan revival is most clearly seen in the movements that deify nature (Baal), sacralize sexual perversion (Ashtoreth), and normalize child sacrifice (Molech) — all of which now converge under the banner of Pride.
🌩️ Baal: Worshiping Nature Instead of the Creator
Baal was the Canaanite storm god, a deity of weather, agriculture, and fertility. Baal worship was grounded in the manipulation and adoration of nature — treating the created order as divine, rather than submitting to the Creator.
Today, Baal worship lives on in radical environmentalism, pantheism, and the cult of self-determination. The modern mind exalts nature, instinct, and the self as sacred. Romans 1:25 describes this perfectly:
“[They] worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”
Baal worship was often accompanied by fertility rituals and sexual rites — not unlike the Pride parades and public demonstrations that intentionally conflate natural expression with divine authority[^2].
💋 Ashtoreth: The Demoness of Sexual Anarchy
Ashtoreth (also known as Astarte or Ishtar) was the goddess of love, war, and fertility — and her worship was notorious for ritual sexual perversion, gender confusion, and sacred prostitution. The temples of Ashtoreth were filled with cross-dressing priests, erotic dances, and orgiastic rites meant to blur the lines between man and woman, sacred and profane[^3].
Today, Ashtoreth’s spirit animates the sexual revolution and the Pride movement itself. The open embrace of transgender ideology, homosexual lust, drag performance, and public sexual exhibitionism are not new. These are not mere cultural shifts; they are liturgies of a demoness revived.
Even ancient hymns to Ishtar describe her as the one who “turns man into woman and woman into man.”[^4] The transgender movement is not modern — it is a recycled religious rite, celebrated again under the guise of identity and progress.
🔥 Molech: The Devourer of Children
Molech was worshiped through human sacrifice — especially the burning of infants. The people of Israel, in defiance of God’s law, “built the high places of Baal… to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech” (Jer. 32:35).
This practice was so abominable that God declared it never entered His mind (Jer. 7:31). And yet, we see it revived in the modern abortion industry, which has become a holy sacrament of the sexual revolution. The destruction of children is now called “health care.” It is not a side effect of Pride ideology — it is part of its core theology.
Molech devours not only the unborn but the minds and innocence of children through sexual grooming, pornographic education, and deliberate confusion of identity[^5].
👃 Ezekiel 8: A Branch to the Nose of God
In Ezekiel 8, the prophet is shown a vision of the escalating abominations committed in the Temple. The vision culminates in verse 17:
“They have filled the land with violence, and have returned to provoke Me to anger: and, lo, they put the branch to their nose.” (Ezek. 8:17, KJV)
The phrase is cryptic. The Hebrew word for “branch” (ha zomer) is a hapax legomenon — it appears nowhere else in Scripture. Many scholars believe it refers to a cultic object, possibly phallic in nature, given its placement in a passage about idolatry and its sudden, offensive finality[^6].
Some Jewish and Christian interpreters have treated it as a ritual of obscene defiance, symbolically waving a fertility emblem in mockery of God. The ancient Septuagint translation omits the phrase entirely, likely due to its obscenity or untranslatability[^7].
Whether literal or symbolic, the gesture clearly represents a deliberate insult to the holiness of God — an unclean act in the very presence of the Almighty.
So too in our day, the rituals of Pride are not morally neutral. They are liturgical acts of rebellion — vivid, public gestures that desecrate God’s created order and provoke His holy wrath.
😈 The Return of the Gods
These ancient idols — Baal, Ashtoreth, and Molech — have returned, not as statues of stone, but as ideologies, movements, and moral codes. They demand allegiance. They consume innocence. And they will not be satisfied until worship of the true God is silenced.
Pride is not about rights. It is not about love. It is the cultic resurrection of the same demons God condemned in Israel’s history. The public parades, erotic displays, and calls for children’s “liberation” are not political statements — they are religious ceremonies in rebellion against the Most High.
✝️ Christ or Chaos
The only answer to this unholy trinity is the true and living God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not merely a personal improvement plan; it is a cosmic confrontation with the powers and principalities of this age (Eph. 6:12).
We are not called to tolerate these false gods — we are called to tear down their altars (Deut. 12:3), expose their lies (Eph. 5:11), and proclaim that there is one King, one Lord, and one Name under heaven by which we must be saved.
“How long halt ye between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow Him.” – 1 Kings 18:21
The war is not coming — it is already here.
📚 Footnotes
Deuteronomy 32:17; 1 Corinthians 10:20 – “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God…”
Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God (Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 84–92.
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses (Free Press, 1992), pp. 40–43.
Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 144.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), esp. Chapter 10.
Marvin Pope, “Ezekiel 8:17 and the Obscure Branch,” in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 87, No. 1 (1968), pp. 50–52.
Septuagint translation of Ezekiel 8:17 omits the “branch to the nose” phrase entirely, suggesting textual or theological discomfort among ancient Jewish translators.