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As the daughter of a two-term president and a first lady who went on to serve as a U.S. senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate, for better or worse Chelsea Clinton has spent the majority of her life in the public eye. Among the aspects of such extreme public visibility that count as worse, we presume, is being the target of defamatory rumors and conspiracy theories. For Chelsea Clinton (as well as for her parents), this includes accusations of being a devil worshiper. Rumors of Chelsea Clinton's supposed involvement in Satanism go back at least a decade and typically revolve around photographs of her that contain what is described as Satanic symbolism. This example, found on the alt news blog Rense.com, was posted in January 2008: The same photograph of Chelsea Clinton wearing a necklace adorned with a so-called upside-down or inverted cross, together with similar images, would reappear hundreds of times over the next ten years on websites and in social media posts labeling her a Satanist. This tweet from March 2016 elaborated on the theme: This one from April 2017 included additional photographs of Clinton wearing the upside-down cross: And this 2018 tweet offered the closest (but also the blurriest) views of her necklace available on social media: These posts raise two critical questions. First, do the photographs authentically depict Clinton wearing an upside-down or inverted cross, or were they altered, misrepresented as, or mistaken for doing so? Second, is an inverted cross truly symbolic of Satan worship or involvement in a Satanic organization? To the first point, we put the question of whether or not Chelsea Clinton (who is a Methodist) wears an upside-down cross to her spokesperson, Bari Lurie, in January 2018. Lurie responded as follows: The Greek cross (in contrast to the more familiar Latin cross) has four equilateral arms and has been in use since the fourth century, if not earlier. Clinton herself confirmed that she owns and wears one by tweeting a higher-quality image of the same pendant in response to questions about it in 2018: Although it's not unreasonable to suppose that the images that seem to show Clinton wearing an inverted cross were purposely manipulated (as both she and her spokesperson suggested), the distortion may also simply be an effect of how low-resolution and blurry the images are. The cross is affixed to the necklace by a rounded clasp that may appear to be part of the cross itself at low resolutions. (For example, compare how the cross looks in the image above in which Clinton is wearing a light-green sweater to how it looks in higher-resolution images taken on the same occasion in 2006.) Last, here is a higher-quality image of Clinton wearing her Greek cross pendant at a social function in 2005: Embed from Getty Images As to whether or not it's legitimate to conclude that someone wearing an upside-down cross is ipso facto demonstrating fealty to Satan or membership in a Satanic church, we quote Hector Molina of the Catholic Answers website: That having been said, some people who call themselves Satanists do wear upside-down crosses and/or crucifixes. According to the Church of Satan's website, they do not regard the inverted cross as an official symbol, but members may wear such items if they find personal meaning in the gesture: Another high-profile organization claiming an affiliation with Satan, the Satanic Temple (best known for erecting a statue of a deity called Baphomet outside the Arkansas State Capitol building in August 2018), gives a more prominent place to the upside-down cross. This description of preparations for a Satanic ritual is from one of the temple's websites: And there was this report in the 12 July 2018 edition of the Indianapolis Star: It should be noted, however, that neither the Church of Satan nor the Satanic Temple subscribes to a literal belief in Satan. Both groups, on the contrary, completely reject theism and the attendant worship of supernatural beings (including Satan), grounding their philosophies in rational self-interest and individualism instead.
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