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I watched the leaked LDS Church tapes until I got bored, maybe 10 minutes tops before the videos took on all the charm of a high council sacrament meeting.

This was not what the initial hype led me to believe. These were videos of super-secret meetings, events to which few outsiders are ever granted access. Leaking them had to be a huge deal.

Nope. Where I had expected to glimpse something scandalous or even outright salacious, I saw only church leaders talking. No goat sacrifices, altars, stacks of human skulls, or strange incantations. Just a meeting.

But for the lack of coffee mugs, they could have been a group of businessmen taking a break at Denny's.

There was one video that did give me pause, though. It was a 2009 clip of former Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., telling church leaders, "If the devil wins the war over the family, he's won."

Wait a #%@*! minute. Won what? Are you telling me there's a possibility that the devil might win? Really? I thought the entire point of church was to be on the side of the guaranteed winner. How many talks and scriptures have there been about Satan being an inevitable loser?

I didn't hear/see a single LDS Church leader challenge Smith's statement that Beelzebub stood a chance of coming out on top in the salvation game. Isn't Jesus supposed to win?

Mormons aren't the only ones who believe this is a foregone conclusion. Christians in general believe that the Lord will return one day, gather up all the righteous, personally beat the crap out of Satan, and leave backsliders, unbelievers, and even people who guessed wrong (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.) to wallow in our eternal misery.

Note: Yes, I meant "our." I figured out by the time I was 11 that I was going to hell. Since then, my job has been to mitigate the extent of the punishment.

But now there's a possibility — regardless of how slight — that the devil could win the entire war? What a rip.

It really doesn't matter what particular take you have on Christianity. Satan is supposed to come out on the short end of things. He might peevishly grab a bunch of souls on his way down, but he was definitely not going to win.

The generally accepted view of Satan is that he got mad at God about something and pitched an eternal snit over it. He's just an immature brat who's decided to punch holes in the wall and slap some people around before the cops show up and kick his ass.

This view reduces Satan to an eternal Justin Bieber. I don't think so. I'm betting that Satan, who once communed with God on a personal level, is at least smart enough to have a better plan than just a terminal tantrum.

A person/entity/spirit that smart obviously thinks he can go "all in" and walk away with everything.

If the devil "wins," a lot of people are going to be screaming, "What about grace? What about my good works? Hey, I had a contract. Great, all that church for nothing!"

It's not a pretty picture. So I'm thinking a lot of you should try harder to make sure that doesn't happen. The last thing any of you want is being stuck forever in a horrible place where I'm already mid-level management.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.