Satanists Want to Kill America’s Christian Revival Before It Gets Off the Ground

The secular Left’s assault on religious freedom and the religion that birthed it is wrapped in sinister packaging

Imagine being a parent whose seventh-grader announces she wants to seek counseling from a Satanic Temple chaplain at school, assuring you that Satan—horns, hooves, and all—symbolizes a “non-theistic” religion supporting “free inquiry,” rationality and science. You look online and find articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times supporting her claims. Do you sign the permission slip? 

This is the situation which some Florida parents may find themselves in after July. The Satanic Temple (TST) is promising to use a new law allowing religious chaplains in schools to introduce Satanic Temple chaplains there. In Oklahoma, TST is also promising to secure kids school credit for taking its courses—this time using a new law requiring schools to excuse students for attending religious or moral instructional courses off school grounds. And though TST has not yet responded to Louisiana’s recent bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments or Oklahoma’s law requiring the teaching of the Bible in school classrooms, commentators have suggested that it might make a move to include Satanic principles in classrooms as well. Given TST’s provocative and litigious history, this seems likely. 

These controversies are the latest to be stirred by TST, whose formation and “Satan club” outgrowths in schools have been investigated by Restoration News in two earlier reports. Formed in 2012 in response to what its founders saw as the intrusion of religion into public life, TST is the tip of the sword of a broader push to stop state governments from involving themselves with religion—a historically anomalous separation created by Liberal Supreme Court rulings from the 1940s to the 1980s that conservatives are finally pushing back on.

It’s this conservative pushback that TST is determined to prevent. Especially this year, as conservatives press their case for religion in public life through state-level democratic processes, TST has become, in NBC’s words, a “powerful foe” of their efforts. Digging into TST’s recent moves reveals the justifications and strategies it uses to advance its agenda, as well as possible strategies to stop it.

(RELATED: How “Satan Clubs” Advance Militant Secularism’s War on Religious Freedom)

The Satanic Temple’s Real Purpose

For all its apparently exotic Satanic imagery, TST exists within what Restoration has shown is an extremely familiar network of nonprofit and journalistic allies, all of which promote Washington D.C.’s power at the expense of states, families, and faith in the name of “rational,” “secular” authority. In 2017, Vox went so far as to label TST a “leftist activist organization,” and concluded that “what is, perhaps, most surprising about [TST] is its normalcy.” TST’s main vehicle for securing its goals has been After School Satan, or Satan Clubs, formed to cleanse public schools of what it saw as a Christian intrusion: evangelical Good News Clubs, which a 2001 Supreme Court ruling allowed, along with other religions, to gather in classrooms after-school in the name of the First Amendment.

Today, where Good News Clubs exist, Satan Clubs follow, provoking parents with their far-out imagery and then proclaiming their “religious” faith in rationality and science as symbolized by Satan, the “ultimate questioner of authority.” This leads reluctant school administrators to inform parents that they are “duty bound to uphold . . . the Constitution” as read by the Court in 2001 and allow Satan Clubs into schools as a religion. TST’s ultimate goal seems to be to force the Good News Club to leave the school and to score a public shaming of their backers.

But recently, as Supreme Court rulings have allowed more leeway on bringing religious issues into public life, traditionally states’ constitutional brief, TST’s focus has moved beyond Satan Clubs. In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, TST created “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic” which, in TST’s signature style, mixed broad-brush mockery and Satanic imagery with a familiar progressive priority, “provid[ing] abortion medication via mail.” This year, as elected representatives in Florida and Oklahoma have allowed more mixing of religion in schools, continuing a return to the pre-1948 status quo, TST has not just stated its intent to participate as a religion but to sue if it does not get its way.

The Religious Fight in the Works

These actions have set up a more direct and, in some ways, a more honest battle over the real question that has always been at play in TST’s actions. Should a minority of activists in states, backed by judicial appointees in Washington, D.C., be allowed to use a particular read of the Constitution to force their way into public life, with the ultimate goal of chasing traditional religion out?

This is an issue that TST and its supporters would have Americans believe is constitutionally settled in their favor—but digging even slightly into the history shows how radical, unrepresentative, and recent their constitutional argument really is. Before the 1940s, when liberals on the Supreme Court began their rulings regarding religion, the First Amendment, the basis for those rulings, had been treated with few exceptions as applying to the national government not the states. In lieu of national dictates, government and religion regularly mixed at the state level. By “incorporating” the First and other Amendments in the Bill of Rights and then using them to hand down decrees to state governments including regarding religion, liberal justices made a sea change in the law and in peoples’ lives.

The people supporting these moves for the last eighty years have been cut from the same clothe: “Liberals” who identify with Christianity and Judaism but whose beliefs are essentially secular, politically liberal, and self-expressive. These institutionalists, whose loyalty is to the “rational” management theories popularized by post-Puritan Progressives and monopolists of a century ago, are joined by institutional hangers-on or outside drifters like the founders of TST, whose function is broad-brush provocation.

(RELATED: How “Satan Clubs” Weaponized the Constitution Against Christian Families)

The Legal Issues at Play

The first legal challenge mounted by these provocateurs will probably surface in Florida, since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has said that Satanism is not a religion, and the Satanic Temple has expressed its determination to come into schools anyway. Its grounds for doing so will be the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Assuming the case proceeds through the Courts, and considering the makeup of the Supreme Court, the DeSantis administration may have a chance of prevailing depending on the arguments it chooses to use.

The court’s six-justice conservative majority is divided between Chief Justice Roberts, whose main tactic when it comes to what he sees as divisive “social issues” seems to be to punt; three strict originalists—Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas; and two originalists, Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh, who are less strict in their approach. For originalists, what the Constitution was understood to say when it was written is what it means. This makes an originalist decision in this case clear: when the First Amendment provided for freedom of religion, religion was not understood to mean Satanism; and blasphemy was understood to be an exception to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.

The five originalist justices also, arguably, rely on traditionalism in their decisions: examining the customs, norms, and laws of Americans as they’ve developed organically over time. This criterion, too, makes for a relatively clear decision, since most Americans have never considered Satanism a religion and, until the 1940s, blasphemy was regularly an exception in laws protecting free speech.

Finally, a continuing split among the five justices is how precise to be when it comes to analyzing both original meanings and traditions. Should they require literal language and practice of the past to justify a law or should they set a looser standard? But even applying the general standard to the question of how Americans and their legislatures understood religion and free speech over the course of our history, it’s hard to see Satanism qualifying as either a religion or protected speech.

Still, a Supreme Court win may not happen because, as even conservatives point out, some justices may not have adopted originalism to the point where they would be willing to antagonize a vocal minority regarding an issue as seemingly minor as blasphemous speech. But even a 5–4 or 6–3 loss for conservatives would open the issue to the court, producing dissents which might eventually turn into majority opinions. Indeed, if anyone has specialized in turning dissents into majorities, it is Justice Thomas.

Even Bigger Stakes

In short, a Florida—or Oklahoma, or Louisiana—case against TST is potentially strong, and litigating it will have effects far beyond stopping a small group of disruptors from finding their way into schools by pretending to be a religion. It will help push the preeminence of what Gov. DeSantis calls “common sense”: the customs and traditions of Americans and the intentions of our Constitution, which was written to secure the primacy of public opinion in an extended republic.

Pushing this legal project to restore Christianity to the life of the states has broader significance for the country as well. From the Revolutionary period to today, believing Christians have been the fiercest and most consistent proponents of rule by the people against the arbitrary power of a few, because their faith lies in divine not human authority. It makes sense, then, that supporters of national institutions and their unquestioned power would fight against efforts to re-introduce Christianity into the public life of the republic. Fortunately, unlike sixty years ago, changes in American law mean they are less likely to succeed.

(WATCH: The Public School Exodus is Reviving Our Republic, One Family at a Time)

Matt Wolfson, an ex-leftist investigative journalist, tweets @Ex__Left and writes at Oppo-research.com.