In a month or so, the 2023-24 school year will come to an end for most American kids.
That does not mean, however, that Christian parents of children in public schools should let down their guard. After all, evil never sleeps.
Beginning in 2016, After School Satan Clubs, organized and promoted by the Satanic Temple, sprang up in elementary schools across the country.
Then, according to campaign director June Everett, the clubs’ momentum accelerated during the darkness-filled year 2020.
“That’s kind of when things started blowing up,” Everett told The Hill in May 2023.
Buoyed by legal victories, Everett looked forward to even more successes.
“I anticipate that every year moving forward is going to get busier and busier,” she added.
If the thought of elementary school children joining a club named for Satan instinctively horrifies you, of course it should.
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When it comes to manifestations of evil, however, the depth of horror often depends on the degree of deception involved.
And in this case, the Satanic Temple has cloaked its sinister designs in the most deceptive lies ever told.
The Satanic Temple and After School Satan Clubs
According to its website, the Satanic Temple bills itself as a bastion of “reason,” a “religious organization” devoted to “benevolence and empathy among all people,” opposed to “injustice” and engaged in “noble pursuits.”
In addition to empathy and reason, the organization also celebrates “advocacy.” Specifically, it has devoted nearly all of its home page to promoting abortion.
Thus, “reason” and “benevolence” apparently require child sacrifice.
The Satanic Temple has also described its fundamental tenets as “inspired by 18th Century enlightenment values.” This, of course, gives the group a deceptive air of intellectual gravitas.
Unsurprisingly, the After School Satan Club has also claimed Enlightenment lineage.
“After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us,” the group’s mission statement claimed.
The ensuing sentence, however, revealed the group’s fundamental purpose.
“We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors,” the mission statement concluded.
In other words, After School Satan Club members learn to disregard the very concept of sin.
According to the Christian Broadcast Network, in fact, Everett got involved in the After School Satan Club when an overzealous sponsor of a Christian-themed Good News Club left her first-grade son terrified by the idea of eternal damnation.
“He went on to tell me how he was going to burn in hell. Be taken away from everyone that he knew and loved, his mom and dad, Molly, his dog at the time, if we didn’t start attending church and accepting Jesus Christ into our hearts,” Everett said of her young son.
Ironically, the Good News Clubs and After School Satan Clubs claim equal access to public-school facilities after hours under the same 2001 Supreme Court decision, Good News Club v. Milford Central School.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion.
“When Milford denied the Good News Club access to the school’s limited public forum on the ground that the Club was religious in nature, it discriminated against the Club because of its religious viewpoint in violation of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment,” Thomas wrote.
With the help of the ACLU, the After School Satan Club has successfully branded itself a religious club, entitled to First Amendment protection.
For instance, according to The Hill, in May 2023 the Satanic Temple and the ACLU won a court victory over the Saucon Valley School District in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.
“In a victory for free speech and religious freedom, a federal court has ruled that the Saucon Valley School District must allow the After School Satan Club to meet in district facilities,” the ACLU said.
It got worse.
In November 2023, the ACLU announced a settlement in which the school district had to pay $200,000 in attorneys’ fees and other costs to the Satanic Temple’s attorneys.
Thus, the Satanic Temple has allies in a federal legal system infested by attorneys and judges who misunderstand the First Amendment.
The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Clubs have also received sympathetic coverage from fact-checkers and establishment media outlets.
And it is not hard to see why. After all, the organization has not concealed its anti-Christian animus.
“The After School Satan Club does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus,” the group’s website reads.
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By “other religious groups,” they meant Christians.
In 2016, in fact, the Satanic Temple announced that the after school clubs would appear at nine elementary schools across the country, all locations “where evangelical Christian after-school programs are already in place,” according to KTVB in Boise, Idaho.
And the group has never deviated from that anti-Christian approach.
“There is currently a Christian club on campus called AWAKE student ministry that posts their flyers around the schools and were advertising their club with ‘free donuts,’ which felt like a bribe to me,” the anonymous student-founder of an After School Satan Club on a high school campus in Kansas told the Olathe Reporter in 2023.
“Since many students don’t align with the beliefs of Christianity, I was inspired to start a student-led club for those students and myself,” the student added.
As one would expect, the anti-Christian After School Satan Club has targeted young children in states across the country.
One club sprang up at Jane Addams Elementary School in Moline, Illinois, in 2022.
According to NewsNation, After School Satan Club members held their first meeting at B.M. Williams Primary School in Chesapeake, Virginia, in February 2023.
In short, the club has used the Satanic Temple’s deceptive tenets, backed by the First Amendment, to attack Christianity at the elementary-school level.
The Stakes
In a contest of this nature, one measures the stakes in cosmic terms. After all, the contest involves the only two questions that matter to human beings: What is this universe, and why are we here?
Those questions allow for only two possible answers. Either an intelligent being with definite purposes created the universe and everything in it, or the material that comprises the universe has simply always existed, in which case it offers no divine meaning.
The Satanic Temple cheekily professes disbelief in the existence of the Biblical Satan. Instead, it regards embracing Satan as equivalent to “rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions.”
In other words, the Satanic Temple obviously denies the existence of God.
But that raises a thorny contradiction from which the temple, its club program and its defenders can never disentangle themselves.
If no God exists, then what could they possibly mean by “benevolence,” “empathy,” “injustice” or “noble pursuits”?
“Unlike our counterparts, who publicly measure their success in young children’s ‘professions of faith,’ the After School Satan Club program focuses on science, critical thinking, creative arts, and good works for the community,” the organization declared on its website.
But that makes no sense, either. How could a universe of uncreated matter contain anything “good”? What would “good” even mean in such a place? Good compared to what?
And what about “reason”? How did human beings come to discover such a concept in a universe governed by material processes?
The Satanic Temple’s paean to reason reflected its perceived debt to 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. Those pseudo-forebears did, in fact, venerate reason and largely detested revelation, though they did not go quite as far as the satanists.
Eighteenth-century deists such as Thomas Paine, for instance, tried to have it both ways. Awed by Creation, they depicted God as a detached clock-maker who formed the universe and then left it alone to function according to natural laws.
This comforting view, of course, took no account of sin or the need for redemption. It also elevated science and human reason at the expense of virtues such as humility. On these key points, the Satanic Temple has followed the deists.
And followed them to what end?
Well, Enlightenment ideas have sometimes produced noble outcomes, but only under the right circumstances.
In Christian America, the Enlightenment produced the American Revolution and its devotion to natural rights, among other things.
But in anti-Christian parts of Europe, Enlightenment devotees chose to worship their own capacity for reasoning. And that catastrophic choice helped turn the French Revolution into a bloodthirsty affair.
Paine, a virulent anti-Christian, paid for his devotion to that world-changing cataclysm when revolutionaries turned on him and imprisoned him. Still, he never did learn that worshiping reason meant worshiping something human, and that this always leads to the worship of self on which all tyrannies depend.
Something similar occurred in the 20th century. In the book “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” originally published in 1991, author Jung Chang described how she survived Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
At one point, Chang recalled an old friend of her parents named Tung. For five years, Tung had suffered imprisonment at the hands of Mao’s regime.
Upon his release, however, Tung continued to “study Mao’s articles every day, with a seriousness” that Chang “found more tragic than ridiculous.”
What do these examples have in common? Paine worshiped reason. Tung worshiped Mao. In both cases, the veneration of something human carried them to hell, though they never recognized it as such.
In short, that is the world the Satanic Temple would make, for the Satanic Temple is what happens when Enlightenment ideas are adopted by people who worship human beings, i.e. themselves.
Thus, believers must contend with the group on what one Christian in Texas called a “spiritual battleground,” according to KETK-TV.
Like all battles, this one involves deception.
“People assume that we’re there to insult Christians and we’re not,” temple co-founder Lucien Greaves said according to USA Today.
Judging by their behavior, of course, that statement amounts to one form of deception.
Another deception lies in their stated concern for the First Amendment — an impossibility in light of their beliefs.
After all, the American Declaration of Independence asserted the doctrine of natural rights as the foundation of a new republic.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Declaration famously proclaimed.
The First Amendment followed from that assertion.
Thus, how can the Satanic Temple claim First Amendment protection while simultaneously denying the doctrine of natural rights?
That does not mean, of course, that atheists or satanists should not enjoy equal rights under the Constitution. They have the freedom to speak, gather, worship, carry weapons and enjoy general immunity from government harassment.
It does mean, however, that the constitutional protection they claim depends on an understanding of rights and their divine origin that both groups ironically deny.
Furthermore, if American freedom depends solely on the doctrine of natural rights, and if the Satanic Temple’s anti-supernatural worldview rejects that doctrine, then why does the broader community have an obligation to treat as equal the very thing that actively works to undermine it?
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently labeled satanism “not a religion.”
Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams — among many others — would have agreed that the First Amendment does not exist to place satanism on par with actual faith.
Indeed, the contradictions inherent in their claims to religious status and First Amendment protection resemble their contradictions on cosmic questions of right — all of which bedevil the satanists at every turn.
For instance, from their perspective, why the lawsuits? After all, the legal system exists to promote fairness. But what is fairness apart from conformity to God’s law? Where did satanists get the idea that people should treat them a certain way?
In short, the Satanic Temple and their After School Satan Clubs have dedicated themselves to nothing more than demonic advocacy and deception. They celebrate child sacrifice while rejecting the very concept of sin, for acknowledging the latter would imply a moral law that originated with God. Meanwhile, they pretend to promote good while undermining its only possible basis.
Alas, Christian parents should know that the system, at present, does not stand with them.
