The unserious organization’s antics have nothing to do with exercising religious freedom and everything to do with trying to undermine it.
The unserious organization’s antics have nothing to do with exercising religious freedom and everything to do with trying to undermine it.
O h, brother: The Satanic Temple is at it again. Just in time to ruin the holidays, the swivel-eyed secularists who adopt as their mascot the Prince of Darkness while asserting that they “aren’t really Satanists” bamboozled officials in charge of Iowa’s capitol building into allowing them to erect a Satanic holiday display.
The display featured electric candles surrounding a figure draped in a blood-red cape, representing the pagan idol Baphomet. The monster held a pentangle and had a mirrored ram’s head. Accompanying the display was what the Satanic Temple says are its “seven fundamental tenets,” including its belief in “the freedom to offend.” Supposedly awaiting those to come and pay it homage, the figure was to stand for two weeks. Until it didn’t.
As state officials wrung their hands, claiming that the Constitution required them to approve the display, Mississippi office-seeker Michael Cassidy tore it down last Thursday. After being charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief, Cassidy posted on X the following Bible verse: “1 Peter 5:8 KJV Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Some conservatives are applauding Cassidy’s actions. Republican presidential hopeful and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has even offered support for Cassidy’s legal fund. But before we give Satan and his minions any more publicity, it’s worth considering: Did it have to come to this? I don’t think so.
A misunderstanding of religious freedom and the authority of the government to regulate the use of its property seems to have led folks in Iowa’s state capitol astray. And that’s understandable, because the secular Satanists are adept at exploiting the gray areas in interpretation of the First Amendment.
Officials at the relevant agency, the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, said the temple had applied for and met all the requirements for a display. It’s not really clear what those requirements are, but it seems that there is some sort of review process prior to approval. According to state representative Jon Dunwell, a Republican and Christian, “the Satanic Temple petitioned for their display in August and were approved with some modification. They wanted to use an actual goat head (I’m assuming a skull) and were prohibited from doing so.” The other “holiday” displays at the capitol include a nativity scene, a banner by the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers, and one by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
This “All Are Welcome” approach superficially appears consistent with the religious-freedom principles robustly protected by the Supreme Court in recent years. Lucien Greaves, the publicity-hungry co-founder of the Satanic Temple, has picked up on this. In an interview with CNN, Greaves insisted: “We don’t want to yield some kind of power to the government to begin picking and choosing between religious groups.” Oh, really?
In reality, Greaves and his Satanic Temple have been engaged in legal shenanigans for quite some time. They have demanded monuments to Satan in public spaces where there are also religious displays. Where local schools have allowed bible-study groups to host after-school clubs, they have invented something called an “After School Satan Club.” With the help of — you guessed it — the American Civil Liberties Union, the Temple recently won a lawsuit against a school district in Pennsylvania that denied the use of school grounds for the Satan Club. The district agreed to pay a whopping $200,000 in attorneys’ fees.
Originally founded to advance noble principles embodied in the First Amendment, the ACLU has since become a shill for progressive causes including, inevitably, gender ideology and “reproductive rights.” In this respect it shares an agenda with the Satanic Temple, which also argues for a religious-freedom right to abortion and has even gone so far as to set up a telehealth abortion clinic: the “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Abortion Clinic,” charmingly named to spite the author of the Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade.
In short, these are not organizations of integrity. And it’s my view that this issue has nothing to do with exercising religious freedom and everything to do with trying to undermine it.
We could entertain some ghastly hypothetical, imagining what protections the Satanic Temple would be afforded if it really were a sincere religious organization, devoted to worshiping some gruesome horned pagan god and with doctrines diametrically opposed to organized religions. And we could then wonder whether the authorities in Iowa might have to accommodate its demands if they could be sure that there was no likelihood of criminal behavior. (Nefarious groups in the past have used the veneer of a religious organization to enable drug and prostitution rings.)
But that is not the case here. Greaves conceived of the Satanic Temple as a “poison pill” for the church–state debate and is now also running an ideological cult with no supernatural beliefs, good or bad. And, last time I looked, the First Amendment did not extend specifically religious protection to such groups. What it does do, of course, is protect free speech. Here, the arguments become really contorted and legal precedent is hard to interpret.
For example, when Boston officials rejected an organization’s request to fly a Christian flag in front of city hall as part of Boston’s flag-raising program, the Supreme Court intervened. Citing long-standing First Amendment principles, a unanimous Court said the city had violated the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. “When a government does not speak for itself, it may not exclude speech based on ‘religious viewpoint’; doing so ‘constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination,” explained Justice Stephen Breyer for the Court. Does that ruling apply to the Satanic Temple’s grotesque display?
Consider another ruling from the Court that seems to point in another direction. The town of Pleasant Grove, Utah, allowed privately donated monuments, including one of the Ten Commandments, to be displayed on public property — but denied the demand by Summum (a quasi-religious organization whose founder claimed to have had a series of encounters in the ’70s with “highly intelligent beings” he referred to as “Summa Individuals” who “untiringly work the pathways of spiritual evolution”) to put up its own statue. Justice Alito, writing for a unanimous Court, explained that the city’s decisions were valid expressions of government speech and not an unconstitutional interference with the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Barring the city from doing so, Alito added, would put the government in the position of accepting monuments with conflicting messages that do not represent the values and ideals of the community, or removing all monuments from public space.
In short, this does not present a question about the guarantee of free speech in a designated public forum — something the state capitol decidedly is not. This is about the different though related constitutional protections afforded to religion. It strikes me as frankly preposterous that such protections would attach to the Satanic Temple — because it is a militantly secularist body.
If we choose to regard the Satanic Temple as bogus Satanists, as we may well do given their lack of belief in Satan, that doesn’t mean that these people aren’t literally doing the Devil’s work. Nor does it mean that we should shy away from this battle.