HOW “SATAN CLUBS” WEAPONIZED THE CONSTITUTION AGAINST CHRISTIAN FAMILIES

A little-known extremist group has wormed its way into schools across the country with one goal: Forcing genuine religious groups out. And they’re using satanic imagery to do it.

This report and its follow-up originally appeared in Restoration News and is reprinted here with its permission.

In 2023, Satan Clubs hit elementary, middle, and high schools like strangely shaped meteors, generating fear, controversy, and protests. But, like most exotic-sounding things, Satan Clubs are less unusual than their name implies. They’re also more political… and more dangerous.

Underneath what’s supposed to be a “playful” Satanist veneer, these groups employ lawsuits, provocations, harassment, and promises of “liberation” to push a deeply conformist project in the name of “rationality” and “science.” This means government defined by administrative specialists and secular dictates rather than religious traditions and democratic choice.

Digging into Satan Clubs’ allied networks of journalists and nonprofits shows them to be tips of the spear of a two-decade establishment push, motivated by anti-religious animus but also other forms of prejudice, against the public religious inclusiveness that’s been America’s norm for most of its history.

Satan Clubs Have Their Roots in Liberal, Secular Overreach

Satan Clubs’ specific target is a 2001 6–3 Supreme Court ruling, Good News Club v. Milford Central High School, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by originalists, conservatives, moderates, and Democrat appointee Stephen Breyer. This ruling, which held that a public school preventing the meeting of a Christian club restricted the club’s free speech, cut against the effects of Supreme Court rulings from the late 1940s to the late 1980s in which liberal justices had disallowed public schools from involving themselves in religious instruction classes. They’d also prohibited state governments from allowing even nondenominational prayers to be recited in schools; from authorizing a one-minute period of silence for voluntary meditation or prayer; and from sending qualified remedial teachers into parochial schools.

Thanks to these earlier rulings, states—traditionally responsible for public health and morals—were now supervised by the Establishment Clause of the Constitution in the First Amendment, which prohibits government from establishing a religion, favoring one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion. This was a major shift: Until this point, the Amendments that formed the Bill of Rights had almost never applied to the states, on the logic that the national government was the main threat to liberties. By selectively “incorporating” the Bill of Rights to apply to states, liberal courts were enabling a power grab by the national government—and ensuring that religious expression in state schools would wither and die.

The effects of this shift on religious expression were what the Good News Club ruling, delivered by a Supreme Court with a new conservative-to-moderate majority, began to push back on—not by “un-incorporating” the Bill of Rights from the states but by reading the Establishment Clause in a way that allowed for more religious expression in schools. The ruling, a modest carve-out for religion after four decades of diminishment, became the target for attacks that are cresting with Satan clubs. 

The Rise of Satan Clubs

The first extensive establishment media reporting on Satan Clubs occurred in 2016, when freelancer Katherine Stewart wrote a series of reports for the Washington Post about the clubs, which had been founded a few years before by the leaders of the Satanic Temple under the pseudonyms Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry. The Temple was known to eagerly embrace Satanist imagery, but the founders told Stewart that its real project was promoting “the view that scientific rationality provides the best measure of reality.” According to Greaves, as well as according to Temple descriptions, “‘Satan’ is just a ‘metaphorical construct’ intended to represent the rejection of all forms of tyranny over the human mind”—symbolizing a “non-theistic religion” that “seeks to separate religion from superstition.”

Satan Clubs were a prong of this project: Aiming to use the new latitude for religious expression permitted by the Supreme Court’s Good News ruling to combat the Christian clubs that the ruling had allowed into schools. Satan Clubs have spread fitfully since 2015, even as the Satanic Temple has made other provocative moves. But because of a series of legal victories which stemmed from reactions to their provocations and brought them attention and recruits, 2023 was an inflection point for Satan Clubs in schools.

In 2023, the club reported that branches existed in schools in California, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Further efforts are underway in Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Virginia. Controversy is erupting in Kansas. And protests have occurred in Chesapeake Virginia; Moline, Illinois.; Lebanon, Ohio; York County, Pennsylvania.; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Bakersfield, California.

Satan Clubs’ Tactics

The clubs’ function seems first to provoke parents with its name and imagery. Understandably concerned over having Satan worshippers in an elementary school, parents then respond with protests. When that happens, the clubs, having set up a straw man with their Satanist label to draw immediate outrage, one-up critics by “rationally” explaining their secular function. In one example, After School Satan Club director June Everett argued “We do not believe in demons” and presented Satan as “a rebel against tyranny and the ultimate questioner of authority.” Then, if schools respond to taxpayer concern by banning the clubs, the Clubs sue and are allowed into schools under the Supreme Court’s 2001 reading of the Establishment Clause.

Eventually, the club’s function is to push religious believers and administrators to admit they’re in a bind: Disband all religious clubs or let the satanists in. As one pastor put it, “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.” The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools called it “an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.” Or, as the New Republic supportively put it, “Angry About Your Kid’s After-School Satan Club? Blame Clarence Thomas.”

But there also has been at least one push by Satanists that goes beyond provocation. This occurred at Pioneer High School in San Jose, California. There, a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes sued after the district, according to their lawsuit, “began recognizing . . . the Satanic Temple Club,” which “soon began demonstrating outside of the FCA meetings, including yelling at FCA members as they entered their meetings and holding signs that read “‘hatred is not a religious belief.’” Not surprisingly, this story hasn’t made its way into the Washington Post or New York Times.