As culture wars continue to brew in schools across the United States, one unconventional group is pushing for more representation in the classroom: Satanists. This has particularly caused controversy in states like Tennessee, where an elementary school formed a program for children called the “After School Satan Club.”
This program was created by an organization called the Satanic Temple, a relatively new religious movement that purports to teach “compassion and empathy toward all creatures.” However, the introduction of these clubs has unsurprisingly made parents upset, while supporters of the Satanic Temple say they are working to improve the lives of children.
Do these clubs actually worship Satan?
Not according to them. The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club, despite their name, do not worship Satan and do not “believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural,” said the temple’s website. Rather, temple members consider the concept of Satan to be a “‘mythological framework’ that encourages people to question authority and follow ‘the best available evidence,'” Lucien Greaves, the co-founder of the Satanic Temple, said to The New York Times.
The after-school clubs seem to have a similar mission to the temple itself, which is to “encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice and undertake noble pursuits,” said the temple’s website. The temple, which is recognized as a religion by the IRS, has often waged campaigns against Christian nationalism and far-right ideologies using Satanic imagery like the goat-headed Baphomet. They make efforts to promote a variety of rights, and the temple has “publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools … exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, [and] organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations,” their website said.
How is the temple expanding in schools?
The temple’s after-school clubs are “usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club,” The Guardian said. The temple “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus,” said a statement obtained by The Guardian.
Recent headlines began brewing amid a battle between the temple and its efforts to reintroduce a before-school branch of its After School Satan Club in an elementary district in Memphis, Tennessee. The club reiterated that it would only teach Satan as a “literary figure” and that it “does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology” but “supports children to think for themselves,” the temple said on X. The club would “offer science projects, community service projects, puzzles and games, nature activities, arts and crafts, and snacks” for children, said the Commercial Appeal.
The expansion of the Satanist movement “definitely started with a kind of humorous or satirical element to it, but this is a movement with hundreds of people that’s been going for 10 years now — they’re quite serious about it,” Joseph Laycock, a religious studies professor at Texas State University, said to NBC News. The “real fear of Christian nationalism is driving people into the arms of groups like The Satanic Temple.”
What has the response been?
Several conservative-run states have sought to ban the Satanic Temple from representation in schools. This includes the aforementioned Tennessee, as well as Florida and Texas, which are both states where the Satanic temple has attempted to appoint school chaplains. However, despite a wide range of “talk about them” in many states, “elementary school Satan clubs have been active in only four states: California, Ohio, Connecticut and Pennsylvania,” the New Republic said at the end of 2023.
A number of these club attempts have resulted in court challenges, such as when school administrators in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, rescinded approval for a Satanist after-school club following parental backlash. However, the temple argued in a lawsuit that a “Satan club has just as much right to use public school facilities as do Christian clubs,” said the New Republic, and the “school district eventually settled the case, agreeing to pay the organization $200,000 in legal fees and open up its facilities to a Satan club after all.”