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The Satanic Temple says it’s not a religion but also that it is a religion — and therefore its “chaplains” should be allowed to “spiritually” counsel schoolchildren in Florida.
“Ron DeSantis Just Invited the Wrath of the Satanic Temple,” thunders a recent headline. At issue is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signing of a bill to permit certain schools in the Sunshine State to bring chaplains on board in order to make spiritual support available to students.
The legislation is designed to provide chaplains from established religions to any student who believes they need spiritual counseling to help them deal with school and life issues. The program is voluntary.
Speaking of apparent assertions that the legislation would necessitate the presence of Satanist “chaplains” in Florida’s schools, DeSantis stated: “Some have said that if you do a school chaplain program, that, somehow, you’re going to have Satanists running around in all our schools. We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion. That is not qualified to be able to participate in this. So, we’re going to be using common sense when it comes to this. You don’t have to worry about it.”
The Satanic Temple, which claims to fight for “for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property,” took umbrage at DeSantis’s stance.
The co-founder of the Satanic Temple insisted that “Despite DeSantis’s contempt for religious liberty, the Constitution guarantees our equal treatment under the law, and DeSantis is not at liberty to amend the Constitution by fiat, at whim. He just invited Satanic chaplains into public schools, whether he likes it or not.”
The Satanic Temple and its supporters apparently believe that allowing Christian chaplains in schools but not their own officials would be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.
Let us put aside for a moment the utter hypocrisy of these Satanists in suddenly avowing a deep love of religious liberty, considering their previous attempts to harass and bully Christian bakers like Jack Phillips into giving up deeply held religious convictions.
Even disregarding this unfortunate inconsistency, the Satanic Temple, by its own admission, is not a religious group — so it should not be allowed to present chaplains under Florida’s new law any more than Dunkin Donuts.
Shortly after calling itself “the primary religious Satanic organization in the world” in its About Us page, the group boasts of its “high-profile public campaigns designed to preserve and advance secularism [my emphasis] and individual liberties”— in the very next sentence.
Lucifer’s fan club also denies the existence of the very entity to which the institution is purportedly dedicated, stating that “we [do not] believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural,” that “Satanists should . . . exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things,” and that “our religion is non-theistic and non-supernaturalist.”
Following the group’s logic — that religion does not have to be theistic or based in the supernatural and must apparently only have followers who “hold to their values…deeply” — the fans of, say, the New York Yankees or any other sports team could create their own religion.
Yet the institution still wears religion like a cloak of skin, with its FAQ page listing some of the rituals this Satanic group engages in, including a “Black Mass,” or a “a celebration of blasphemy, which can be an expression of personal liberty and freedom,” and an “Unbaptism,” in which “participants renounce superstitions that may have been imposed upon them without their consent as a child.”
Seen in this light, and considering the “temple’s” self-professed quest to infest any public space in which real religion is allowed, it becomes clear that the attempt to insert its “chaplains” into schools is a massive trolling campaign meant to undermine a commonsense law.
Satanists can cry from the rooftops all they want that their “temple” is a religion, but much like the Father of Lies himself, they are speaking deceptively out of both sides of their mouths and contradict themselves with their own words.
Scripture teaches that “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment” (Proverbs 12:19).
The Satanists would do well to consider that and repent of their deception.
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