Nothing like a few vampires to give a small-town reason to come alive with passion. Not that I needed the threat of vampires on my summer vacation to Forks, Wash. Olympic National Park doesn’t run short of awe-inspiring vistas, whether it be rainforest or sculpted coastline.
Perhaps to lend an aura of magic to our vacation experience, we watched the movie “Twilight” and then ventured into the Hall of Mosses the next morning. It was the allure of the Edward Cullen character that came to mind when I read of Satanic Temple founder Lucian Greaves. Greaves too is full of passion and channels it in public school settings (not unlike Cullen) in the form of the Satanic Temple after-school club.
It comes as no surprise that Greaves’s passion is infectious in the school districts that launch the club. Parents in Hellertown, Pa., were outraged. (We are left to wonder what in the hell led them to make that place their home). With rosaries and a smattering of upraised pitchforks at the school board meeting, the board was persuaded to ban the Satanic Temple after-school club. The ban was expected, and I imagine tasted sinfully delicious to the club which wasted no time filing suit asserting their First Amendment free speech rights.
Some background is in order. The Satanic Temple began in 2013 and their beliefs do not include the worship of Satan or any other supreme being — in contrast to the Church of Satan. In an interview, Lucien Greaves is quoted as saying Satan is a “heroic figure who fights tyrannical authority.” Their tenets include rationality, compassion and bodily autonomy. While their claim of 700,000 members may appear inflated, their last convention, SatanCon, in Boston, was a sellout at the Marriott Copley Square.
Even if most of the membership proceeds go to pay legal fees, in my view it’s money well spent. Their insistence on challenging the dominant religious ideas is to be applauded rather than vilified. These are student-led clubs in public school districts that participate in “limited open fora,” that is, districts that open their doors to noncurriculum-based clubs.
Long before political schisms entered public classrooms, most American school systems, under the well-meaning cry for education, have languished in dry, fear-based, industry-led, relatively passionless idea-vacuums. If students are after openness, free inquiry, encouragement to critically identify and pursue their own brand of truth, they must look elsewhere. In this sense, the Satanic Temple after-school club is oxygen to the intellect, if not to the soul.
If attitudes toward science were as oxygen-deprived as toward religion, we’d be without refrigeration and sewage treatment, not to mention the most underrated of technological achievements: elastic.
At the same time that I indulge my sympathies for the Satanic Temple, I tip my hat to the Christian Good News after-school clubs who, ironically, paved the way for the Satanic Temple in litigating bans against their own on-campus activities. In 2001, SCOTUS ruled the ban on the Good News club a violation of free speech. And recently a federal court ruled the same for the Satanic Temple — no doubt prompting a mixture of prayers and indignation from Hellertown.
In the opinion of a Missouri federal judge: “provocative speech is most in need of protections of the First Amendment … it was designed for this very purpose.”
Even Satanic Temple followers would find it hard to quibble with Christian writer C. S. Lewis’s insight that “devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.” Led by insights like that we ought to be encouraging students to join after-school clubs that open their minds to new ideas, new wings to fly. Otherwise, their wings are left to be clipped inside their classrooms and their homes.
After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: usrenewnews.org.
