Schools receive request for after-school 'Satan Club'

 

After-school religious clubs appear to be the next venture of a national group that sought to install a statue of Satan outside two state capitols to protest Christian monuments on public grounds.

The Satanic Temple contacted nine public school districts across the country this week seeking to start after-school Satan programs. In all but one district, religious clubs are operated by the Child Evangelism Fellowship's Good News Clubs, in which students can study the Bible and pray, according to temple co-founder Lucien Greaves.

Several districts contacted by The Associated Press said they were reviewing the group's request and noted their facilities were available to community groups.

Mat Staver, founder of a Christian legal aid group that has represented the Child Evangelism Fellowship, said Greaves' organization was illegitimate and an "atheist group masquerading" as religious. Greaves described Satanism as an atheist philosophy whose believers "feel it provides everything a religion provides to be legitimized as such."

The Satanic Temple, based in Massachusetts with chapters in several states, said it wants to counter well-funded fundamentalist Christian organizations that it believes are eroding the separation of church and state in public schools. Greaves said the after-school program would show "that people can be of different religious opinions and still be moral, upright people."

"We think that when kids are being exposed to the idea that they will burn in hell and other supernatural ideas, that there is a positive upshot to being exposed to the presence of a satanic afterschool program," he said.