Satanic Temple To Host After-School Satan Club At Illinois Elementary School

An after-school program run by the national religious and civil rights organization The Satanic Temple is being defended by an Illinois school district.

The meetings that will be placed at Moline's Jane Addams Elementary School have infuriated a lot of parents. According to its website, the Satanic Temple neither believes in Satan nor will it try to convert kids to its beliefs.

According to a widely circulated brochure shared on social media, the club will instead educate kids about kindness and empathy, critical thinking, problem-solving, creative expression, and personal sovereignty. The club's meetings start on January 13 and are open to kids in grades 1 through 5.

“This isn’t a club that’s meant to proselytize Satanism or even engage in discussions about religious opinion,” Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves told WQAD. “This is an educational program meant to focus on critical thinking and just basic education skills.”

Since the Good News Club v. Milford Central School decision, decided by the Supreme Court in 2001, schools aren't allowed to discriminate against religious speech if a religious organization runs a club on their property.

Other schools have already started offering after-school Satanic clubs. The controversial club was introduced at Point Defiance Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, in 2016, but it was terminated a year later due to a shortage of funding, according to the News-Tribune.

The temple says the clubs “incorporate games, projects, and thinking exercises that help children understand how we know what we know about our world and our universe.”

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Moline-Coal Valley Schools' administrator, Dr. Rachel Savage, claimed that neither the school nor its teachers are a part of the club. Parents must sign a permission sheet to allow their children to participate, just like they do for Boys and Girls Scouts or any other organization, according to flyers posted in the school's lobby.

The Board of Education, according to her, allows community usage of its facilities.

“To illegally deny their organization to pay to rent our publicly-funded institution, after school hours, subjects the district to a discrimination lawsuit, which we will not win, likely taking thousands upon thousands of tax-payer dollars away from our teachers, staff, and classrooms,” Savage said in a statement Wednesday, Jan. 12.

Savage's statement came after numerous parents expressed worry about the club, according to WQAD.

The Satanic Temple — which views Satan as a “mythical figure representing individual freedom” — says on its website that “to embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions.”

“Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things,” the temple says. “Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.”