[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
As we enter the Christmas season of “peace on earth and good will toward men,” a demonic display installed by the New Hampshire branch of The Satanic Temple on a Concord city plaza was toppled and destroyed last weekend, according to local news. At press time, Satan could not be reached for comment.
The Satanic Temple (TST) – based appropriately in that legendary center of witchcraft Salem, Massachusetts – received a permit to place their monument of the goat-headed occult idol Baphomet near the city’s Statehouse Nativity scene. TST representatives unveiled Baphomet on Saturday night, and police believe it was vandalized sometime that night after the unveiling. The legs of the black mannequin were left standing upright, but the strewn head and torso were damaged and the tablet listing the TST’s fundamental tenets had also been cracked with chunks of text missing. By Monday night, the idol had been entirely destroyed and the tablet smashed. The remains of the display were removed Tuesday.
A Concord police spokesperson confirmed that they could be investigating the incident as a hate crime, which is yet another example of how stupid and political the category of “hate crime” is and always has been. At whom is the “hate” supposedly directed? Satan?
State Rep. Ellen Read, a Democrat who is signed up online as a member of TST in solidarity with them, initially asked the group to join the scene to represent “our pluralistic society.” Did you catch that? She invited the Satanic Temple to be represented alongside a Nativity scene at the New Hampshire State capitol. Why would an elected official think it a great idea to reach out at Christmastime to an organization devoted to the occult, and encourage it to install a display at the State capitol alongside the Nativity?
That’s a rhetorical question, because the obvious answer is twofold: one, she is a Democrat; two, she must have felt compelled to give Jesus – the actual reason for the season – some competition. And yet she claimed later that “There was nothing inherently offensive about the display [and]… nothing about it that was denigrating Christians,” both claims of which she must surely know are patently false.
Leave it to a Democrat to declare that there is nothing offensive or denigrating to Christians about a monument to Satanic evil placed on equal footing with a Nativity scene. “I’ve just been a long-time supporter of TST in terms of their beliefs and the work that they do,” Read told reporters (emphasis added). “I’m local, so I helped with the permitting process, and I was there for the unveiling.”
She supports the Satanic Temple’s beliefs and their work? She was present for the unveiling? What kind of a society are we when our elected officials declare their proud support for Satanism and go out of their way to grant it equal, government-sanctioned representation to Christianity?
To clarify what Satanism today is, allow me to summarize from a previous article of mine:
As an organization, the Satanic Temple has been around only for about ten years. It views itself as a sort of alternative religion for people who resent the “oppression” of traditional religion, especially Christianity, which the Satanic Temple regularly mocks and taunts by demanding equal time with Nativity scenes at state capitols at Christmastime.
Are Satanic Temple members devil-worshippers? Sort of. As I’ve written before,
Contrary to popular assumption, only a small minority of Satanists actually worships Satan. Most of them reportedly do not believe in a higher power; they see Satan himself as more metaphorical, a symbol of rebellion. They view their religion as a worshiping of the self, and believe that each individual is free to define his or her own moral code.
Today’s Satanism is largely what author Carl Trueman, Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College, calls expressive individualism, which holds that “human beings are defined by their individual psychological core, and that the purpose of life is allowing that core to find social expression in relationships. Anything that challenges it is deemed oppressive.” Sects of the self today include a revival of paganism and Satanism.
The Temple’s mission is supposedly one of working toward “benevolent and compassionate” social justice, with a generous helping of such self-worship thrown in. But an unstated yet obvious part of its mission is to disempower Christians in the public and political square – hence its challenges to Christmas displays in political buildings. In fact, Concord officials said in a statement that they approved the Temple’s permit there partly “to avoid litigation.”
Rep. Ellen Read seems suspiciously heavily invested in ensuring that the Christmastime celebration of the birth of mankind’s savior is balanced with its dark counterpart. In explanation, she claims fidelity to the First Amendment: “They can pretend that they allow it for all religious displays, but it’s only really applicable if it’s Christianity. That’s kind of the point of calling that out and making sure that we’re standing up for First Amendment principles.”
Are Buddhists clamoring for, and being denied, religious displays at the Capitol? Muslims? Zoroastrians? It sounds like not even the Satanic Temple was clamoring for one, because it was Rep. Read who reached out to them. Only someone, some organization, and some demonic entity that resent what little cultural presence Christianity still has in America (we are living in a post-Christian West) would feel compelled to challenge something as innocuous and good-willed as a Christmas display.
This recent Concord incident brings to mind, of course, the similar smashing of a Baphomet idol a year ago at the Iowa State Capitol building (which I wrote about here). The Satanic Temple of Iowa had received permission to erect the statue near a Nativity display (again, as a direct challenge to Christianity). Christian conservative and U.S. Navy flight instructor Michael Cassidy “saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged,” and so he took it upon himself to tear it down – after which he turned himself in to police officers and was charged with 4th-degree criminal mischief.
Cassidy told reporters that he destroyed the shrine in order to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government”:
The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment. Anti-Christian values have steadily been mainstreamed more and more in recent decades, and Christians have largely acted like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water.
Correct. The Founders did not want the establishment of a “state religion,” but they would have found it incomprehensible that this wariness would result in government buildings hosting altars to Satan-worship.
Author Rod Dreher once mused about this issue on his Substack page, and it is worth quoting him at length because he sums up the truth about the Satanic Temple’s intent and Michael Cassidy’s protest:
The United States is a country now where we oversee the removal of statues of figures — even Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, whose statue was taken out of New York City Hall in 2021 — that the woke find intolerable… but we erect statues, however temporary, honoring Satan.
He went on to note that “the abstractions of liberalism must reach a limit at some point… And the construction of a statue honoring Satan crosses a line that I think none of us should be willing to cross”:
Even if you don’t believe that Satan actually exists, and you consider him to be merely a symbol, then why would you tolerate this statue? In the symbolic matrix that produced the figure of Satan, he symbolizes ultimate evil… Not just evil, but Evil…
[…]
If being a good classical liberal means that I have to tolerate reverence in a public space to a god that stands for Evil, then I am not a classical liberal… There is no society that can be called “good” in which an effigy of Satan is honored in the public square.
I agree, and if that’s not “pluralistic” or “inclusive” enough for the morally impaired among us, I don’t care. Classical liberalism should not be a suicide pact. As I concluded about the Cassidey incident,
A society that gives equal weight to Good and Evil out of a misguided sense of fairness and tolerance and diversity will quickly find itself overrun by Evil, because Evil will exploit the fair-mindedness and tolerance of classical liberals in order to get first a foot in the door, then to smash the door off its hinges and subdue the whole of a classically liberal civilization.
If we as a culture can’t agree on drawing the line at the government-ordained worship of such a symbol as Baphomet, then that figurative door is already off its hinges. To paraphrase Sir Thomas More in the brilliant play A Man For All Seasons, can we stand upright in the winds that will blow then?
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior