They’re celebrating Satan at the Minnesota State Capitol: “A Satanic holiday display at the Minnesota State Capitol has some sounding the alarm but Gov. Tim Walz says he can’t take it down as it is protected by the First Amendment. Minnesota Satanists applied through the Department of Administration, which manages the capitol grounds, to set it up near the first floor rotunda from Dec. 13 through 27.”

Now, there are serious free speech arguments about the government’s capacity to deny this kind of platform to some voices if it’s available to others. But we should all be able to acknowledge that this is not a religion or a religious display. The Satanist group itself “says members don’t directly worship Satan or believe in Satan.” Pretty much by definition, the display does not celebrate a religious holiday, because one does not have holidays to celebrate things one doesn’t believe in. Jews put up menorahs this time of year to celebrate an actual Jewish holiday. Even a synthetic holiday such as Kwanzaa at least pretends to have some sort of historic connection to the season. But the point of putting up a Satanic display during the Christmas season by people who don’t even believe Satan exists is simply to be anti-Christian during the time of a Christian holiday. We ought not feel compelled to adopt the pretense that hatred of someone else’s religion is itself a religion — especially when a more general secular skepticism of religion is typically not treated as a religion for purposes of establishment clause constraints on its endorsement and propagation by the government.