OPINION
Jared Gould | Minding the Campus
In March, a Colorado school district granted a religious accommodation to a student affiliated with The Satanic Temple (TST).
The dispute, TST reports, centered on a digital hall-pass system called Minga, which Elizabeth High School uses to track students, including when they leave class to use the bathroom. The family of the student, who identifies as a Satanist, requested a religious accommodation exempting her from the system. Reports indicate that the request stemmed from an incident in which the student was allegedly unable to access a restroom while menstruating, resulting in a bleed-through accident. The district initially denied the request.
Christian Post reports that in the letter to the district, TST legal counsel Matt Kezhaya argued that the bathroom-monitoring system burdened the student’s religious exercise by placing school authority over her bodily autonomy. The organization contended that the restriction interfered with the student’s adherence to TST’s Third Tenet, which states that one’s body is “inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.”
After TST threatened civil-rights action against the district, school officials granted the student an accommodation allowing her to use a traditional physical hall pass rather than the digital tracking system. The accommodation was celebrated by Friendly Atheist, which argued that TST had successfully employed “the same legal playbook that’s been used to privilege Christianity” in public schools.
Whatever one thinks of the Colorado case, TST is staking out a role in American education.
The organization now claims more than 700,000 members, up from roughly 50,000 a decade ago. Many of those members, like the girl in Colorado, are students. TST’s expansion into education has been years in the making.
Its educational efforts began as early as 2016 with the launch of After School Satan Clubs. TST created the program in response to Evangelical Christian Good News Clubs that operated in public schools. The organization says the Satan clubs promote rational inquiry, scientific thinking, and critical reasoning rather than religious conversion. One song associated with the program reassures children that “Satan’s not an evil guy.“
TST portrays Satan as a symbol of skepticism and individual liberty, maintaining that it does not believe in a literal Satan. Whatever it may say, the organization has spent much of the past decade locked in disputes over Christian displays, Christian prayers, and Christian influence in public life, especially in public education. And it appears interested in bringing that activism to college and university campuses.
According to TST’s site, the group’s Satanic Representation Campaign is developing a Collegiate Affiliation Program intended to help college students establish campus organizations affiliated with the movement. In response to my inquiry about the initiative, Campaign Director and TST Ordained Minister June Everett said the program is “not designed to manufacture controversy or serve as a political project.”
“Like many other religious student organizations, its purpose is simply to provide a framework for students who wish to associate around shared religious beliefs and values,” she added.
As for the size of the program, Everett said that because it is currently being reorganized, TST is not providing participation figures, membership estimates, or information about how many campuses currently host affiliated groups. A quick Google search suggests there is no official launch date either, though TST does encourage interested students to contact the organization to form “on-campus group[s].”
Whatever the current size of TST’s collegiate presence, higher education would not be entirely new territory for the organization.
In 2014, the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club invited TST to participate in a Black Mass—a ritual that, to Catholics, blasphemously inverts and mocks the Roman Catholic Mass. The proposed event sparked so much criticism from the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and other church leaders that the student club withdrew its sponsorship, and the event relocated to a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square. The controversy helped introduce many Americans to the then-new TST, which had been founded just the year before.
It is difficult to make firm inferences about the organization’s plans for higher education today. Beyond its stated goal of expanding its Collegiate Affiliation Program, TST has offered few details about what role it hopes to play on college campuses. When asked whether the organization anticipated supporting college students through future litigation, Everett did not elaborate, saying, “We do not speculate on hypothetical disputes or future legal strategies.”
One clue to the direction TST may take in higher education, however, lies in the materials it has chosen to highlight alongside its Collegiate Affiliation Program.
Using the “Collegiate Affiliate Program” tag on the organization’s latest news page leads readers to an article titled “The Satanic Temple Sues Indiana and Idaho to Protect Members’ Abortion Rights,” which discusses two lawsuits filed in 2022. In those cases, TST argued that abortion restrictions interfered with what it described as a protected religious ritual grounded in its belief in bodily autonomy. Everett says that TST’s “principle of bodily autonomy reflects the belief that individuals should retain agency over their own bodies and personal decisions, consistent with the rights and protections afforded under applicable law.” So, according to the organization, waiting periods, mandatory counseling requirements, and other restrictions imposed an unlawful burden on its members’ religious exercise—for an organization that insists it does not believe in a literal Satan, it has found a remarkably ancient way to honor him.
Federal courts ultimately rejected those challenges.
In Indiana, the Seventh Circuit dismissed TST’s suit for lack of standing, concluding that the organization had failed to identify specific members who had been harmed and had relied instead on statistical estimates that one or more members were likely affected by the state’s abortion restrictions. In Idaho, the district court similarly found that TST lacked standing for the same reasons, but added that its underlying legal theories were without merit and incapable of being cured by amendment.
But as its recent win in Colorado demonstrates, TST is capable of extracting concessions from public institutions. And that raises an obvious question for us: if its Collegiate Affiliation Program succeeds, what might it accomplish in higher education?
Colleges and universities may soon find out. After all, Everett tells me, “things have been busy.”
