The tale of what happens when The Satanic Temple comes to Hellertown, PA.
From dear teacher friend Jason Stern comes this lesson in First Amendment rights. It all started when the Saucon Valley School District got word that the After School Satan Club was coming to town.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:01] This summer we got an email from an old teacher pal of ours.
[00:00:06] I Was like I should email those guys. They might find this interesting.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:09] This is Jason Stern. He's a social studies teacher in Hellertown, Pennsylvania.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:14] Jason Stern is a friend of the show, and we got to speak to his brilliant students back in 2021.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:19] Yeah, that's right. That was basically a lifetime ago. Anyway, Jason sends us this email with the subject line might find this interesting [00:00:30] dot dot dot dot dot.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:33] A five dot ellipses.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:35] And I was like, okay, what you got for a stern. And what he got for us was this.
Jason Stern: [00:00:41] Just sitting home on I believe it was on just a school night. And check my email. And we got an email from our superintendent, and it was sent out because I'm a teacher [00:01:00] and a parent in the district. So we send out to all the community members, and it said that just wanted to make everybody aware that the group called the After School Satan Club, will be holding meetings at our school district, on our school district campus. After school.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:21] Satan had come to town. But [00:01:30] that is not the reason Jason was emailing us. Though to be fair, it probably would have been enough to pique my attention. No, Jason reached out to us to say that the story of what happened at Saucon Valley Middle School, where he works, was dripping. And yes, he used all caps in his email with civics.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:51] And we host a show called Civics 101.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:53] We sure do. And this is that show. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:57] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:58] And today we bring you the dripping with [00:02:00] civics story of what happens when the Satanic Temple wants to enrich young minds in an after school setting. So back to that fateful night and the email from the superintendent.
Jason Stern: [00:02:16] I'm not sure if she gave dates or not, but she said this will be occurring. Our lawyers have said this is what we need to do. We need to allow this group to come on to our school district and use our facilities. [00:02:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:02:35] The After School Satan Club in Hellertown, Pennsylvania.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:39] Not lost on me. Not lost for one second and sure not lost on the media. And we'll get to that later. Now. Okay. This email from the school was saying, you know, just FYI, we have to allow them to come in.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:52] Yeah, like right off the bat, in case there was any doubt as to whether or not the after school Satan Club would arrive without controversy or concern. This [00:03:00] superintendent is broadcasting. We have to let them be here. So, in other words, clearly some people are not going to want them here. We're going to.
News Archival: [00:03:08] Begin here with the controversy over one group's plan to host a gathering for young children at a Lehigh Valley school.
News Archival: [00:03:13] The After school Satan Club was granted permission to meet at Saucon Valley Middle School next month. And as you might imagine, the reaction to this pretty swift.
News Archival: [00:03:22] Associating it with such a figure that we commonly equate to being evil. [00:03:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:03:30] So before we go any further into this tale, Hannah, you mentioned The Satanic Temple, which it sounds like is the parent organization of this club. Now I hear temple and I think religion is this indeed a religious group.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:44] Great question, because as I learned on this very show, being a religious group, specifically a church is something that comes with federal designation here in America. And yes, the Satanic Temple is recognized as a tax exempt [00:04:00] church by the IRS. They were founded in 2012, and they are not the same thing as the Church of Satan. And in fact, they've got a whole thing on their website about how they are way different from the Church of Satan, which was established in 1966. This episode is not about that, but if you're really curious, I encourage you to take a look. I will tell you that the Satanic Temple does not believe in or worship actual Satan. They use Satan as a literary device.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:28] Okay, that last part you [00:04:30] said there. That does seem relevant to this episode. What does that actually mean?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:34] What that means is that they use Satan as a symbol in order to, according to their website, quote, encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:49] I saw on the news that a satanic gathering in Boston in April of 2023. It got a lot of attention, in part because they ripped up a Bible and a pro-police flag.
News Archival: [00:04:58] You've probably heard of.
News Archival: [00:04:59] Comic-con, [00:05:00] but how about Satan Con? Starting tomorrow, hundreds of members of the Satanic Temple will be in Boston, their convention coming to Copley Place. And as WBZ's Tammy Mutasa reports tonight, Boston's Christian community is asking their faithful to respond with prayer and not protest.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:20] And that event was organized by the Satanic Temple. The Archdiocese of Boston. And for those of you who did not grow up in a Boston Irish Catholic household like old [00:05:30] Hannah McCarthy here, that means a division of the Catholic Church, which is basically a group of churches presided over by an archbishop, which is basically a high ranking Catholic leader anyway. The archdiocese called for intense prayer in response to this event.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:45] So we know that the Satanic Temple is not beloved by most Christians.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:50] That's right. And not being beloved is also relevant to this story. So let's get back to Jason.
Jason Stern: [00:05:56] So as you can imagine, my teacher text chain started [00:06:00] to blow up. The social media started to blow up. People were posting, what is this? How can we do this? There was outrage, there was confusion, there was curiosity. So came to school. The next day. It was all abuzz. Everybody was was sort of talking about it, not quite sure. There was a school board meeting, then a few days later where it wasn't on the agenda, but people were allowed to. At the end of the meeting, they were allowed [00:06:30] to give their comments and ask questions to the school board. So that caught the attention then of the local press and and more and more people started learning about this. And actually a couple of days later there was a bomb threat called into the school.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:50] Oh, wow. A bomb threat. So this got incredibly serious and scary pretty quick, incredibly serious.
Jason Stern: [00:06:56] So we had to close the school for a day and [00:07:00] they checked it out and everything was okay. Later on, it was found out this was someone from North Carolina. I'm in Pennsylvania who had just seen it on some posting somewhere on the internet and was very upset by it. Had no connection to the school whatsoever, but called in a bomb threat on that. So once again, this heightened tensions. Even more and more and more people got involved, and the school board came back [00:07:30] at the next school board meeting and said that the after school Satan Club did not properly distinguish in their advertisements that they were not sponsored by the school district, that this was a non-school district sponsored event. And the school district said, because you didn't make this clear in your filings, you violated the rules of the school district. So we are not [00:08:00] going to allow you to have your meetings on our campus.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:10] Out of curiosity, Hannah, was the school district's reasoning considered legit? Was this considered a pretty reasonable reason to stop a club from hosting a meeting?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:20] Not by the Satanic Temple, that's for sure.
Jason Stern: [00:08:23] Well once again, that heightened things even more. Then the after school Satan Club [00:08:30] guest contacted the ACLU, and the ACLU filed. Guess it was an injunction. I'm not a lawyer in order to stop that from occurring. And they went to court and the after school Satan Club won and they were allowed to hold meetings after school.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:52] Okay. So the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, they were the ones who filed this lawsuit. On what grounds?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:59] Specifically on [00:09:00] grounds that we are quite familiar with the First Amendment, specifically the free speech clause, and even more specifically, the prohibition against censoring speech based on the objections or reactions of others, the.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:14] Reactions of others being all the hullabaloo. And the school district. After the superintendent said they had to allow this club.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:20] Bingo, as the ACLU put it, the school district bowed to, quote, the Heckler's veto. And here is what the judge in this case, John M Gallagher, [00:09:30] had to say. Do you care to read his words, Nick?
Nick Capodice: [00:09:32] Oh, absolutely. Okay. Hold on. Here we go. Quote. When confronted with a challenge to free speech, the government's first instinct must be to forward expression rather than quash it, particularly when the content is controversial or inconvenient. Nothing less is consistent with the expressed purpose of American government to secure the core innate rights of its people, end quote.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:57] Ultimately, the judge agreed with the ACLU that [00:10:00] the school district's reasoning for trying to deny the club that the permission slips failed to make clear that this was not a district sponsored thing, was indeed pretext for discrimination against religious beliefs.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:12] So the after school Satan Club clubbed?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:15] Yep. It held their meetings.
Jason Stern: [00:10:18] I believe they held a total of 3 or 4 because by this time we were into the early spring. By the time the case went to court and everything was was settled and we had some protesters [00:10:30] coming out, we could look outside our windows and on the sidewalk across from the school, there was a religious group. I'm not sure what denomination or what they were affiliated with, but there was about a dozen people out there, usually on the days that the club would meet, but they were there other days as well. So the club did meet 3 or 4 times. There were no major incidents that at least [00:11:00] I was aware of, seemed to go fairly smoothly. And sort of that took us to the end of the year.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:12] Now we're going to get into the real reason that Jason was emailing us after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:17] But just a quick reminder to our listeners, if any of you out there are lovers of ephemera or trivia, Hannah and I put all the stuff that doesn't make it into our episodes, into our newsletter. It's called extra credit. It comes out every two weeks. It's fun. It's free. You're [00:11:30] going to love it. Sign up at our website civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:54] We're back. You're listening to Civics 101 and we are talking about the after school Satan Club in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. [00:12:00] Now for inquiring minds out there. Here is what the club is about. Jason told us that the Satanic Temple looks for school districts where religious groups are allowed to meet and says, all right, well then we can meet there too. The club's pamphlet says that it teaches, quote, free inquiry and rationalism, bolstering scientific understandings of the natural world and nurturing your child's already awesome ability to be curious about the wonders around them. But see, [00:12:30] Jason Stern was not invested in discussing the tenets of the club with his students.
Jason Stern: [00:12:35] I'm a social studies teacher and I do teach civics, and just so happened at this time we were studying the amendments.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:42] All right, now we're talking civics.
Jason Stern: [00:12:44] So one of the ways I brought it into my classroom, because I really had to be careful because this was an event that was affecting kids and their families, and it was a very hot [00:13:00] button issue. And social studies teachers, especially these days, need to be very careful on how they handle sensitive topics. So whereas in my class, I do do a lot of debates and discussions where kids get to share their opinions. This was not the time for that quite yet. You know, it didn't want kids to, you know, knowing that one kid's mom spoke at a meeting or something like that to point it out. [00:13:30] It just was too hot button of an issue. But I couldn't resist bringing it into class somehow.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:41] Wait, so how did he do it? Because Jason's right. This is tricky territory. When he says, especially these days, he means it. So-called divisive concept laws are usually about race and sex. But I could see the after school Satan Club getting a special mention. Yep.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:57] So here's how he did it.
Jason Stern: [00:13:59] So I said to [00:14:00] myself, we're studying the First Amendment. You have freedom of religion. Okay? Even though the after school Satan Club on their website says they are not affiliated with any religion, they're not of the satanic religion. Okay, it was still a religious issue. We had a good news club that did affiliate themselves with a religion in our school, and this was a response to that. So we had the freedom of religion. Freedom from religion sort of pop out here [00:14:30] right away.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:31] First amendment, lesson number one. Let's think about this on a freedom of religion basis. Number two.
Jason Stern: [00:14:38] Freedom of assembly. We had protesters outside the school. We had people with signs. We had people assembling at school board meetings in order to show they were pro or con this issue. So assembly was front and center as well.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:58] Number three.
Jason Stern: [00:14:59] Speech. [00:15:00] Speech was all was all over the place. We had speech on social media. We had speech at school board meetings. We had speech in the town. People were talking about it. People got to express their opinions, pro con or otherwise, on this issue in a variety of places.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:22] I feel like number four is pretty obvious.
Jason Stern: [00:15:25] Press. The press was there, we had the local TV stations. [00:15:30] We even had we're outside of Philadelphia. We had the Philadelphia TV stations into our school board meetings. We even ended up in the New York Times and the New York Post, of all places, articles concerning this issue. So, you know, the press was there.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:49] All right. Nick, can you guess number five?
Nick Capodice: [00:15:51] Yeah, there's only one left. Hannah, does freedom of petition say hello here somehow and.
Jason Stern: [00:15:56] Finally petition the after school Satan [00:16:00] Club petition the school in order to to meet there. They filed petitions in court when they were denied that access.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:11] I that's so interesting to me. All five freedoms cropping up in response to one after school club that is without a doubt dripping with civics. Hannah.
Jason Stern: [00:16:22] And when I ask my students to try to point out, you know, well, you've all been watching this in the news, you've been seeing the [00:16:30] social media posts. They were pretty quick to be able to identify the different ways that this case showed the five rights in the First Amendment, and as a social studies teacher, that made me very happy.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:43] I am really curious, though, given the controversy around the club itself, how did Jason students do in terms of using it as the basis of a First Amendment civics lesson? Like, did the classroom just dissolve into argument?
Jason Stern: [00:16:57] I admittedly did a little bit of bobbing and weaving [00:17:00] when that came up, just because it's a high button issue, and I didn't want to alienate any kids, because when we discuss topics that are controversial in class, I'll obviously give a lot of background. Here's how I want it to be handled, but I felt like this one. Just was. It was. It was too close to home at the moment. So curious. The kids were definitely curious about it and intrigued by the spectacle of it. [00:17:30] But as far as opinions, none came out that heard and said, you know, oh, this is horrible or this is wonderful.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:39] Jason actually mentioned the fact that even though the school board meeting about this did have some moments of tension, nothing happened that would have, as he put it, gone viral. He says people were pretty respectful in conversation about this.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:55] Respectful and conversation about something that calls itself the After School Satan Club. [00:18:00] I have to say, Hannah, I am pleasantly surprised to hear such a thing in America in the 2020s. Actually, to that point, something that calls itself the After School Satan Club. Did Jason talk about the name with his students?
Jason Stern: [00:18:19] I'm in, so I'm in in Saucon Valley School District. But the town we're in is hellertown. So people are making reference that, um, you know, the devil comes to Hellertown. [00:18:30] Uh, but yes, they were, I think, shocked by it. It's really something I think most hadn't really thought about before or seen before. And quite honestly, I think that was part of the reason that this Satanic club chose Satan because it got them in the newspapers, it got them on TV. And that's another thing I tell my kids when we're we're talking about the First Amendment rights, and we talk about protesting and assembly, you know, why does someone [00:19:00] dress up or make a big spectacle or whatever? I ask them that. And finally we come to clues because because that's the one that's going to get on TV, that's the one that's going to get, you know, the picture on the internet of them. So I think kids, yes, they were shocked by it or just once again intrigued. This is intriguing.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:20] You know, in our Separation of church and State episode, I talked about religious expression in a public school context, specifically the most recent Supreme Court case about it, Kennedy [00:19:30] v Bremerton School District, which did allow a government employee to engage in prayer on school grounds and on school time. Basically, the idea there was, if the school does not prohibit comparable secular speech, they can't prohibit religious speech. So did lawsuits like this come up during the after school Satan Club events?
Jason Stern: [00:19:51] There were definitely other lawsuits brought up in this case. And, you know, we did we did talk a little bit about some of the other court cases, [00:20:00] freedom of expression and things like that. But no, this is different because it's after school. You know, all those other ones occurred during school. This is after school using the property of a public school for religious uses. So yeah, it's interesting. I know we did ten years ago, there was a Bible study that used the school before school, and I just know it because I was the classroom next to the one that was used. [00:20:30] And we had a teacher. He didn't teach it, but there had to be a teacher in the room, and he volunteered just to be in the room to supervise. It has happened before, but I do know there were other court cases in other parts of the country about this.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:48] As far as the constitutionality of after school religious clubs goes, Congress's 1984 Equal Access Act was passed to protect non-school sponsored student speech, [00:21:00] including religious speech. It was challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Scotus ruled that the act was constitutional, while government speech endorsing religion is still prohibited, private speech endorsing religion, even if that religion is a nontheistic organization that uses Satan as a metaphorical construct to symbolize opposition to arbitrary authority, is currently allowable in these United States.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:30] May [00:21:30] I just say if there are any other educators out there stumbling into kismet constitutional lessons because of stuff going down behind your schoolhouse gates, we are your ardent audience. Please drop us a line Civics 101 at npr.org. And if you happen to use a bunch of ellipses in your email subject line, that's good too.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:51] Yeah, that worked amazingly well on us.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:53] Sure did. We love you, Jason Stern. You're the best.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:11] This [00:22:00] episode was produced by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by Roof, Tigerblood Jewel, Hampus Naeselius, Duke Herrington, Will Harrison, Kenzo Almond, Roots and Recognition and BDBs. [00:22:30] Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.