Should the State Ban Satanist Statues?

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker Trent Horn. And there’s been a lot of debate on social media last week about a Satanist statue in the Iowa State Capitol. It just finished being on display for two weeks. So here’s one news story covering the issue to kind of give you the foundation of what I want to talk about today.

An Iowa lawmaker is calling on Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to take down a display inside the state capitol. The Satanic Temple of Iowa set up its holiday display back in December, or I should say on December 2nd, raising a lot of eyebrows. A spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services says the group applied for this spot and met all the requirements. But in his newsletter this week, state representative Brad Sherman called for its removal. He claims the preamble to the Iowa Constitution refers to a supreme being, which is God. Sherman says with Satan being an enemy of God, the display is unconstitutional. The display is scheduled to be up in the Capitol through Friday the 15th of December.

Okay, so after I made this episode, a Christian later tore the Satanic altar down on December 14th. I’ll comment on that later in this episode, but I just want to add that point here for context. So for the rest of the episode, my commentary was made when this Satanic altar was still standing. So just so you have a heads up.

There’s also been a lot of commentary on Twitter, especially around John Dunwell of the Iowa House. He said that while he personally opposes this statue, he also claims it can’t be removed because the statue is constitutionally protected speech. And those who put the statue up went through all the regulations and rules in order to put it up. He recommends instead that Christians should use their protected speech in the state capitol to balance out the effect of the Satanist speech. And not everyone liked that answer. One critic told him, “As a follower of Christ, you’ll have to answer before God on why you use the authority bestowed de you from God to defend the public display of a Satanic statue.” But it’s clear from Dunwell’s post that he didn’t morally defend the statue. He was defending its legal right to exist.

So what I want to do in today’s episode is I just want to try to shed some light on the different sides of this debate and how they each often don’t get a fair hearing from the other. Also, one thing that often doesn’t get a fair hearing and a review is our subscribe button. Sometimes people just ignore it and you don’t want to ignore important contributions to debates. So please hit our subscribe button so you don’t miss our upcoming content and support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

All right, so even though the statue is not up anymore, there’s going to be lots of controversies like this in the future. So it’s important to think clearly about issues like this going forward. So let me talk about the different sides of this debate.

First, there is the side of people who say Satanism is evil and the state should protect people from this evil and they’re right. Keep in mind though that most Satanists don’t literally worship Satan. Instead, Satan to them is an ironic role model they prop up to represent their moral code, which is basically a form of secular humanism. Satan is chosen as their symbol because He is opposed to what they believe are the mistaken moral rules of the God of the Bible. Regardless, Satanism is evil and it uses their foe religion to defend other evils like unlimited access to abortion. So there’s nothing wrong in principle with the state using civil law to protect people from spiritual evils. Throughout most of the church’s history, the state was seen as a means to promote not just a person’s temporal good where they’re good in this life, but also their spiritual good, which is more important. If the state can use coercive means to protect people from viruses, for example, that can harm their bodies, well, why shouldn’t the state use coercion to protect people from heresies that can harm their souls?

While America has brought protections on freedom of speech, many other countries do not. In some European countries, for example, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust because of the harm this kind of falsehood causes. So why can’t the state protect people from falsehoods related to religious claims that cause harms or claims that are anti or opposed to religion?

Now you might say, well, it’s because of the separation of church and state that we have here in the United States. Well, that particular phrase is itself a relatively new idea. The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist. It’s not actually in the Constitution. And the Catholic Church never teaches that governments must strictly separate the roles of church and state. Through most of church history actually, the church has argued for the opposite of that. Now, some Catholics might say that this changed at the Second Vatican Council and now the state must grant people religious liberty. It’s true that council did teach that people must have freedom to accept a reject the Catholic faith. The church has always taught this form of religious liberty when it says, for example, that baptisms against an adult’s will are invalid.

But that does not mean society must always be completely neutral towards religion. It’s acceptable to have societies. In fact, it’s a good thing to have societies that promote true religion. In Dignitates Humane, the Second Vatican Council taught that “Religious freedom in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men in societies toward the true religion and toward the one church of Christ.”

So it’s a natural and actually very Catholic desire to want the state to protect people from both physical and spiritual harms. It’s not wrong or totalitarian to desire a society where the state works in harmony with the church to promote man’s true ends. Secular humanists do the same thing to try to promote their own view of our true or good ends. They do this when they use the power of the state, for example, to coerce people to accept their beliefs on issues like transgenderism. I mean, gender identity is just as empirically unverifiable as many religious beliefs, and yet the state today often demands that people recognize these foe religious beliefs through things like laws that prohibit misgendering, so to speak, in certain contexts. If the state can do that, why shouldn’t the state demand that people at least respect true religious beliefs or the true faith? So it’s unfair to say that people who desire our country to be Catholic in law and culture must therefore be totalitarian and fascists.

However, while there is nothing wrong with this goal in principle, one could be practically opposed to it or in practical disagreement to that goal because they consider the goal to either not be feasible or because the goal of uniting church and state in this way could lead to greater evils in spite of one’s good intentions. So let’s start with feasibility. This comes up with critics who say that representatives like Dunwell, well, they’re failing in their Christian duty by allowing this Satanic statute to exist in the capitol building. Well, I would ask those critics this question. What specifically do you want Representative Dunwell or the Iowa governor, what specifically would you have wanted them to do during the two weeks the statue was up? Their answer might be, well, they should just walk in there and burn that altar to the ground. Safely, of course. They should be like St. Boniface who chopped down Donar’s Oak and built a church out of the wood. They should just be based about it.

All right, and here’s what’s going to happen if they do that. The Satanists will sue the state of Iowa and they will win just as they have won other cases based on the First Amendment’s broad protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Even if the Satanists aren’t a religion, Satanism would get the same protection that atheists get when they put up signs in state capitals that say God does not exist, for example. In 2023, the Satanic temple actually prevailed in the case of the Satanic temple versus Saucon Valley school district. The school district did not allow the temple to have an afterschool Satan club. So the Satanists sued the school district and they actually got a hefty payout because of it.

School district in North Hampton County will pay $200,000 in a settlement to the Satanic Temple, that after the district blocked an after school Satan Club from meeting on school property. The Satanic Temple filed a lawsuit back in March claiming the district violated the First Amendment. In addition to money for attorney’s fees, the district must give the Satanic Temple Incorporated and the afterschool Satan Club access to school facilities like any other organization.

People like Representative Dunwell only have two choices, either leave the statue up for the set amount of time it’s allowed to be up or take the statue down and then be forced to put it back up again by a court order along with an order to pay out financial damages to the Satanists. So those are the only two options that you actually have. And personally, I’m going to pick the option that does not involve the state giving hundreds and thousands of taxpayer dollars to Satanists.

Okay, so here’s where I need to add an update to the original episode that I recorded. As I said before, on December 14th, a Christian named Michael Cassidy tore down the Satanist display and he damaged it beyond repair.

The Satanic temple posted this video to Facebook today. It says investigators told them their statute was damaged beyond repair.

Now, this sidesteps the problem of Christian politicians doing this or taking down the display and then having to pay exorbitant settlement money to the Satanists. So what do I think of his actions? I would compare what he did to a kind of civil disobedience. It’d be similar to blockading an abortion facility, which is also illegal. So I would say what he did is not immoral necessarily, though not everybody is called to make that kind of sacrifice. However, there is an argument to be made that this kind of action is heroic, especially since nobody got hurt.

At the same time though, there are bigger questions we have to ask concerning this civil disobedience type of approach to the state toleration of things like Satanic displays. For example, where do we draw the line? Where do we stop with this behavior? Should Christians tear down atheist billboards that mock God but are not Satanic? Should Christians tear down a Hindu exhibit in state capital because the gods of Hinduism don’t exist? Paul says that these other idols are actually demons. Should fundamentalist Christians tear down nativity sets because many of them believe that God forbids all graven images, even nativity scenes? So do we want to live in a world where every religious group is always plotting about how to vandalize one another or worse? These are serious questions that we need to ask one another.

Christians often use examples of Muslim violence against alleged blasphemers as an argument against the reasonableness of Islam. But if Christians start routinely doing the same thing against blasphemy or even just critical non-Christian speech, well, then we risk looking just as unreasonable to the non-Christians that we want to evangelize. So when it comes to civil disobedience like this, we need to be willing to grapple with these tough questions.

All right, let’s go back to my original cut of the episode where I focused more on what people were demanding that Christian lawmakers should do. Because those lawmakers are more constrained by the threat of a lawsuit that would help the Satanists, I’m going to discuss the solutions that were offered related to creative legal strategies rather than direct acts of civil disobedience. Now, some people say that this is not the case. Political commenter, Jack Posobiec, along with some Iowa lawmakers claimed that the Satanist display violated the Iowa State Constitution because the Constitution recognizes the existence of a supreme being who blesses the state of Iowa.

So no, it is not a federal, right? It’s not a federal situation. It is a state situation. And under state constitution of Iowa, it says that Iowa believes that the world was created by the supreme being. That’s what Iowa’s constitution states all the way back from the 1850s. And there’s been numerous lawmakers down there in Iowa that say this is unconstitutional based on the state constitution of Iowa itself. So the state government has full authority. The state governor has full authority under the US Constitution and the Iowa Constitution to have this thing removed.

First, the Iowa State Constitution is actually vague on this issue. Every state constitution references God or the divine. In fact, Iowa is one of only four state constitutions that do not refer to God, G-O-D. The Constitution only refers to an ambiguous supreme being. The state doesn’t have any standing to argue that this supreme being, whatever that means, cares about what Satanists do. Maybe this supreme being gives blessings no matter what we do and is generous or arbitrary in that regard. Who knows? But the text doesn’t give warrant to say that Iowa has the constitutional right to restrict groups that it thinks upset the supreme being.

Number two, the federal government can overrule state constitutions. Seven state constitutions make it illegal for an atheist to hold public office, but nobody in those states has tried to enforce those statutes because they would be rendered unconstitutional in light of the US Supreme Court’s 1961 case of Torcaso versus Watkins. That case struck down religious qualifications for holding public office at either the federal or the state level, which in the Torcaso case involved an atheist who wanted to be a notary in the state of Maryland.

Here’s another example. Consider that Pennsylvania Satanist case I referenced earlier where the Satanists prevailed in wanting to put up an afterschool Satan club in a public school. So the Pennsylvania state Constitution actually says this, “We the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty and humbly invoking His guidance, do ordain and establish this constitution.” Now, one could argue that since Pennsylvania depends on God for civil and religious liberty and they seek His guidance, the state has the right to restrict activities that would displease God, which would probably include an afterschool Satan Club at a public school. But nobody in the Pennsylvania government made that argument because the state’s attorneys knew it was never going to pass constitutional muster. Instead, Pennsylvania had to end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Satanists for unconstitutionally denying them the right to exercise free speech. And that there can be lots of different clubs at schools and you can’t discriminate against them simply based on a disagreement with their religion or their worldview.

Now, another argument would be that religious freedom is not absolute, so it can be restricted in this case. I mean, couldn’t you restrict the Pennsylvania Club at a school that says that its religion is the desire to enslave Black people or discriminate against them or to be antisemitic? And you can restrict those kinds of clubs even if they hold a religious basis. That’s true. Religious freedom is not absolute. That’s correct. Freedom of speech is not absolute. So back to religious freedom, this is how the federal government was able to restrict Mormon polygamy in the 19th century. There was even a case of Reynolds versus the United States where the Supreme Court said that if religious freedom was absolute, every man would be a law unto himself and the law would exist in name only.

But just because religious freedom is not absolute doesn’t mean that you can restrict religions however you desire or just because you don’t like a particular religion. The government can’t say for example that Mormons are not allowed to be polygamous, but Muslims are allowed to be polygamous. In the same way, the state of Iowa cannot say Satanists are prohibited from mocking Christianity, but Christians are allowed to mock Satanism or Satan with a similar display in the state capitol. That would simply be a case of the government favoring or establishing one religion over another, which can’t be the case given the way the US Constitution is currently set up.

Now, you might argue that well, Satanists are a threat to the social order because they endorse evil or Satan, and so the state can restrict them because of that. But like I said, Satanists don’t literally worship Satan. Their moral code includes tenets like act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason. Or if one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might’ve been caused. Typically, speech can only be banned by the government if it is used to cause imminent lawless action like speech directly inciting a riot. But you’re not going to convince a judge that these relatively adenine tenets and just the simple mocking of Christianity is going to do that, that it falls under speech that can be legally prohibited.

Some critics might say, well, we should just change the Constitution. We should get rid of freedom of speech or get rid of freedom of religion, or at least redefine those freedoms so that they only protect true speech and the true religion. The government should just not allow people to mock God’s true revelation.

All right, what are the problems of this approach? First, it’s never going to happen. In order to revise the Constitution to do this, you would need two thirds of Congress to propose a constitutional amendment like that, and then 75% of the state legislatures ratify it. Good luck. We can’t even get a majority of people in conservative states to vote to protect babies from abortion. Now, that doesn’t mean we should give up on using the law to do as much good as possible. We can use legislative means to pass heartbeat bills. Abortion is illegal in Texas where I am right now. It can be done, but we have to understand the limitations that are involved. What it does mean is that we should not morally condemn Christians who don’t support fantasy solutions for society that are just not going to happen. At least in the near future.

Second, even if this could happen, are you sure you want that? Who is going to decide what is true speech or what is the true religion? What if you redefine the Constitution to allow this and Muslims get in power and they outlaw any criticism of Islam? Or what about atheists who want to outlaw any kind of homophobia, including by banning the Bible? And let’s say though you do get, well, we’ll do it if Catholics are the ones we’re going to allow freedom of religion and the government’s going to promote Catholicism. Okay. What Catholics are going to be setting those policies? What if the Catholics who set those policies are Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the most liberal Catholic bishops and cardinals? My biggest concern about trying to take away religious freedom in order to stop groups like Satanists is that such a move will eventually be used against Catholics themselves who would’ve been better off under a regime or government that allowed for broad religious freedom.

Now, Daily Wire commenter Michael Knowles claims there is a third option between doing nothing about the Satanist statues and getting rid of religious freedom entirely. Knowles says that we can just constitutionally interpret religious freedom to make it very limited rather than very broad. We can point out that traditionally in the history of American jurisprudence, religious freedom never applied to atheists. It didn’t apply to Satanists. So religious freedom in our country’s laws does not apply to atheist or Satanists today.

You can circumscribe what religious freedom means, not merely on your own preferences or a naked political power grab, but you can set limits on what religious freedom means through tradition, informed by reason. You don’t need to just pluck it out of thin air or have it be a matter of your own preferences. You can say, look, here’s what religious freedom has always meant in America, it’s never included opposition to God. It’s included broad religious toleration for different people who worship God in different ways, but it’s never included opposition to God or outright denial of God. That was just really never part of it. And so we’re not going to allow that. No Satanists, no atheist altars, none of that.

And Posobiec makes a similar argument.

When the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment, we always had public displays of Christmas throughout state capital. This was very well accepted and as a matter of fact, for all the way up for almost 150 years all the way into the 20th century, we even had blasphemy laws on the books in state after state, and none of that was seen as in contrivance, no Supreme Court justice all the way up until the 1900s started saying that that might be against the First Amendment.

The problem with Knowles and Posobiec’s arguments is that appeals to tradition have also been used to deny Catholics religious freedom. Traditionally, the United States and the colonies and the states that were founded after them, they did not consider religious freedom to be something that applied to Catholicism because they said that Catholic loyalty to the Pope was seen as loyalty to another sovereign power and thus incompatible with being an American citizen. I have a whole episode about the history of anti Catholicism in American culture that you can watch using the link in the description below, but here are some of the highlights from that previous episode.

In 1704, Maryland, which was founded to be a Catholic refuge, ended up passing a law to “prevent the spread of Popery”. Thomas Jefferson said, “History, I believe furnishes no example of a priest ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” Catholics were not allowed to hold public office, and public schools were basically Protestant schools that taught people Protestant values using the King James version of the Bible. That’s why Catholics had to create their own parochial schools and states like Oregon even tried to pass laws to force Catholic children to attend these Protestant public schools because they considered it a matter of protecting the social order.

Now, thankfully, they lost in the Supreme Court in the early 20th century. And later in the 20th century, religious freedom was seen to include not just traditional Protestant faiths, but Catholicism, Judaism, non-Christian religions, and even people who have no faith at all or atheists. But even at this point in American history, you still had things like Jack Chick cartoons warning people that Catholics are loyal to the Pope and would obey him in any political matter no matter what.

So here’s the problem. If past legal tradition in the United States was wrong to exclude Catholics from having religious freedom, and so Catholics should have religious freedom in spite of how they were treated in America’s past, then that same argument can be used to defend the religious freedom or the freedom of speech for atheists or Satanists, even if they aren’t technically a religion.

Finally, even if you can make Catholicism the state religion and get everything you want when it comes to promoting the common good, that doesn’t mean people’s hearts are going to follow suit. Consider the nation of Malta. It has a 95% Catholic population. Catholicism is the official state religion, but today only about half of Maltese Catholics attend Sunday mass. It’s projected that by 2040, that number is going to drop to 10%. And in the past few years, the Maltese government has approved evils like no-fault divorce, and so-called same-sex marriage. When you look at the Catholic Church in Germany, it’s supported by a mandatory religion tax. So the Catholic Church is supported by the state in Germany. Its revenues increase every year, even as church attendance declines every year.

One reason that Christianity has flourished more in America, in the United States than in Europe is because religion had to fend for itself in the United States. It wasn’t simply propped up by the government. Religion in the US thrives or it did thrive, even now it’s starting to falter, but it thrived in comparison to Europe because of the hearts and souls of those who truly believed in it and persevered against all odds to witness it and share it with other American citizens.

Now, would I like a country where the government promotes truth and does not give a platform to evil? Absolutely. But there is no legislative shortcut that allows us to get to that ideal. The only way we’re going to get there is to trudge down the long road of changing people’s hearts and minds and changing our culture for them to accept the truth without primarily relying on things like the government to encourage them to do that. Now, that doesn’t mean civil laws have no place in this process of converting our culture. The civil law is a part of changing people’s hearts at least incrementally. For example, laws banning racial discrimination that were passed 60 years ago. They have changed people’s hearts on racial discrimination and make people see that racial discrimination should be unthinkable. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr once said these poignant words on the relationship between law and morality.

There may be some truth in this that you can’t change the heart through legislation at that moment. I may go along with that argument, but I would have to go on to say, it may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate the segregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so that is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems that we face.

So in the midst of this Satanist debate, and there’s going to be similar ones in the future in state capitals and public schools, things like that in the future, what I hope is that Christians will at the very least be understanding of one another. Wanting the state to promote virtue and spiritual goods does not audibly make you some kind of insane totalitarian Christo-fascist. But on the other hand, recognizing we live in a pluralist society, and so in many cases we can only strive for the best feasible solutions does not make you some kind of cowardly traitor to Jesus Christ. Let’s just keep in mind that the true Satan, He wants us as Christians to fight one another so that we’re less effective at fighting Him. Let’s not give Him what He wants and continue to pursue through culture, through politics, and through any elicit means to transform the world around us to help it conform more to the person of Jesus Christ.

All right, I hope this episode was helpful for you and I just hope that you all have a very blessed day.

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