PORTLAND — If you live in the Neah-Kah-Nie School District, you might have an interesting new choice when it comes to after-school programs for the kids this fall. That’s because the Satanic Temple is trying to bring their After School Satan Club to Nehalem Elementary School.
“We’ve just reached out to the school,” says Finn Rezz, one of two heads of the provisional Portland chapter of the national organization of the Satanic Temple, “and let them know we’re interested” in offering the course.
You can read a sample of the letter that the Satanic Temple is sending to schools here from The Washington Post.
Rezz says the chapter picked Nehalem because they are focused on offering an alternative in schools that have the Good News Club, an after-school club put on by the Child Evangelism Fellowship.
According to the website for the Child Evangelism Fellowship, it is “a Bible-centered organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.”
That program is in 18 counties in Oregon. John Luck, Director of Global Partnership for the Child Evangelism Fellowship, says, “We actually last year had just under 78,000 clubs worldwide.” He cannot say how many clubs are in Oregon. He says there are clubs in the Portland area, but cannot say how many or where they are.
Rezz says his Satanic Temple provisional chapter picked the Tillamook area because it’s close to Portland, and he believes there are no schools with the Good News Club in Portland.
“Portland’s a pretty liberal secular city,” he says. In Nehalem, he says, the Good News Club has “been running for 17 years.”
Rezz says his group is “non-theistic” Satanists. “We’re focused on science and rational thinking,” he says, adding that the After School Satan Club will promote “benevolence and empathy for everybody,” which he says is in direct contrast to the Good News Club, which teaches “hellfire.”
Luck says the goal of the Good News Club is to “share God’s love with … students … that is going to enrich their faith.”
“What we’re offering is an alternative that looks at things from a secular and humanist point of view,” says Rezz.
The Satanic Temple is an organized religion, though most of its members identify as atheists. “Satan for us is an allegory,” says Rezz, “that promotes free thought.”
The Satanic Temple believes that their after-school club should be allowed in schools that allow the Good News Club. According to the Child Evangelism Fellowship website, “In 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Good News Clubs v. Milford Central School that Good News Clubs can meet in public schools in the United States after school hours on the same terms as other community groups.”
“It is a club that is offered after school hours,” he says, and “it requires parental permission.”
Luck says that the members of the Satanic Temple “certainly have a right to meet in the schools just like we do,” but he believes the program will fizzle out due to lack of interest.
When asked if she thinks the Satanic Temple should be allowed to have an after-school program, Kayleen Talbert who works in the Benton County chapter of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, says as a Christian, she doesn’t love the idea but, “I would not be opposed to it happening because there is a freedom of religion here America and we should be able accept that.”
