Connecticut students have choice of Satan or Bible club. Why it’s not really good against evil.

Elementary school children in the town of Lebanon will be able to join the After School Satan Club starting Dec. 1.

According to June Everett of Colorado, campaign director for the clubs, the Satan Club was requested by a parent from Lebanon Elementary School as an alternative to the Good News Club that meets there. It’s sponsored by the Satanic Temple, an atheist group.

Everett said it’s the first Satan Club in Connecticut.

“This particular parent was aware of the Good News Club and did not feel comfortable sending her children to the Good News Club and was more closely aligned with our seven tenets and our beliefs,” she said.

“So she reached out and asked if we can start an After School Satan Club at her kid’s elementary school, and so we went through the process and we lined up our volunteers to help with the club. And of course, the school district understands constitutional law and the First Amendment, so they approved us without any issues.”

There’s nothing evil about the club, Everett said.

“We identify with the statement that is in John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ where Satan stands up to the adversary and is essentially the ultimate rebel standing up for the rights of the other angels and the other people,” she said.

“I always have to explain to the Christians that you don’t have a monopoly on Satan,” Everett said. “We understand that he is a triggering evil, terrible being in your biblical world. But in our world, we look to him differently. And we consider him the embodiment of standing up to radical authority.”

Satan represents the freedom of equal access for minorities and the marginalized, including LGBTQ people, “because a lot of those people have been kicked out of their church or abandoned by family,” Everett said.

The club “focuses on science, critical thinking, creative arts, and good works for the community,” according to its website. “While engaged in all of these activities, we want clubgoers to have a good time.”

Everett said the Satan Clubs only go where there are religious clubs operating.

“What we do is we wait for the Good News Club to return and then we can return, but we don’t want to be the only religious club operating on campus,” she said. “So we have to wait for basically their permission slips or their fliers to start coming out before we take action.”

Both the Bible-based Good News Clubs and the Satan Clubs are allowed in the schools because of a Supreme Court ruling, and the Lebanon superintendent has followed that ruling.

Superintendent Andrew Gonzalez issued a statement saying, “The Lebanon Public Schools … must allow community organizations to access school facilities, without regard to the religious, political, or philosophical ideas they express, as long as such organizations comply with the viewpoint-neutral criteria set forth in the (school board’s) policy. 

“Not everyone will agree with, or attend meetings of, every group that is approved to use school facilities,” the superintendent continued.

“However, prohibiting particular organizations from accessing our school buildings based on the perspectives they offer or express could violate our obligations under the First Amendment and other applicable law and would not align with our commitment to non-discrimination, equal protection, and respect for diverse viewpoints.” 

Everett said the Satanic Temple has a cybersecurity team that monitors the many threats that come in whenever they start a Satan Club, and there have been a number stemming from the Lebanon club, but none have ever been carried out.

“It gets interesting because the school’s first inclination is to shut us down after they receive a threat like that,” she said. “But what we learned when we won our case with a federal Trump-appointed judge in Pennsylvania this past year was that the First Amendment doesn’t cave to violence or threats.”

Moises Esteves, executive vice president of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, which operates the Good News Clubs, said he believes the Satanic Temple’s goal is to keep the Bible-based clubs out of the schools.

“They hate the fact that we teach the Bible to children in public schools,” he said. “They cannot remove us legally because we won a United States Supreme Court ruling in June 2001 that we have the right to be in public schools. … We cannot be discriminated against because of our viewpoint. And so they come at us in a variety of ways, creatively trying to shut us down. This is their latest strategy.”

That strategy has worked a couple of times, when a school district closed down all outside groups, which it has a right to do.

Esteves said the Satanic Temple has been operating the Satan Clubs since 2016, with little success.

“Their strategy has proven to fail, but they still continue to pursue the schools where we have Good News Clubs,” he said. “They’ve had very few clubs, they don’t get a lot of kids, they don’t last very long.”

Esteves said the Good News Clubs teach a better lesson to children. “They reject authority, right? And they kind of admire Satan as this supreme rebellious guy that rebelled against the authority, because he rebelled against God, is basically the point they’re trying to make,” he said. 

“We believe in authority,” he said. “We believe that God is the originator of authority and God establishes authority. For example, God gives mom and dad authority to raise their children and children need to be taught to honor authority. Honor the teacher in school, honor the parent, honor the police officer.” 

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.