Kansans love themselves some satanic panic

16 March

Michael Stewart, founder of the Satanic Grotto, has vowed to defy an order by Gov. Laura Kelly to move a “black mass” scheduled for March 28 to the Kansas Statehouse grounds.

Take Gov. Laura Kelly, who recently declared a group of Sunflower satanists would not be allowed to hold a blasphemous “black mass” inside the Statehouse later this month.

The event, a mockery of the Catholic mass in which a Christian Bible and a cross will be destroyed, was scheduled to take place in the first floor rotunda, beneath the Capitol dome, beginning at 11 a.m. March 28, the last day of the Legislature’s regular session.

A cynic might say that it’s too late to dedicate the Capitol to Satan because the majority of lawmakers have already sold their souls to the devil. Or that only politicians are allowed to conjure evil in the Statehouse. But not me. I say give the devil his due and let’s take the issue seriously, not because I necessarily believe in Old Scratch but because the controversy raises serious constitutional issues.

In one corner you have Kelly, a Democrat in a red state where 70% of adults identify as Christians, according to a Pew Research Center study updated in 2024. During the past few years, her executive power has been eroded by a GOP-dominated Legislature. The pressure from the religious right to block the indoor ceremony apparently was too great for her to resist. She’s also Irish Catholic, as were governors Kathleen Sebelius and Joan Finney.

In the other corner you have the Satanic Grotto, a group of Kansas religious anarchists who would like to express their views just as other groups have done at the Capitol at every session since forever. In 2013, for example, then-Gov. Sam Brownback opened the building to eight hours of continuous nondenominational prayer. Last year, on May 2, the National Day of Prayer, speakers inside the Capitol rotunda included Brownback and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach.

The showdown between Kelly and the satanists is likely to be historic. While claiming to balance the free speech rights of the Satanic Grotto against the public interest in health and safety, she trampled on the former and was opaque about the latter.

“There are more constructive ways to protest and express disagreements without insulting or denigrating sacred religious objects,” Kelly chided in a statement released March 12. “However, as governor, I also have a duty to protect protesters’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression, regardless of how offensive or distasteful I might find the content to be.”

Kelly then went on to do exactly the opposite, by saying the event would not be allowed inside the Capitol, but moved to the grounds outside. No protests would be allowed inside the building that day.

“It is important to keep the Statehouse open and accessible to the public while ensuring all necessary health and safety regulations are enforced,” the statement said.

No indication was given, however, of exactly what safety or health regulations might be jeopardized by the event, or how keeping the building accessible to the public was consistent with barring a public protest for which all necessary permits had been acquired.

Michael Stewart, founder and president of the Satanic Grotto, the group planning the event, has said he will defy Kelly and hold the “black mass” inside the Capitol building anyway. If Capitol Police want to stop them, he vowed, they will have to arrest them.

Stewart, a 42-year-old rural Linwood resident, said the event would be a nonviolent protest of traditional Christian religion. He expected about three dozen members of the grotto to attend, he said.

“Ours is a direct reflection of our anger and hurt as it revolves around Christianity,” Stewart told me.

The first floor rotunda, with its cardinal points on the marble floor, is the perfect place for their event.

“We will mark the four stations of blasphemy and make sure the message we deliver is powerful and that it reminds not just Catholics, but all people, all Christians, all religious folk that we’re not the center of our universe,” he said.

The March 28 event would not be the full “black mass” the group normally observes, he said, because that would involve nudity, drinking and other activities discouraged at the Statehouse. There also wouldn’t be fire or anything used in the ceremony that might pose a physical risk to the public. Communion wafers would be destroyed, he said, perhaps by grinding them under heel, but he declined to say whether the wafers would be consecrated.

“We get this question a lot,” he said. “The Catholics have made a big issue out of this. No one in my organization has stolen anything, or obtained it through false means or lies. … The communion wafer will still represent the body of Christ, and there will be a desecration of it. We are using that to manifest Satan.”

An online petition to stop the event had gathered nearly 15,000 signatures as of March 15. The petition, hosted by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property — a traditionalist Catholic advocacy group — asked Kelly and Topeka Mayor Michael A. Padilla to intervene. TFP’s national headquarters is Spring Grove, Pennsylvania.

“Every black mass is an act of hatred against God,” said John Ritchie, director of TFP Student Action, in an email after I asked for comment. “Just consider what satanists do during a black mass: They attack and desecrate a consecrated host, which is typically stolen from a Catholic Church. Theft is immoral and illegal. And sacrilege is worse. It’s so bad that even people without any faith find it heinous.”

Satan has no rights, Ritchie contended.

“Satanism was not and never will be a religion,” he said.

It might be appropriate to note that in 2019, the Satanic Temple, headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, was recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a religion. The Satanic Grotto is not affiliated with the Satanic Temple or other groups, Stewart said, but it is registered in Kansas as a nonprofit. Prospective members must be at least 21 and have a sponsor in the grotto.

I asked if Ritchie would debate Stewart, if given the chance.

“If a satanist expresses sorrow or compunction for his sins, I would be happy to speak with him and encourage his or her complete conversion because God’s grace can restore anyone,” he said. “But, sadly, those hardened in sin are not open to the truth.”

TFP, Ritchie said, is organizing a “large rosary rally of reparation” at the Capitol on March 28. “The victorious Saint Michael the Archangel already defeated the powers of darkness. He can defeat Satan again at the Kansas Statehouse.”

At this point, I should say that some of what the Satanic Grotto is planning disturbs me as well. Having been nominally saved to impress a girl at the First Baptist Church at Baxter Springs when I was 14 or so, and being fully appreciative of Pascal’s Wager, I would not personally destroy a Bible. It gives me a queasy feeling just thinking about it, and not just because I’m against burning or otherwise obliterating books in general. The thought of treating any sacred text badly, whether the King James or the Koran or the Vedas, gives me tremors.

But that doesn’t mean others should be forbidden from peacefully expressing themselves. The question is whether speech can be so offensive as to actually harm another. How tolerant a society is of unpopular speech is a litmus test for democracy.

Consider the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, which became notorious for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with hateful messages about homosexuality. Somehow, the congregation believed that dead service members were God’s punishment to the United States for tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that such picketing was protected under the First Amendment, even though it causes emotional distress, because it was on a matter of public concern.

The Westboro case isn’t an exact analogy, because the Satanic Grotto does not direct its protest at a specific family or individual, but there are parallels. Stewart, the grotto president, said the goal of the black mass is to grab attention.

“This goes to wake people up,” he said. “To make them pay attention, that ultra-Christian nationalism can be stood against, that there are people who are brave enough to draw a line. I’d rather stand and do something now, to make them come and take me away. … This is just basic human rights.”

Stewart said he is an atheist and doesn’t believe Satan is real.

“We don’t believe in any punishment from God or retribution from Satan,” he said. “What we are doing is creating shared realities and manifesting ideas. Westboro did some messed-up stuff to harm people. We’re not attacking Catholics. We’re attacking the idea of God.”

Stewart described himself as a poor kid from south Kansas City with a high school education who pulled himself up through reading. He’s familiar with the works of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who died in 1947, and Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. One of his mentors, he said, is Darrel Ray, a Kansas City, Kansas, psychologist and current high priest of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

While Stewart is attempting to make a point about tolerance, Ritchie is having none of it.

“Freedom of speech is not absolute,” Ritchie said. “It has limits. Engaging in slander and libel, for example, can be punishable in court. Since every person has a right to his or her good name, it makes sense that the sacred Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, would also be granted the due respect and honor. … Those who yell equal rights the loudest frequently want to erase the Christian faith from our land, rip moral values out of our institutions, and provoke chaos and anarchy.”

This reminds me of the paradox that goes, can God create a rock so heavy even He cannot lift? If God is all-powerful, can He be defamed? If so, what court would hear it?

To enter into a debate about religion is to enter the invisible world of belief.

As Elaine Pagels noted in “The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics,” conversion to Christianity requires renouncing “the devil and all his works.” Pagels traces how the concept of Satan evolved from an ancient Jewish religious conflict to become Christianity’s primary adversary.

“What fascinates us about Satan,” Pagels writes, “is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and envy we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals.”

Satan is also a snappy dresser, according to literature and folklore, rich and attractive and with the power to offer anything you desire, from Helen of Troy to the ability to play a mean blues guitar, just in exchange for your soul. Luckless New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone sold his soul to Mr. Scratch for seven years of good luck, in the 1936 Stephen Vincent Benét story, but gets it back when famed New England lawyer Daniel Webster pleads his case before an otherworldly jury.

Mark Twain had a different take on the devil, recognizing him in us.

“I have always felt friendly toward Satan,” Twain observed in the first volume of his uncut posthumous autobiography, as published in 2010. “Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.”

In the end, I suppose, one’s faith — or one’s intellect — is either strong enough to withstand challenges or it isn’t. If it is, and your beliefs were sincere, wouldn’t God want you to spend your time feeding the poor or providing some other tangible relief to your fellow human travelers?

I will leave such questions to your own heart.

Booting the grotto’s event from the Statehouse may have seemed like an easy win for Kelly, but I can’t help but think the implications will come back to haunt her. There is, of course, the appearance of religious discrimination and the chilling effect it might have on the expression of unpopular beliefs.

But there is another danger.

It encourages deference to religion. When this happens, true believers are more likely to resort to violence to end perceived blasphemy.

Salman Rushdie, among the world’s greatest contemporary novelists, was left blind in one eye after being stabbed repeatedly in 2022 during an assassination attempt in New York. Rushdie had been hunted and in hiding for years after publishing his novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1989, which some Muslims found blasphemous and for which the supreme leader of Iran called for his death.

There are other examples closer to home.

Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber, was an adherent of Christian identity, and members of the white supremacist group The Order killed Jewish talk show host Allen Berg in 1984. I wrote about Christian Identity, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the road to Jan. 6 in a previous column.

There is also the killing of George Tiller, a physician and abortion provider in Wichita. He was shot to death in 2009 by an anti-abortion extremist. Tiller was shot in the head at the Reformation Lutheran Church, where he served as an usher.

While some of us speaking their minds may make most of us feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is the cost of admission to a democracy in which free speech is valued. Failing to protect unpopular opinions weakens our democracy — and encourages the mob to shout down, or permanently extinguish, our most original voices.

The government can regulate the time, place, and manner of free speech demonstrations, but these decisions must not be based on content. Kelly’s decision to move the satanic event outside the building appears to be largely based on content. By ordering the event outside, even if her desire were to protect the public, she effectively canceled the group’s permit and muzzled their speech.

She also set a precedent that looks dangerously close to a religious test for Capitol protests. Today it’s the irksome satanists. Tomorrow, if Christian nationalists have their way, it might be anybody who doesn’t salute the flag and kiss the cross.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

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