From Marx to After School Satan Clubs and the Conversion of Our Children.
Feb 8, 2024 by David Fowler
In 2012, I brought to the legislature a bill that encouraged teachers to present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warning, and human cloning.” It became law, but without former Governor Bill Haslam’s signature and approval. His action helps us see how we went from Karl Marx to Satan Clubs and why those Clubs are likely to convert the next generation.
How the Satan Club Covertly Converts Our Children.
The Satanic Temple said this about its Satan Club:
How can the temple, with a straight face, say its club isn’t affirmatively trying to convert our children?
It’s because they won’t have to do it overtly. They simply know that the cosmology they are affirming and putting before children will do the converting of its own accord over time. Children who grow up breathing the air produced by this cosmological worldview will naturally convert in time. Karl Marx could see this day coming.
Karl Marx’s Critique of Religion Paves the Way for Satan Clubs.
In 1844, in his introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote: “The critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism.”
In other words, godless humanists living in a predominately Christian culture and wanting to change everything had to start with critiquing religion.
Why would Marx say that is the place to start? The answer to that question takes us back to the Middle Ages.
The Religious Cosmology Marx Critiqued.
During that period, also known as the age of Christendom, Jesus, as the God-Man and mediator between God and creation, was the key to understanding and interpretating all things and how the various relationships among them could be harmoniously held together. It is an historical fact that Jesus was the key substantially, i.e., as a real person, and metaphorically, like Satan is proposed to be now.
Marx was saying that with the critique and eventual removal of Jesus as the centralizing figure for understanding everything, everything else could be more easily critiqued and change would follow.
In sum, the Christian understanding of everything would fall apart, and Christianity and its adherents would lose their influence on the minds of others, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Total Conquest of the Christian Cosmology Was Required.
During Hegel’s time, a flat-out denial of God would have met strong resistance and been laughed off, given the lingering effect of Middle Ages thinking.
But Hegel did the next best thing. He proposed a pantheistic cosmology using Christian words devoid of their historic meaning. In doing so, he loosed the first tie to a fundamental doctrine in Christianity, creation out of nothing by God’s fiat.
But Marx said Hegel’s work wasn’t enough. Hegel had pulled God down to earth, but now God needed to be buried under the earth.
Thus, referring to the native Germany he shared with Hegel, Marx wrote that this liberation from the Middle Ages could not happen “unless it liberates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages,” i.e., Hegel’s partial victory.
In other words, total conquest of the “God cosmology” with Jesus as the defining figure was necessary for man to be liberated from God to pursue man’s own ends.'
I would say evidence of that conquest is the constitutional protection that will be given to Satan Clubs in government schools under the First Amendment.
Understanding Governor Haslam’s Actions
The bill Governor Haslam refused to sign into law was overwhelmingly approved by the legislature. By signing the bill, the governor would have been in good political company. So why didn’t he sign it?
Publicly, he said the bill wasn’t that important because he didn’t think it changed anything, and might invite confusion into the classroom, but he also knew there was no point in vetoing it, because the votes were there to override his veto.
But privately, the scientific community knew what was really on his mind. They knew the bill could change things by opening a door to there being Something beyond us that they considered closed. They wrote:
As the pro-education governor trying to lure businesses to Tennessee, Haslam didn’t want to look like he or our state was against science.
The air pressure exerted by the prevailing Marxian cosmology against the fundamental Christian dogma of creation is just hard to overcome, especially when you are the object of high profile public pressure by that cosmology’s adherents and don’t want them to think you are a Neandertal.
A Demonstrable Practical Consequence of the New Cosmology.
In sum, culturally speaking Karl Marx has won (for the time being), and the Satan Clubs are the proof. But there are other practical consequences to this temporary conquest besides overtly religious ones.
For example, fighting to take “Marxism” out of the curriculum is doomed to failure over time since that is the very air all students and society unwittingly breathe. That is why our young adults increasingly support socialism and communism. When it is time for them and those coming behind them to oversee textbooks, it will be as natural as breathing for them to repeal the laws passed today which purportedly take Marxist economic thinking out of the curriculum.
The same will be true for laws passed today to stop Satan Clubs in public schools and for the same reason. The judiciary’s protection of the clubs today will become culture’s approval of them tomorrow.
What is Required if Things are to Change?
This Marxian-Satan Club cosmology will continue to win and “convert” our children until Christians are no longer embarrassed by believing what Genesis says, learn how to defend it without apology and a thousand caveats, and learn how to do what Marx did to them: liberate our nation from its current cosmology.
I don’t have time today to explain how to do that, but I will say this: Christians can’t keep running from the fundamental doctrine on which the whole of Christian thought and the gospel depends and expect to see anything change simply because of the positive laws they enact.
Turns out Haslam was right about one thing, even the law I got enacted hoping to open the kind of dialogue we need changed nothing.
How the Satan Club Covertly Converts Our Children.
The Satanic Temple said this about its Satan Club:
The organization claimed that it offers a ‘non-theistic religion’ with Satan present as a metaphorical literary figure, and that its after-school clubs don’t attempt to convert children to any religious ideology. (emphasis supplied)
How can the temple, with a straight face, say its club isn’t affirmatively trying to convert our children?
It’s because they won’t have to do it overtly. They simply know that the cosmology they are affirming and putting before children will do the converting of its own accord over time. Children who grow up breathing the air produced by this cosmological worldview will naturally convert in time. Karl Marx could see this day coming.
Karl Marx’s Critique of Religion Paves the Way for Satan Clubs.
In 1844, in his introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote: “The critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism.”
In other words, godless humanists living in a predominately Christian culture and wanting to change everything had to start with critiquing religion.
Why would Marx say that is the place to start? The answer to that question takes us back to the Middle Ages.
The Religious Cosmology Marx Critiqued.
During that period, also known as the age of Christendom, Jesus, as the God-Man and mediator between God and creation, was the key to understanding and interpretating all things and how the various relationships among them could be harmoniously held together. It is an historical fact that Jesus was the key substantially, i.e., as a real person, and metaphorically, like Satan is proposed to be now.
Marx was saying that with the critique and eventual removal of Jesus as the centralizing figure for understanding everything, everything else could be more easily critiqued and change would follow.
In sum, the Christian understanding of everything would fall apart, and Christianity and its adherents would lose their influence on the minds of others, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Total Conquest of the Christian Cosmology Was Required.
During Hegel’s time, a flat-out denial of God would have met strong resistance and been laughed off, given the lingering effect of Middle Ages thinking.
But Hegel did the next best thing. He proposed a pantheistic cosmology using Christian words devoid of their historic meaning. In doing so, he loosed the first tie to a fundamental doctrine in Christianity, creation out of nothing by God’s fiat.
But Marx said Hegel’s work wasn’t enough. Hegel had pulled God down to earth, but now God needed to be buried under the earth.
Thus, referring to the native Germany he shared with Hegel, Marx wrote that this liberation from the Middle Ages could not happen “unless it liberates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages,” i.e., Hegel’s partial victory.
In other words, total conquest of the “God cosmology” with Jesus as the defining figure was necessary for man to be liberated from God to pursue man’s own ends.'
I would say evidence of that conquest is the constitutional protection that will be given to Satan Clubs in government schools under the First Amendment.
Understanding Governor Haslam’s Actions
The bill Governor Haslam refused to sign into law was overwhelmingly approved by the legislature. By signing the bill, the governor would have been in good political company. So why didn’t he sign it?
Publicly, he said the bill wasn’t that important because he didn’t think it changed anything, and might invite confusion into the classroom, but he also knew there was no point in vetoing it, because the votes were there to override his veto.
But privately, the scientific community knew what was really on his mind. They knew the bill could change things by opening a door to there being Something beyond us that they considered closed. They wrote:
Probably contributing to Haslam’s unwillingness to sign the bill were the protests from state and national civil liberties, educational, and scientific groups, the editorials against the bill from the state’s major newspapers, and the petition effort organized by Larisa DeSantis of Vanderbilt university, which garnered thousands of signatures calling for a veto.
As the pro-education governor trying to lure businesses to Tennessee, Haslam didn’t want to look like he or our state was against science.
The air pressure exerted by the prevailing Marxian cosmology against the fundamental Christian dogma of creation is just hard to overcome, especially when you are the object of high profile public pressure by that cosmology’s adherents and don’t want them to think you are a Neandertal.
A Demonstrable Practical Consequence of the New Cosmology.
In sum, culturally speaking Karl Marx has won (for the time being), and the Satan Clubs are the proof. But there are other practical consequences to this temporary conquest besides overtly religious ones.
For example, fighting to take “Marxism” out of the curriculum is doomed to failure over time since that is the very air all students and society unwittingly breathe. That is why our young adults increasingly support socialism and communism. When it is time for them and those coming behind them to oversee textbooks, it will be as natural as breathing for them to repeal the laws passed today which purportedly take Marxist economic thinking out of the curriculum.
The same will be true for laws passed today to stop Satan Clubs in public schools and for the same reason. The judiciary’s protection of the clubs today will become culture’s approval of them tomorrow.
What is Required if Things are to Change?
This Marxian-Satan Club cosmology will continue to win and “convert” our children until Christians are no longer embarrassed by believing what Genesis says, learn how to defend it without apology and a thousand caveats, and learn how to do what Marx did to them: liberate our nation from its current cosmology.
I don’t have time today to explain how to do that, but I will say this: Christians can’t keep running from the fundamental doctrine on which the whole of Christian thought and the gospel depends and expect to see anything change simply because of the positive laws they enact.
Turns out Haslam was right about one thing, even the law I got enacted hoping to open the kind of dialogue we need changed nothing.
