Satan comes to town
One of those “After School Satan Clubs” is coming to Saucon Valley.
Of course it is. Where else?
Can you think of a small Pennsylvania community that has done more to both foment and attract high-profile extremisms on a regular basis?
Nope.
If it’s not white supremacists publishing in our backyards, it’s absolutely bonkers paranoia on local social media and message boards.
Why do national white power orgs pick Hellertown as a place to post flyers?
The answer to that isn’t unrelated to why the Satanic Temple has chosen to test its influence here.
What local school district was the subject of a Rolling Stone Magazine feature a few years ago?
You guessed it.
If I reposted even a fraction of the lunacy posted regularly on certain Saucon Source story reader comments (and pity Publisher Josh Popichak, who has to wade through that dross in the interest of creating a community forum), and called attention to it, I’d have emails begging me to take down the proof of people being who they are.
It’s no wonder Satan has come to town.
But the Satan Club’s brand of airbrushed contrarianism doesn’t do much for me, personally. I’d rather study Renaissance art or read Milton, Marlowe, or the Bible, for that matter, than waste my time with rehashed goth and “pagan” stereotypes run through a Hot Topic corporate-culture conveyor belt and peppered in references to “reason.”
Ha! Reason? Satanists sure ain’t like they used to be. The great Romantic poet Lord Byron, who is often accused (stupidly) of “Satanism,” wrote often of mysterious, tortured, lonely figures, separated from humanity—as in “Manfred”—and definitely not joiners of after school clubs.
Make no mistake: Moral panic will ensue in Hellertown, like clockwork. It already has. And instead of keeping our focus on the larger issues that lead to our schools’ actual problems, every single time, we take the stinkbait and indulge in outrage.
And nothing changes. Not one single elementary school child will score higher in math and science because of the outrage. Meanwhile, a Satan Club flyer promises “science” activities, by the way.
Are you seeing how this all connects?
Some on the left will laugh about all this. The nationally coordinated Satanic club thing is 100% inorganic and concocted to outrage. Why fear them? It’s deliberately provocative, after all, and engineered for maximum attention, like the late Larry Flynt’s Hustler pranks in the service of free speech. The Satanic Temple seems almost cartoonish to libs I know, like Ozzy Osbourne in high mephistophelean mode. Let’s watch the conservatives’ heads explode, the left will think.
Many on the right will react, naturally, with horror and panic, and play right into the hands of the campaign. I totally understand that, but that is precisely the hope of the Satantic Temple, I suspect.
But it’s also possible to be politically somewhere in the middle and just mildly dismayed about this affair. Imagine that.
How about some spectacular moderateness?
I’m Roman Catholic, and like many Christians and other religious people, I do feel disappointed and frankly embarrassed in seeing this group pick on Saucon Valley. There probably isn’t much the school district can do to stop it without wading into dangerous and potentially costly legal hot water. The Constitution is pretty clear about freedom of “religious” organizations.
I just hope more people in my community will take a broader, more critical look at the context within which this is happening, and ask themselves, why is this happening here, and why now?
Because we’re a community where spiky extremisms take root as readily as those banned bamboos species you see near the bike path. As Mick Jagger puts it in “Sympathy for The Devil,” if you want to know who killed the Kennedys, don’t look too far: “It was you and me.”
If kids honestly have a hunger to learn about rationalism (and I question that), for example, and which this group claims to teach, why isn’t that hunger for Plato and Descartes and Spinoza being satisfied in our schools’ actual curriculum?
I’d rather have a state-certified teacher educating my kid about Pythagoras in a basic philosophy class than some local autodidact who’s hopped up the latest Mercyful Fate album.
Still, it’s the larger context that is the problem, not this particular manifestation
There are reasons why Saucon Valley School District once again is focused on reacting to problems rather than pursuing, above all, educational excellence.
Frankly, being jerks to one another is easier than coping with reality. Outrage is a drug.
Here’s the unflattering reality: Our good school district, if the elementary school is any indication of its future, is now in decline or, at best, deeply mediocre and meh.
If you want to be disturbed, be disturbed about that. We can do better!
We’re not even trying to go toe-to-toe with districts like Parkland’s, it seems. Our elementary school, in particular, is failing children from low-income families. In my book, that’s evil.
We can do better!
I remember, long ago, having a student I was teaching at Yale. He actually happened to be from Parkland and he was recommending Saucon Valley as a great place to raise a kid as we were moving to the Lehigh Valley. I still think that’s true. But I’m concerned. Would he say the same today? I’m not so sure.
We can do better!
That’s what we should be concerned about, not this silly “devil” episode that will almost surely shrivel on the vine once kids realize being a pawn in a battle among adults isn’t all that fun or interesting.
And if young people really want to piss off our local adults, I can think of no more radical act than picking up a book—something we all, me included, should do more often.
