Over the past decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has significantly expanded religious liberty, restoring religion’s rightful place in the public square. In response, irreligious groups have moved to exploit this advance by turning religious freedom protections into a weapon against authentic religion. Their sacrilegious strategy is slowly succeeding. This raises a fundamental, largely unanswered question: What exactly counts as “religion”?
The Satanic Temple (TST) is a nontheistic political activist organization that rejects the supernatural. It treats Satan as a metaphorical “Eternal Rebel,” a symbol of opposition to arbitrary authority and the right to question sacred laws. The Catholic League has documented TST’s heinous radicalism firsthand: the group opened what it called “the world’s first religious abortion clinic,” staged a “Satanic BDSM Babies” stunt, and poured blood over a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
TST has filed numerous lawsuits invoking First Amendment Free Exercise and Establishment Clause claims to challenge abortion restrictions, demand “After School Satan” clubs in public schools, and install occult statues on government property.
Recently, in one of these occult statue cases, an Arkansas federal district court struck down a state law permitting a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol. The court held that the law violated the Establishment Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection rights of TST, among other plaintiffs, explicitly recognizing TST as a religion and ruling that “TST was prevented from competing with Christianity on an equal footing for placement of its [occult] monument on State Capitol grounds.”
The ruling comes just weeks after two related victories.
In Stinson v. Fayetteville School District No. 1, a federal judge permanently blocked an Arkansas law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools and libraries, citing Free Exercise violations on behalf of atheist, agnostic, and non-religious parent plaintiffs.
And in Anonymous Plaintiff 1 v. Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana, a state court permanently blocked enforcement of Indiana’s abortion ban because it violated the plaintiffs’ rights under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The plaintiffs claimed a “supernatural force…larger than any individual person” compelled them to seek abortions; the court explicitly deemed these “personal religious and spiritual beliefs.”
Why are irreligious groups succeeding in inverting the First Amendment and perverting religious liberty?
As legal analyst Frank DeVito documented in “The Original Meaning of Religion,” the U.S. Supreme Court has had a decades-long doctrinal drift in its definition of religion. The Constitution never defines religion; the First Amendment simply bars laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In United States v. Ballard (1944), the Court began subjectivizing religion by prioritizing the “sincerity” of belief over its truth or traditional content. Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) gestured towards extending constitutional protections to non-theistic systems such as Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, and Secular Humanism. United States v. Seeger (1965) and Welsh v. United States (1970) went further, granting religious exemptions to beliefs that were “purely ethical or moral,” rooted in “history and sociology” rather than theology. Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) tried to draw a line between philosophical and religious convictions, but the dam had already broken.
DeVito further observes that most modern court decisions address only whether a belief system resembles a religion, not whether it actually is one. But take, for example, theistic Satanism, which worships Satan as a literal deity and steals consecrated hosts from Catholic masses to use in satanic black masses that mock Christ. Even if theistic Satanism may function like a religion, it is not one substantively, in any correct sense of the term.
In discussing whether Satanism could qualify as a protected religion, a Seventh Circuit judge wrote, “We should not lightly conclude that because of its content, Satanism is to be denied the full protections of the First Amendment. . . . Basically, therefore, we ought to give the Devil his due.” Rebellion against God is not religion; the devil is not due the same constitutional protection as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Conservative religious advocates are starting to push back against the secular paradigm by articulating an objective definition of religion. In McCutchan v. Nicholson, a Texas district court ruled in July 2025 that a secular humanist group seeking to officiate marriages “is not a religious organization or a religion under the First Amendment.” That decision is now on appeal before the Fifth Circuit, where the Becket Fund, a religious liberty law firm, filed an amicus brief urging the court to return to the original, Founding era meaning of religion as articulated by James Madison: “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.”
The Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court should adopt Madison’s historic definition of religion. What hangs in the balance is not merely a legal definition but the integrity of religious liberty itself. The First Amendment must protect authentic religion, not become a tool for dismantling it. Because if everything is a religion, then nothing is.
