Bound for hell: A satanic display is likely to be placed in Florida's Capitol

The Satanic Temple is in a battle with the state of Florida. Last holiday season, the Department of Management Services, an arm of the state government, allowed religious groups to construct displays of faith in the rotunda of Tallahassee's Capitol Building. First a Christian group erected a nativity scene that endorsed Christianity. Then an atheist group hung a winter solstice banner celebrating the Bill of Rights and freedom from religion. Inspired, another atheist built a Festivus pole made of beer cans, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster added a small pile of holy noodles.

Under current First Amendment law, the Capitol had no ability to turn down any of these groups; once the government opened the door to one religion, it had to let them all in.

But when the Satanic Temple applied to erect a display featuring an angel falling into a pit of fire, state officials turned it down. The display, they explained, was "grossly offensive during the holiday season." Now, with Christmas around the corner, the temple is reapplying, asserting its constitutional right to include its display alongside the others. And this time, it's bringing a legal team.

How did the Florida Capitol become the center of a constitutional showdown launched by Satanists? Surprisingly, the fault lies squarely with the U.S. Supreme Court's most conservative justices. In their quest to let the government endorse and sponsor mainstream religion, they accidentally granted groups like the Satanists and the Pastafarians a constitutional right to force the government to advertise their beliefs.

The seeds of the current Satanist showdown were planted in 1984, when the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, argued that it had a right to fund blatantly religious Christmas displays using taxpayer money. Five conservatives on the Supreme Court agreed, holding that the First Amendment (which bars the government from making any laws "respecting an establishment of religion") did not forbid the city from financing religious displays.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled that the image of Christ in a manger was merely a "celebration of a public holiday with traditional symbols" and thus served "legitimate secular purposes." (When the dissenting justices pointed out that the court had placed deeply holy figures on the same spiritual level as "Santa's house or reindeer," Burger scoffed, "Of course this is not true." He did not elaborate further on his reasoning.)

Five years later, a similar issue reared its head after the city of Pittsburgh placed religious displays including a Hanukkah menorah and a nativity scene in the Allegheny County Courthouse. A badly splintered court ruled that the nativity scene endorsed Christianity in violation of the Establishment Clause, because an angel held a banner that proclaimed "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" ("Glory to God in the Highest").

The majority was also troubled by the scale of the nativity display; it was placed on the "grand staircase" of the courthouse, lending the impression that the city held it in special esteem. Six members of the court, however, ruled that the menorah didn't unconstitutionally endorse religion. Placed outside the courthouse, next to a Christmas tree and a sign saluting liberty, the menorah was, in the eyes of the court, merely a celebration of "the winter-holiday season, which has attained a secular status in our society."

The implicit message of the Allegheny case was that cities can allow, and even finance, religious displays on government property as long as the city doesn't appear to be favoring one religion over another. In most cities, these rulings have led to an all-comers policy; if officials permit every applicant to construct a religious display, after all, they can hardly be accused to preferring a specific religion. For a while, the policy was tacit and loose. Most cities probably assumed that they retained the ultimate right to refuse a religious display that strayed too far from their sense of decency.

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Bound for hell: A satanic display is likely to be placed in Florida's Capitol