SEATTLE - A group of robe-wearing, incense-spreading, self-described Seattle Satanists plans to attend a Washington state high school football game on Thursday, in the latest turn of a controversy over a Christian coach’s postgame prayers.
Bremerton High School senior class President Abe Bartlett said Wednesday that he was one of a few students who invited The Satanic Temple of Seattle to attend the game. He called it an effort to get the school district to clarify its policy: While officials last month asked assistant coach Joe Kennedy to stop praying at the 50-yard line, he has continued the practice and threatened a lawsuit if the district forces him to stop.
“Coach Kennedy has expressed an interest in filing a lawsuit against the school district, and I think that was crossing a line - we’re a low-income school district,” said Bartlett, 17. “But the main reason I did it is to portray to the school district that I think we should either have a policy that we’re not going to have any religious affiliation or public religious practices, or they should say people are going to be allowed to practice their religion publicly whatever their beliefs.”
“They need to either go black or white,” he said. “I don’t think this controversial middle ground is what our school needs.”
The controversy has focused attention in Bremerton, across the Puget Sound west of Seattle, and beyond on the role of religion in public schools. On Tuesday, dozens of lawmakers in the Congressional Prayer Caucus sent a letter to the superintendent expressing support for the coach.
Kennedy has vocally engaged in pregame and postgame prayers, sometimes joined by students, since 2008. But the practice recently came to the district’s attention, and it asked him to stop.
The district said in a letter last month that while Kennedy may have had good intentions, he was opening the school to potential liability if he engaged in religious activity with students or was seen as endorsing it. The letter cited U.S. Supreme Court and appeals court cases, and told him he was free to practice while on the clock as long as he did so away from students or the prayers were not demonstrative.
He initially agreed to the ban, but then, with support from the Texas-based Liberty Institute, a religious-freedom organization, he resumed the postgame prayers, silently taking a knee for 15 to 20 seconds at midfield after shaking hands with the opposing coaches. His lawyers insist he is not leading students in prayer, just praying himself.
In response, The Satanic Temple, which has 42 members in its Seattle chapter, announced that its members were open to being invited to a game, and a few students and teachers extended such invitations, the group said. The organization doesn’t believe in Satan except as “a potent symbol of rebellion against tyranny,” it says on its website. It’s an atheist group that rejects the notion of supernatural deities and espouses values such as scientific inquiry and compassion, it says.
The group suggested that by allowing the coach to continue praying, the district has created a forum for religious expression open to all groups. It requested permission to perform an invocation on the field after the game. The district had not responded as of Wednesday and did not respond to a request for comment except to confirm that it received the request.
“It’ll definitely be a theatrical production - robes, incense, we have a gong,” chapter head Lilith Starr said. “There are a number of students and teachers at Bremerton High who don’t feel like they’re being represented on the football field.”
Kennedy’s lawyer, Hiram Sasser, called the Satanists’ effort “a gimmick to threaten the school district into violating Coach Kennedy’s rights.”
“The school district, by allowing the coach to accommodate his religious beliefs, does not create a public forum,” he said.
As long as Kennedy has a right to be on the field, he has a right to pray there, Sasser said. And if the Satanists are in the stands at the game, they can pray there too.
“Our view is that religious liberty belongs to everybody,” he said. “If the school district tried to prevent them from doing that, we’d think the school district was violating their rights as well.”
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