Satanic Children’s Book Is Inevitable When You Mix Church And State [Op-Ed]

A Satanic children’s book will be distributed to Florida schoolchildren in response to a decision that would allow churches to hand out Bibles to young kids in school.

Called The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities and paid for by the Satanic Temple, the book is not unlike most children’s activity books. There are mazes, connect the dot exercises, compare-and-contrast pictures, and more.

(See it all at The Daily Banter.)

There is no mention of murder or drug abuse or doing evil. Just a bunch of cute characters drawn in cartoony fashion as seen in the image above.

Nevertheless, the outrage exists for this material from some of the very people who support the Bible judgment, and as a Christian person, I’ve got to say, I don’t get it.

We live in a country of 318 million people, give or take. Not everyone is going to be raised in a church home. Some kids grow up sleeping on floors and caring for their younger siblings because Mom and Dad are hooked on drugs and out of their minds.

Some kids don’t receive proper medical treatment because Mom and Dad are religious fanatics who misinterpret the very Scriptures they supposedly support.

The public education system is a flawed and increasingly ineffective way of trying to provide the right tools to children with disadvantages like these while also trying to prepare advantaged students for the next stage of life.

In other words, schools need to prepare a wide diversity of children to succeed, and they can’t do that amid the constant overreach and conflict that surrounds the Church and State debate.

I know religious people, and have seen them do many great things for their community. My beef isn’t with anyone who is religious. As noted, I consider myself a Christian and plan to raise my child that way.

But there is a certain degree of reality you have to swallow when you live in a country with hundreds of millions of other people who aren’t shaped by the same human experience.

You can be a Christian at home and work by how you carry yourself. You don’t have to convert your government. That was never “the Call.”

Christianity rose to prominence in Ancient Rome, one of the most decadent cultures to walk the face of the earth.

For years, many scholars believe that Christians had to live in fear for their lives just to practice the faith. They had no foothold on government, only their beliefs to guide them.

Christianity has also survived in modern cultures that are much less tolerant and much more violent towards the belief. (Boko Haram is our most recent reminder.)

Clearly, Christians can be Christians in any environment if they’re actually faithful to the religion and believe what they’re “selling.” They don’t need government edicts or Bibles in schools or prayers before football games to do what they believe they were put on this earth to do.

That’s not how this country was designed, and it’s not how it has grown after close to 240 years of existence.

Christians need to stop their obsession with being in government if they are going to make up the ground they’ve lost, according to this survey reported by ABC News.

That’s not to say that a Christian shouldn’t run for office or let his beliefs in a greater good guide him/her in service.

But there will be parts of this government (or any) that are always limiting in how one can practice their faith, especially when there are so many people from different backgrounds and belief systems that have every right to be who they are.

With that said, the Satanic children’s book doesn’t invoke outrage from me. It is, unfortunately, an inevitable result of mashing together Church and State in a country that was built on the ideology of keeping the two separate.