Unicorns Live in My Shoes
What was the Satanic Grotto event, anyway?
“You’re allowed to believe in a god. You’re allowed to believe unicorns live in your shoes for all I care. But the day you start telling me how to wear my shoes so I don’t upset the unicorns, I have a problem with you. The day you start involving the unicorns in making decisions for this country, I have a BIG problem with you.”
― Matthew Shultz1
Outrage boiled over at the Kansas statehouse last Friday, as members of The Satanic Grotto held a demonstration on the grounds, opposite much larger crowds of people who actually did believe in Satan.
Defying Governor Kelly and the legislature, Grotto president Michael Stewart later entered the Capitol, proceeded to the Rotunda, and began to read something aloud. He was assaulted by a man named Marcus Schroeder, who twice tried to physically tear the papers from Stewart's hands.
In response, Stewart punched Schroeder twice.
Stewart was taken to the floor and arrested by multiple Capitol Police. Schroeder also went to jail.
So ended roughly two weeks of anticipation and rising “how dare theys” surrounding the Satanic Grotto event in Topeka.
Sure, there'll probably be a lawsuit or two, but the drama is over, and that's all people really care about. So now that heads stand a small chance of being calmer, we can ask, What was the Grotto event? Was it a protest? A stunt? A troll? A religious ceremony? Let’s analyze.
Hypothesis #1: A Protest
It was kind of a protest. But a protest against what? Well, take your pick. The Grotto’s About Us page explains that they are “feminist, LBGTQ allies, and Anti racist,” so there’s a metric ton of things the Kansas legislature has been doing that folks with those views could see fit to protest.
Moving to elect state supreme court judges because the non-partisan, meritocratic process we currently use to appoint them tends to follow logic and law and thus results in decisions like, “Hey, you actually have to fund schools, and no, you can’t ban abortion.” That sort of thing frustrates advocates of parochial education who want the state to pay for religious indoctrination. It positively infuriates anti-abortion folks who want to impose their desire to control women’s bodies and choices on everyone within our borders, despite a whole election on a constitutional amendment we had about that issue in 2022.
The Republican majority hates transgender folks, desires to roll back same-sex marriage, and wants to shunt queer kids into the custody of foster and adoptive families looking to “convert” them.
They also seem to target disciplinary procedures against Black legislators, and their recent outcry against antisemitism saw them squint for the fine print in Robert’s Rules of Order to find a procedural way to avoid condemning racism with the same measure.
So there’s no shortage of relevant things to protest in the Statehouse rotunda if you’re a member of the Grotto. Grotto President Michael Stewart’s quotes to the press are kinda all over the place. He’s out to “wake people up,” to “attack the idea of God,” to stand against “ultra-Christian nationalism,” and/or to establish the precedent of “freedom of religion for everyone in public spaces.
Wrap up all the semi-mixed messages, slap a ribbon on top, and you can call what Stewart and the Grotto oppose Christian hegemony, the dominance of a specific religious worldview (or, to be overly kind to my Christian friends, a certain strain of a specific religious worldview). Christian hegemony is both easy to evidence, yet also the sea in which we swim, so this can explain both how the Grotto’s protest might seem vague or diffuse and why so many anti-Grotto folks saw this as utterly gratuitous, undeservedly mean-spirited, and coming from left field.
But none of this matters, of course.
Other protesters in the Rotunda have blamed Satan for policies they dislike. Anti-abortion folks, Christian Nationalists and those who use their rhetoric come to mind. Theirs is a worldview where the Prince of Darkness (but whose name means Light Bringer, Light Bearer, or Morning Star) is real and active and inspiring, recruiting, or controlling their opponents. So the “Satanists” are just asking for equal time.
It doesn’t matter—or, well, it shouldn’t matter—if the group protesting believes that they receive divine instructions from a psychic billboard on Wanamaker during their daily work commute. They have a right to protest. They shouldn’t be forced to do so in the back yard when other groups get to assemble inside.
So shame on Governor Kelly and all those who lobbied her to make an exception in the case of the Satanic Grotto folks—which is, by the way, Exhibit A in the case that Christian hegemony is the order of the day in our capitol.
Take a look at the non-binding, but proves-the-point, HR 6016:
WHEREAS, The United States of America is one nation under God
Really? Says who? The Pledge of Allegiance? That’s the legislature’s supporting evidence? The nationalistic chant we made all schoolchildren recite in public schools and which didn’t contain the words “under God” for the first 62 years as it spread across the country? We only added the godstuff in 1954 (thanks in part to the Knights of Columbus, note, perhaps to help legitimize Catholics as “true Americans” themselves in a country that had often viewed papists as “Satanic”). That was the peak of McCarthyism, literally six months before Tail-Gunner Joe flamed out, condemned by the Senate for his conspiratorial, enemy-within, Commie panic that still scars the nation as it makes an unwelcome return under Donald Trump.
Newsflash, legislators: the United States is now about one-third religiously unaffiliated, suggesting a big-old chunk of us might dispute the whole “under God” business and bringing to mind one of my favorite lines from the band AJJ:
Give me your poor
Give me your poor
Give me your tired
These bigots in the legislature all need to get fired
For targeting one-third of the state they're supposed to serve
And that's the kind of power that nobody deserves
Yeah, that's the kind of power nobody deserves
But back to HR 6016:
WHEREAS, The planned satanic worship ritual is an explicit act of anti-Catholic bigotry and an affront to all Christians. It blasphemes our shared values of faith, decency and respect that strengthen our communities
When TF did the Kansas State Legislature earn the authority to know jack squat about Satanism or about the Grotto’s specific beliefs and practices? When did it earn the power to hold forth on the theology and political philosophy of all Christians, or speak with an iota of credibility on the subject of “blasphemy”?
When legislators are more comfortable speaking out their asses about what they think they know about religion than what they’re supposed to know about the First Amendment, that’s a good sign not only that legislators are morons, but also that we’re swimming in Christian hegemony.
Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the State of Kansas: That we denounce the planned satanic worship ritual scheduled to take place on the grounds of the people's house, the Kansas state capitol grounds, on March 28, 2025, as a despicable, blasphemous and offensive sacrilege to not only Catholics but all people of goodwill, and it runs contrary to the spiritual heritage of this state and nation; and Be it further resolved: That we call upon all Kansans to promote unity, mutual respect and the values that uphold our identity as one nation under God; and Be it further resolved: That we call upon Kansas Governor Laura Kelly to condemn the stated activity and its implicit use of stolen property.
As a person of goodwill, as a lifelong Kansan2 and American, as an upholder of the First Amendment, as a person who believes in mutual respect to the point that I’m cool with you believing that—sure, okay—unicorns live in your shoes, as someone who actually knows the political history of the Pledge of Allegiance you’re using as a load-bearing prop for this utter horseshit, let me just say to the Kansas Legislators who voted for this flaming paper bag of dookie left on the front porch of our state:
Fuck You.
So, yeah, there’s a shitload of Christian hegemony out there to protest, and whatever else the Satanic Grotto event was about, if they wanted to call attention to, and bait the legislature into even more blatant displays of ramming religion down our collective throats while displaying disqualifying levels of ignorance and indifference to founding principles of Constitutional governance, they succeeded like gangbusters.
Hypotehsis #2: A Stunt
But maybe the Satanic Grotto event was a stunt. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s certainly possible that the group wanted to boost their profile by staging what they could be pretty confident would be a hugely controversial event, all the better to juice their YouTube subscriptions, profile, memberships, donations and whatever other metrics they care about.
This isn’t unusual in the world of “Satanic” groups, from what I gather. Like many folks semi-appreciative of the work of these groups, I first grooved on the work of The Satanic Temple (TST) when they started filing court challenges and using church-state rules to demand equal access to public spaces that had, previously and unthinkingly, privileged Christian denominations and worldviews (more hegemonic seas in which we swim).
Over time, I encountered Queer Satanic and began to learn a bit about the toxic behavior and apparent grifter mindset behind The Satanic Temple folks. I have no dog in this hunt, but the takeaway seems to be that TST are not great people. They seem to be in it for the money and personal aggrandizement. They also sound like absolute dickweeds. My point, however, is that if the Satanic Grotto gravitates more toward TST than Queer Satanic, then they might be grifty self-promoters more than sincere activists.
All that said,
If we barred all the grifty self-promoters from the Statehouse, and a tree fell inside the place, would it make even a sound?
Every activist or advocacy group that ever existed is interested, inherently, in growing its audience and expanding its profile, so, again, big deal. I think they call this “marketing.” This includes legislators seeking re-election. It includes religious denominations seeking converts, tithes, estate planning gifts, and donations to or tax and regulatory breaks for their parochial schools. Laying this charge only at the Grotto matters if you’ve already made up your mind that the Grotto is bad.
Hypothesis #3: A Troll
So maybe this whole thing was an epic troll. Announce this event to trigger the “cross-worshippers,” as my tacky Tasmanian friend never hesitates to call them. What’s the point in trolling? Don’t ask me. I mean, I have theories, but it’s not my bag. You need to ask the millions of Christian nationalists and other MAGA folks (including official GOP committees, cabinet officers, and White House Xitter accounts) that have chosen to make “triggering” people the totus tuus pledge to Trump as well as their reason for existing.
If this was all just an epic troll, boy, did it work almost perfectly. For most of two weeks, all the targeted people were triggered. The legislature. The Catholic Church. All the people who believe in a literal Satan. Probably all the old-heads who still believe in the “recovered-memory” Satanic Panic around daycare centers that resulted in criminal persecution and law enforcement buy-in to the most absurd conspiracies, and which was, of course, a subconscious cultural lashing out at institutions serving women who entered the workforce instead of settling down to a happy tradwife existence. That panic resurfaced and animated Pizzagate and QAnon, of course, taking on a much more blatant partisan valence and trickling down to the rank and file thanks to the Internet and a resurgent culture of vigilantism.
Assuming the event was a massive troll, how should the Grotto opponents have responded?
Pretty much the opposite way they did. They should have yawned. That’s what confident grown-ups do when others start acting like tantrummy children. Don’t feed the trolls.
If you feel you must respond in some way, call out the tactics the trolls are using: speak about them, not to them, talk over their heads to the rational and normal people out there who are shocked at the behavior. And yeah, do it in a hurtful way to wound the trolls. Name and shame their tactics and approaches. Point out how weak it reveals them to be. Explain how your own strength means you don’t have to get down in the pigsty with them because they’re just doing it for attention or to boost their influencer profile or donations or platforms or whatever. Reiterate the righteousness of your side by taking the day to swamp the extensive soup kitchens or other free services your church provides with volunteers as happy servants instead of angry disruptors. This will infuriate the trolls, make your followers feel all the more smug, and save everyone gas money because they won’t have to drive to Topeka to counter-protest.
Or mock the trolls. Make it fun and funny for your side. Get your counter-demonstrators to wear paper Jesus masks and hold up low Olympic judge scores while shaking their heads in disappointment after the Grotto folks try to score a rhetorical point. I dunno, be creative and fun.
Ah, but staid institutionalized religionists aren’t usually known for their anarchic comedy stylings. And this sort of stuff really isn’t on the table when your church’s position is that Satan is a very real entity and terribly, terribly serious. You can’t mock the alleged Luciferians if you want your followers to take the literal Lucifer seriously as a tangible, in-your-face manifestation of the evils you preach and baptise against.
And you can’t attack the Prince of Lies when you’re Tim Huelskamp, so earnestly quoted in press accounts about his pastoral discussions with a priest about debating the Grotto’s Michael Stewart. Huelskamp was the upstanding Catholic defender of truth who pushed text messages lying to Kansas voters about the impact of their votes on the 2022 constitutional amendment that threatened abortion rights. No press accounts I found resurfaced that little nugget of recent historical context.
The closest anyone came to a ballpark proper response to a trolling was Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann when he named the Grotto event as intentionally “provocative,” called out Stewart as a Satanic poser who’s really an atheist, and told his followers to “let them see their faith.”
Not bad, Joe. But you also filed a ridiculous lawsuit against Stewart, drawing more attention to him (and ensuring the counter-protesting crowds would be even bigger and more frothing). You framed atheism as entirely outside the realm of religious views and respect when it is, in fact, a strong position on the entire question of God, faith, evidence, religion, and their impact on our common life, laws, and policies, which you involve yourself and your church in without hesitation.
You criticize the Grotto in terms of its stated political stances, as if to demean it in comparison to your higher, holier concerns, saying they are “really pro-choice, pro-abortion and atheist — present[ing] their abortion advocacy as part of their fake religion so that they can claim religious rights are being violated by any efforts to provide protection to the unborn and their mothers.”
Yet you and other Catholic groups poured $4.3 million into changing the Kansas Constitution when the state Supreme Court didn’t rule your way—the same campaign your boy, Tim Huelskamp used Leonard Leo’s dark money to lie to our citizens about what their votes would mean.
Policy advocacy, attention, influence, headlines, demonstrations, religiously-tinged protests and rallies in the name of your religion, your God, your take on the universe … but no one else’s, Joe. That’s what it comes down to. It’s just harder for folks to see because you coast on long-established norms of deference and respect for your forms of goofy costumes and rituals, whereas contrarian upstarts calling out your injustices are deemed offensive, hate-speaking,3 and blasphemous.
You'll notice I'm getting more snarky with regard to the Archbishop. It's just Matthew Schultz echoing in my head: You're allowed to believe unicorns live in your shoes, but when you start using your clout and special privileges to tell me how to wear my shoes, when you start influencing binding law to blanket the statutes with unicorn-respecting codes of footwear conduct, boy, I start getting pissed. And when I get pissed, I get snarky and anarch-y. Kinda like the Satanist trolls.
It all comes back to double-standards and hypocrisy. The Father of Lies is the enemy of the Church and all "decent" people of "goodwill," but we should overlook the targeted lies funded by Huelskamp with Catholic and right-wing dark money when it comes to pushing the political agenda they all want to ram down our throats. And remember: that political agenda was in the name of rejecting bodily autonomy, first for women, but eventually for all of us. Women, whom the stories tell us Jesus was amazingly woke toward.
Not to mention the whole free-will thing, which God allegedly gave to all of us. Legal and safe abortion seems to jive with such a theological regime allowing people to decide for themselves without the State putting a thumb on the scales in any way. That's if you really believe in judgment after death. But forced-birth advocates want precisely that: to force people to have less choice than God allegedly gave humans, thanks to their influence with agents of a coercive state.
You can't preach a Prince of Peace when your supporters (now indistinguishable from their white evangelical Christian nationalist, insurrectionist, Appeal-to-Heaven flag-waving allies) literally leave your homily to cross the street and join with their brothers and sisters who subscribe to the Jesus as John Wayne transformation, where members of the crowd say things like…
"…nothing in our past compares with what is happening today where God is being directly challenged on the state Capitol grounds." --Francis Slobodnik, Topeka representative of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property
"[Slobodnik] praised people at the rally who were standing in opposition to Satanic Grotto, and referred to them as the Navy Seals of the Catholic faith. He said these activists were willing to confront God’s enemies head-on as if on a field of battle."
[Wichita resident Sam McCrory] said separation of church and state was originally the product of a homogenous Christian population. Satanists and others who diluted that national unity often used constitutional freedoms as a weapon against well-meaning people, he said.
“These sorts of things need to be brutally tamped down,” McCrory said. “Let’s set an example. I think that the United States should be an explicitly Christian nation. If you want to be something other than Christian, I think that’s fine, to an extent. I think they (non-Christians) should have to pay an extra tax.”
Hemant Mehta, whose Friendly Atheist blog has covered the Satanic Grotto story, thinks that Michael Stewart punching a guy more or less ruined all his work. I disagree. Yes, it was bad optics, and yes, the anti-Satanists will make hay of it, but nothing was going to dent their bloodlusty Christian supremacy and ignorance of church-state separation and first amendment necessity anyway. Plus, Mehta is interested in spreading atheism, whereas I'm fine with people having faith, so long as they don't dictate my shoe size based on the number of faerie beasts it should be able to accommodate.
I look at Stewart, and I see a dude, pretty vastly outnumbered, probably not exactly an expert in all the stuff he's trying to take on, under a decent amount of stress, getting physically stepped to by Marcus Schroeder.
You might imagine Schroeder as a well-meaning but deeply offended Everyman, but according to Mehta and Queer Satanic, he seems to be a nutty, evil piece of shit who phoned in a fake bomb threat at a Wisconsin Pride event in 2023 and who may have violated the terms of his sentencing agreement for that fun little terroristic stunt with what he did in Topeka (prayers up for that outcome!).
So all the attention the Christian nationalists and the Catholics, the Kansas legislature and Governor Kelly, gave to the Satanic Grotto—that's right, choosing to feed the trolls instead of ignoring them or playing up the non-militant side of their religion—attracted this apparent violent criminal bottom-feeder Schroeder to start the fight. This is how you get vigilantes, not folks who turn the other cheek. And the irony is, the Church has all the power in this equation.
I guess it’s a good thing the Capitol has metal detectors. Though it's undoubtedly an infringement on what Jesus-As-John-Wayne Would Do.
Hypothesis #4: A Religious Ceremony
Was the Grotto’s demonstration a religious ceremony? Probably not.
Here we get into the weeds on what constitutes a “religion.” As far as I can tell, the Satanic groups I appreciate don’t fit that definition because they, unlike literalist Christians, don’t really believe in a supernatural entity named Satan except maybe as a metaphor or symbol of free inquiry and individual liberty. Insofar as they have ceremonies and rituals, these seem either campy, trollish, or goofy, but that’s my bias kicking in. They seem to glom onto the opposing figures and images of Christianity because they’re the opposing images of Christianity, rather than simply advocating atheism or opposing Christian hegemony. They choose Satanism as a shock-jock way of advocating atheism and opposing Christian hegemony.
Is it effective? Beats me. It sure gets under people’s skin (see above under trolling). They don the trappings of religion and cultishness from the opposite pole to expose the hatred and intolerance of the followers of the Prince of Peace, not to mention a lot of the rank silliness when you step back and consider things objectively (asking a court of law to weigh in on the question of whether or not Stewart was in possession of Jesus in a cracker, for instance).
All of which raises the matter of faith-based asymmetry in America: if you have a group whose worldview tries to be rational and evidence-based, that tries to avoid grand leaps of logic, that does not insist that its members subscribe to core tenets of a creed based on supernatural claims, divine revelation, and principles derived from them … you don’t get to call yourself a “church” or a “religion.” Thus, you don’t get to claim religious perks or exemptions the faithy outfits receive. You have to call yourself a “party” or an “advocacy organization” or a “lobby.” You get downgraded in esteem and deference as a result. You get subjected to a lot more rules and strictures the “churches” and “religions” don’t have to bother with, because we axiomatically accept that those folks will just rattle off a bunch of assertions and unprovable claims and get away with it. Hell, they’ll get massive grace from all quarters because they’re respected religious institutions whose members cannot be gainsaid. Why not? Because they believe things without evidence, on faith, and we carve out a huge category of exceptional protection and honor for such groups. It’s a society-wide subsidy on the basis on irrationality.
So I don’t much blame the Grotto-type folks for their approach. They may not seem much like a “real religion” to me, but real religions don’t even stand a chance when Christian hegemony decides it wants to wield its power: witness the argument from many Jews that bans on abortion infringe on their religion. This, to me, seems like a heck of an argument on freedom of religion grounds to axe such bans and restrictions, but I see zero traction.
For that matter, if individuals’ “sincerely held beliefs” regardless of membership in and adherence to tenets of an established religious tradition that frowns on vaccines are nevertheless good enough for vaccine refusal—which is now the policy of the state of Kansas as regards day care settings—I don’t see why the same wouldn’t be fine for abortions or for gender affirming care and so on. But these all seem to run counter to the prevailing mood of Christian hegemony, and we just can’t have that.
When groups don the mantle of “religion” and wider society accepts that costuming, they pull off a kind of faux-democratic transformation. It’s been said that all religions are just cults that have gained popularity, and there’s something to that. At the root of religion is the irrational, or at least the non-rational: faith—belief in something that is not objectively provable, and usually only weakly demonstrable to skeptics or doubters. I have nothing against faith. In fact, I think all of us are “faith-based” in a thousand ways. I cannot, for example, “prove” to you that human beings are possessed of dignity as humans and should be treated as such. I cannot switch on an electron microscope and pinpoint a “human right” on its screen. Yet I act as if such things are real and true, not so much because I believe they are but because I wish to bring such realities into existence with my actions and words in this world; I think the world is better with such notions widespread and firmly bedrocked into it.
But religions, those “cults that grow big enough to wear institutional hats,” wield something similar to democratic clout. They “represent” the unprovable convictions of large communities of believers, so they seem to act like constituencies in a democracy. And politics has always factored the views of such believers in. They enjoy the immunities of churches while wielding the clout of interest groups, while enjoying the ability to crap on other interest groups for … not being churches like them.
Insofar as these believers base their positions, votes, activism, and advocacy on things that are immune to the common democratic language of reason, they are anti-democratic. Reason (you can call it common sense) is supposed to be the lingua franca that allows people from all walks of life to meet together in the public sphere and hash out compromises that allow us all to live tolerable lives. It requires everyone to remember that we live in a big country where not everyone agrees yet all have the right to disagree. If reason is trumped by immovable faith-based convictions, then no compromise is ever possible and dissent becomes intolerable. That’s why we have church-state separation in the first place, and it’s why it’s dangerous as hell that the most faith-based in America have gravitated to the political Right for decades now in response to active wooing.
All of which ultimately redounds to Governor Kelly and to the legislators who sucked up to the outraged religious throng by passing a resolution condemning the Grotto event. Because the Satanic Grotto folks lack a major “constituency,” they get the shaft: banished to the yard for their demonstration, condemned by the legislature, treated like a cult.
Because the Catholic Church has immense power and membership, reinforced by the white evangelicals who either literally believe in demons or who have become so politicized they demonize anything coded “lib,” they get deference, respect, and supplication—in addition to friendly bills passed into law to codify their worldview and political positions, restricting the rights of all Kansans, regardless of our religious views. These folks get treated as a religion. As legitimate.
Yet if you look at the argument, the claims, the facts in evidence … as vague and maybe chock full of holes as the Satanic Grotto’s positions may be as political philosophy, it’s not terrible, and it’s not less incoherent than the hypocrisies of Christian nationalism and Christian hegemony that our lawmakers seem perfectly fine to aid and abet.
As far as I can tell, this quote is from the Matt Schultz who is the vocalist for the band Cage the Elephant. I could be wrong. It’s not an uncommon name, the Internet is enshittified, and all I really care about here is the sentiment, which absolutely rocks, so it’s apt that it might come from a rocker. By the way, as verse three relevantly reminds us, there really “Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked.”
Minus about a bummer year as an Ohioan.
“What I do not understand is why we are giving our Capitol as a venue for what truly is hate speech.” —Archbishop Joseph Naumann.
