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If your civil institutions require equal time for Jesus Christ and Satan, then your civil institutions have gone astray.

Fortunately, it would take only a basic understanding of history, not to mention a semblance of a spine, for civil servants to recognize that American institutions require no such accommodation of evil.

According to WMUR-TV in Manchester, New Hampshire, a Satanic Temple “holiday” display at the State House in Concord suffered damage shortly after its erection on Saturday, thereby proving that the unidentified vandal has a better historical understanding and much stronger spine than the government officials who permitted or even encouraged the display in the first place.

The Satanic Temple poses as an organization committed to values such as empathy and reason.

As its repellent website makes plain, however, it exists primarily to promote abortion.

In other words, it operates true to form for a group named after the father of lies.

As it has done elsewhere, The Satanic Temple erected a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed occult symbol, at the New Hampshire State House.

Predictably, an elected Democrat encouraged the display.

“I approached them as a person who cares about equal representation on public grounds for religions,” Democratic state Rep. Ellen Read said.

Saturday on Facebook, Concord city officials made it clear that they felt bullied by The Satanic Temple.

“Throughout the country, the Satanic Temple has both threatened and brought lawsuits under the First Amendment when excluded,” the City of Concord wrote.

Thus, “[u]nder the First Amendment and to avoid litigation,” the city decided to allow all holiday displays.

To his credit, Concord Mayor Byron Champlin recognized The Satanic Temple’s insidious motives and thus objected to the display.

“I opposed the permit,” Champlin told the Boston Globe, “on the basis that the request was not made in the interest of promoting religious equity, but to drive an anti-religious political agenda leveraging the attention one can receive during this time of year.”

The statue and its diabolical message had “cracks across the middle and chunks of text missing” within 48 hours.

We may thank the heroic vandal for that.

In the meantime, public officials need to learn that the First Amendment does not protect satanism. It has nothing to do with Baphomet statues.

This same issue arose during the 2023 holiday season, when The Satanic Temple placed a similar display inside the Iowa Capitol.

Then, as now, state officials assumed that the First Amendment required equal protection for such displays. Then, as now, they erred in that assumption.

“Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe,” James Madison, author of the First Amendment, wrote in 1785.

Moreover, according to President John Adams, one cannot read the U.S. Constitution in purely secular terms.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” Adams wrote in 1798.

Thus, the Constitution protects anti-religious speech, but it does not — indeed, it cannot — require equal protection for religion and satanism. For the Constitution and “Civil Society” to exist at all, a community must embrace the former and reject the latter.

Outraged citizens, including the brave Christian who destroyed the 2023 Iowa statue, understand this better than most public servants do.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.