Iowa city council erupts after ‘hail Satan’ opening — but does the Establishment Clause protect it?

On October 6, at an Ottumwa, Iowa, City Council meeting, former council member Matt Dalbey — a member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa — delivered the opening invocation. In it, he addressed the “dark father,” referred to the “Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge,” and concluded with the words “It is done. Hail Satan.”

Despite the Satanic Temple’s claims to be non-theistic, local pastor Rick Bick called it a curse on the city that needed to be reversed.

BlazeTV host of “Strange Encounters” Rick Burgess agrees. Even though he believes the Satanic Temple “really is more of an agnostic movement” designed to test the limits of “freedom of religion,” he nonetheless takes invocations of Satan as matters of spiritual seriousness.

Council Member Bill Hoffman,