Trimming With the Devil in Green Bay

I ’m not one of those obsessive train enthusiasts, but the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is a fascinating place, well worth a visit if you’re in the area. In recent weeks, my respect for the museum has only deepened, and the reason has little to do with the history of steam locomotives or Pullmans.

For the past 15 years, the museum’s “Festival of Trees” has grown into one of its biggest annual fundraising events. As the holiday season gets underway in mid-November, local groups can pay $150 to decorate one of dozens of Christmas trees on the museum grounds. The groups are free to decorate the trees however they like, so long as the decorations do not encourage drug or alcohol use, promote violence by or against anyone or use imagery that is overtly sexual in nature. 

The 66 trees on display this year include a Lego-themed tree, an LGBTQ tree, a half-dozen trees decorated by local church groups, a Satanist tree and a tree extolling the virtues of drinking tea.

Green Bay is a conservative little town where tradition and inoffensiveness are fiercely defended values; it was no surprise when the LGBTQ tree prompted more than a few raised eyebrows and disapproving tongue clucks. But that Satanist tree? Holy mackerel!

Founded in 2012, The Satanic Temple (TST) has always been more interested in defending the First Amendment than in performing blood sacrifices to their Dark Lord. If a state courthouse features a stone carving of the Ten Commandments out front, the TST will go to court to argue (usually successfully) for the right to erect a Satanist statue beside it. If a public school hosts a Christian student club, the TST will form a Satanist club at that same school. They also raise money for assorted social causes that tick off religious fundamentalists, like abortion rights.

Their Railroad Museum tree was decorated with red lights, pentagrams, Baphomets, a large coiled snake and ornaments emblazoned with “Hail Satan!,” “Hail Santa!,” and “Hail Everyone!” It also featured TST’s web address.

Apparently forgetting the whole “Christmas tree” business has Druidic origins, making a Satanic tree as logical as any other, righteous voices from across the political spectrum declared the TST tree an affront to all that is good and true during this holiest of seasons. Incensed Catholic priests and aghast Protestant clergymen lined up to get on local news programs to express their outrage. Random passersby, upon learning there was an evil and wicked tree on display at the National Railroad Museum, gnashed their teeth and bemoaned the fates of the children who they feared would be scarred for life by the briefest glimpse of the accursed evergreen.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, went completely off the rails, if you’ll forgive the low-hanging pun, by holding press conferences and going on Fox News to denounce the devil tree. “It’s impossible to overstate how offensive this is to Christians,” he said. “It would be, in quite a literal sense, the same thing as waving a Hamas flag inside of a synagogue.”

He added, “Conservatives are often accused of launching a culture war or focusing or fixating on cultural issues. But here is a perfect example of how that’s not what’s happening. We’re just trying to defend basic traditions or defend our children in the midst of these basic traditions, from the encroachment of woke ideology.”

Over on Substack, Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves responded to the flapdoodle by writing, “[E]ven if our primary motivation were nothing more than the criticism of religious superstition, it would be an indefensible abridgment of Religious Freedom to deny us that flexibility of religious opinion.”

Amid the tumult — embedded within a wider social context of ideologues on the left and right scrambling to place controls on public libraries and social media — museum CEO Jacqueline Frank stepped up to provide the voice of reason. Not only did she adamantly refuse to remove the tree under pressure from church groups and politicians, but she promised to hold the institution’s line in Christmases Yet to Come. As long as the TST followed the guidelines, she told the Green Bay Press-Gazette, she would not set the dangerous precedent of deciding which group can sponsor a tree and which cannot. Should the Satanists care to decorate another tree next year, she added, they would be welcomed back.

“We’re a non-denominational museum,” Frank said. “We like trains.”