Symbol Turned to Advocacy

This activist orientation distinguishes The Satanic Temple both from the individualist Church of Satan and from theistic Satanist groups. Founded in 2013, the Temple has gained recognition as a religious organisation while grounding its identity in reason and the defence of civil liberties. Its beliefs are codified in a set of Fundamental Tenets that emphasise empathy, justice, and the primacy of conscience. The affirmation is described here as the Temple presents itself: a non-theistic religion using Satanic symbolism in the service of secular and humanistic values.

Much of the Temple's activism since the 2010s has focused on reproductive rights, arguing that laws restricting abortion access violate its members' sincerely held religious belief in the inviolability of one's own body, the Third Tenet, and its right to have that belief accommodated on the same legal terms courts have extended to other religious objectors; it has pursued this argument in lawsuits in several states, with mixed results, particularly intensifying after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs v.

Jackson Women's Health Organization decision ended the federal constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade. The Temple's use of litigation as a primary form of religious practice is itself part of what makes its self-description as non-theistic and activist rather than devotional accurate to how it actually operates.