LaVey's Nine Statements have generated as much internal Satanic disagreement as external controversy. Michael Aquino, a Church of Satan priest, broke with LaVey in 1975 over questions of organizational direction and LaVey's own conduct, founding the Temple of Set on the claim of a direct communication from an Egyptian deity, Set, and replacing LaVey's atheistic framework with an explicitly theistic one centered on the doctrine the Temple calls Xeper, self-directed becoming. The split was personal as much as doctrinal, but it produced the first major organized rejection of LaVeyan Satanism from within the movement it created.
The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, positions itself as a further departure, adopting its own Seven Fundamental Tenets rather than LaVey's nine and explicitly rejecting what it characterizes as LaVeyan social Darwinism and a fetishized authoritarianism, in favor of an activist, community-facing organization built around individual sovereignty, empathy and evidence-based reasoning. The Church of Satan, for its part, has publicly dismissed the Satanic Temple's activism as a political project unrelated to LaVey's own philosophy.
A separate current, represented by the Order of Nine Angles, criticizes LaVeyan Satanism from an opposite direction, describing it as a tamed, psychologized version of a properly transgressive and, in the order's own self-description, traditional Satanism. Between these positions, the Nine Statements function less as a settled scripture than as the fixed point every later current in modern Satanism has had to define itself against.