A Doctrine Defined Against LaVey

The Satanic Temple presents its Seven Tenets as a deliberate evolution beyond, and in several places a direct rejection of, the Nine Satanic Statements that had defined organized Satanism since 1966. Where LaVey's statements drew on social Darwinist language and prized a hierarchy of the strong over the weak, the Temple's own materials explicitly reject what they describe as LaVeyan social Darwinism as inconsistent with a modern understanding of evolutionary biology and cooperation, and reject what they call a LaVeyan fetishization of authoritarianism as incompatible with individual sovereignty, the value the Temple places above all others.

The two organizations have traded public criticism since the Temple's founding in 2013. The Church of Satan has characterized the Temple's activism as a political project with no real connection to LaVey's philosophy and has questioned whether the Temple constitutes a genuine religious tradition at all, while the Temple has dismissed the Church of Satan as an aging and largely inactive organization no longer central to Satanism's development. Scholars of new religious movements have generally treated the dispute as a genuine doctrinal split rather than mere rivalry, since the two bodies disagree in substance: LaVeyan Satanism keeps a broadly occult, ceremonial self-presentation even within its atheism, while the Temple's Satanism is explicitly rationalist, political and without a ceremonial or ritual claim to hidden or esoteric knowledge.