The Satanic Temple

The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic organisation that uses the figure of Satan to test whether religious liberty in the United States is available on equal terms, and its method is to take the state at its word.

If a legislature permits a Christian monument on public land, the Temple applies to place a Baphomet statue beside it. If a school district permits after-school Christian clubs, it applies to run an After School Satan Club. If a state grants religious exemptions from medical regulation, it argues that its own tenets exempt its members too. The point in each case is not the statue. The point is that the authority must either allow it or concede that its accommodation was never neutral.

The Temple is explicitly atheistic. Satan is a literary figure, the rebel against arbitrary authority, taken largely from Milton and the Romantics, and not a being. Its Seven Fundamental Tenets are the nearest thing it has to a doctrine: they commit members to compassion, to the pursuit of justice, to the inviolability of one's own body, to the freedom of others including the freedom to offend, to conforming belief to the best scientific understanding, to rectifying one's mistakes, and to treating every tenet as a guiding principle rather than a rule.

That fifth tenet is the doctrinal statement of the organisation's naturalism. A religion whose nearest thing to a scripture instructs its adherents to follow the evidence wherever it goes is an unusual object, and an entirely intentional one.

The Temple was founded in 2012 by two men using the names Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, and is based in Salem, Massachusetts. In April 2019 the United States tax authorities recognised it as a church, a status it had sought deliberately in order to litigate on the same footing as the bodies it challenges. Some of its own members objected that accepting a privilege it regards as unjust compromises the argument.

Its best-known actions are the Baphomet monument, commissioned in response to a Ten Commandments monument at the Oklahoma state capitol; the After School Satan Clubs; and litigation asserting that its abortion ritual is protected religious exercise. The last has largely failed. The Missouri effort was rejected in 2020, and cases in several other states have generally been dismissed, frequently on procedural grounds rather than on the merits of the religious claim.

In November 2018 it sued over the use of a copy of its Baphomet statue in a television series, and the matter was resolved within weeks on undisclosed terms.

The criticism it draws divides in two. From outside, that it is a political campaign in religious clothing and that its members do not believe anything; the Temple's answer is that a sincere non-theistic religion is a recognised category in American law and that its tenets are held in earnest. From inside, that the organisation is centralised and intolerant of dissenting chapters: chapters in several cities and countries have separated from it, three state chapters severing ties in 2024.

The Temple reports more than seven hundred thousand registered members. The figure was reported in 2023, and it counts free online sign-ups, so it measures the reach of a name rather than the size of a congregation. Active participation is very much smaller and is not published. Both facts should be given together, because neither alone is honest.

It has chapters across the United States and in several other countries, a headquarters and art gallery in Salem, and a legal operation that is the substantial part of what it does.

Two things about it are genuinely novel. The first is that it may be the only new religious movement in living memory whose characteristic ritual act is filing a permit application. The second is that its critics on the religious right and its critics on the secular left make opposite complaints, that it is a real and dangerous religion, and that it is not a religion at all, and it is able to point at the disagreement as evidence for its own case.

Where it stands with the older Satanism is settled and hostile. The Church of Satan regards it as activists borrowing an iconography; the Temple regards the Church as a philosophy without a public purpose. Both are atheistic, and neither worships anything.

What the Temple has demonstrated, whatever one makes of the theatre, is a point that was not obvious before it started: accommodations written for the majority religion are difficult to defend as neutral once somebody unwelcome asks for the same accommodation.