Satan 

Is Having A Moment

By

Søren Nielsen

2019

The rise of the Satanic Temple, a modern pseudo-religion fighting to stave off an increasingly evangelical U.S. government.

Satanists, it turns out, are everything you think they’re not: patriotic, charitable, ethical, equality-minded, dedicated to picking up litter with pitchforks on an Arizona highway.  


That much is clear in the fantastic new documentary "Hail Satan?" — which chronicles the rise of the Satanic Temple, a movement that has little to do with its titular demon.

Founded in 2013, the organization is equal parts modern-day religion, political activist coalition and meta cultural revolution. 

By reclaiming the pop iconography that has long frightened evangelical America ― devil worship, ritualistic sacrifice, horns, pentagrams, the so-called Black Mass ― the Satanic Temple aims to catch people’s attention and then surprise them with messages of free speech, compassion, liberty and justice for all.

The history of satanism, using the controversial belief system as a lens to survey the myriad ways our government has made Christianity the national religion. 

If a state legislature votes to erect a Ten Commandments monument, the church argues, why shouldn’t the Satanic Temple be able to introduce a pillar of their own? It’s only fair.

There’s a moment early on in my research, just in my reading, where I realized that I was completely wrong about something. 

I thought, upon casually scanning headlines about this group and what they were up to, that the Satanic Temple was like a fiction ― a political troll satire thing, like The Yes Men, where they were pretending that they were members of an imaginary organization in order to make these points.

The politics of what they’re doing is obviously really important, and as a particularly American phenomenon, they’re trying to uphold the First Amendment. Their activism is not particularly radical. They’re not anarchists, they don’t want to burn it all down.


The freedom-of-speech thing, for me, comes under the headline of "a new religion for modernity."

What could religion be in the 21st century? 

What would a new religion, starting from scratch, do if it wanted to make sense in the world we actually live in? 

Would it be about nonscientific, paranormal claims about invisible people in the sky, or would it be about embracing the centuries of progress that the Enlightenment project has given us? 

It seems like that would be a better religion.

Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves delivers a speech in front of the Arkansas Capitol, with the group’s Baphomet statue by his side.

It was very frightening for a lot of people, who ended up with people like Mike Pence, who is legitimately a theocrat. 

He would love for the Bible to be the document that we obey as Americans. Then, someone like Betsy DeVos: still super evangelical, loves prayer in school.

It was super easy, if you were me, under Barack Obama, to not pay attention. 

I don’t even know what that guy was doing for, like, six months at a time, Now you’re hyper-aware and fearful. 

So I think for a lot of people, this story took on a lot more urgency.

The entire history of satanism is one of projection. Satanic panic is one example. 

All the way up until 1966, there were no people who called themselves satanists. There literally weren’t any. 

There was a fear that manifested into an elaborate fantasy on the part of the Catholic Church, mostly, if you want to point a finger somewhere.

Then you have this imaginary idea that everywhere around you, there are these devil worshipers who are doing these terrible things. 

In many cases ― well, in all cases ― that was used as justification to kill people, whether it was witches or, for many millennia, the Jews. 

All the same, atrocities were attributed to these groups of people by the Catholics as a way of murdering them. 

Then you go into the satanic panic and you see this same thing.

Of course, it’s a long story, but the most recent iteration of putting God in government was really only 50 years ago, as opposed to 200 or 300 years ago, which is what I would have assumed. 

I think that, for me, was the biggest mind-blowing thing. It’s actually a quite modern phenomenon.


If you went home and Googled it, you’d see that there’s hundreds and hundreds of these local fights happening where some senator somewhere wants to put the Ten Commandments on statehouse property or some senator somewhere wants to have prayer in public schools or write "In God We Trust" on police cars. 

Those battles all look really stupid and petty. Who cares if the Phoenix City Council wants to have prayers before their meetings? 

But when you look at them in totality and start to understand, it’s not like they’re going to stop. 

It’s not like, "Oh, we got ‘In God We Trust’ on the police car, now we’re done."

It’s evidence and ammunition for the next battle. With these Ten Commandments monuments, people now suddenly believe that this is an integral part of our American history.


Initially, someone like (Satanic Temple co-founder),"Lucien Greaves" would make that point, and I’d think, 

"OK, that sounds a little bit paranoid, or a little bit of a conspiracy theory; it’s probably not that serious."

As I did the research, I realized that he was completely right. I didn’t know the extent to which there’s an organized, very well-funded, very effective lobbying happening nationwide. You don’t have to be paranoid to think, "Just because we have a liberal, secular democracy now doesn’t mean we will always."

Then you end up with more satanists of the real kind because there’s a weird back-and-forth where they take the iconography and the imagery, all of which, as you said earlier, are projections. 

There never was a Black Mass ― it was only a fantasy on the part of Catholics. 

Then you’ve got the real satanists doing a fake Black Mass. It just confuses people to no end. 

I try to explain it to people and I’m like, "They really want you to think about the fact that there never really were any satanists."

They want to be like, “We, as Western civilization, have been having this now 2,000-plus-year-old conversation about good and evil and what it means to be a human and how we got here and how we’re supposed to live. 

We want to be part of that conversation. We don’t want to be like Richard Dawkins and just go over there and say, ‘Look at all these idiots. Fuck ’em all, wait till they’re all dead. Can’t wait for the future secular world."

They want to be part of the conversation, so it has to be Satan, because that’s how they get to be a part of the conversation. 

No one cares if you want to be an atheist and go home and yell about how dumb Christians are. They really do care if you’re a satanist.

Satanic Temple supporters gather at an August 2018 rally for religious liberty in Little Rock, Arkansas.

To start to get into false memories, multiple-personality disorder, dissociative identity, all these psychological ideas that allowed this concept to continue, and what happened with this crazy alliance with feminists who were like, "Believe the victims, child abuse is bad," alongside these crazy people who were just imagining devil worshippers everywhere.

I was reading First Amendment law, trying to understand the framework. Then "Kevin Kruse" he’d written a really good book called "One Nation Under God" that helped me understand that history. 

Then there was Jesper Petersen, who was religion expert. I’d read a bunch of his books and articles about satanism as a religious phenomenon of modernity, and that was super helpful for me to understand, from a religious-scholar point of view, what this meant.

The history of Lucifer and this idea of Satan, which was a word out of Judaism that just meant "the adversary," combined and created its own new narrative. 

Again, we keep rewriting the Bible, so then future generations of scholars go back and read the Bible and say, "Look, here’s Satan all along."

Part of the message of the Satanic Temple is that the meaning of symbols changes. They’re malleable to culture. 

Things change over time. It’s not insane to say this Baphomet image means freedom and diversity and reconciliation of opposites and openness to all. 

Just because you think it means the devil and evil and baby sacrificing doesn’t mean that’s what it means. 

That’s why they were so mad at "Sabrina" when they ripped off the Baphomet monument and put it in that show as a monument that means evil.

HERE IS A FOLLOWING WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THIS HAS BEEN WRITTEN

The Satanic Temple has settled its copyright lawsuit against  over their alleged misuse of its goat-headed deity statue in the series “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” a Warner spokesman said on Wednesday.

The settlement was amicable, and resolves a Nov. 8 lawsuit in which the Satanic Temple had sought at least $50 million of damages.


Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Bruce Lederman, a lawyer for the plaintiff said, 

"My client will be getting proper copyright credit on episodes of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina which have already been filmed. The remainder of the settlement is subject to a confidentiality agreement."

The Satanic Temple, which is based in Salem, Massachusetts and also known as the United Federation of Churches LLC, describes itself as a promoter of benevolence and empathy among people rejecting tyrannical authority.


It complained that "Sabrina" misappropriated its statue "Baphomet with Children" in a manner implying that it stood for evil, and that the depiction hurt its reputation.