The So-Called Satanists Out to Defend Religious Freedom

How seriously should we take them?

Lucien Greaves, spokesman for the Satanic Temple, with a statue of Baphomet at the group’s meeting house in Salem, Massachusetts. (Photo by Josh Reynolds for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

LAST WEEK, FLORIDA GOVERNOR Ron DeSantis signed into law HB 931, which lets schools across the state, including public schools, “authorize volunteer school chaplains.” Once the law takes effect on July 1, schools can engage volunteer chaplains to assist students in a variety of “support, services, and programs” as designated by the district school board or charter school governing board.

During a press conference, DeSantis addressed concerns about the program, including whether it might result in Satanist chaplains in the schools. He seemed confident in rebuffing the suggestion:

Some have said that if you do a school chaplain program that, somehow, you’re going to have satanists running around in all our schools. We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion. That is not qualified to be able to participate in this. So, we’re going to be using common sense when it comes to this. You don’t have to worry about it.

Hearing DeSantis’s remarks, the leaders of the Satanic Temple decided to raise holy hell, so to speak.

The group’s cofounder, Lucien Greaves (a pseudonym), in a statement to the Orlando Sentinel rebutted DeSantis’s assertions regarding the law and the group’s “After School Satan Clubs.” “He is not at liberty to amend the Constitution by fiat, and we are a federally recognized religious organization. . . . There is nothing on paper that prohibits The Satanic Temple from offering chaplains in public schools, and to do so would be illegal. DeSantis does not even bother to offer a legal theory by which we would be excluded.”

DeSantis’s clash with the Satanic Temple comes at a time when the group’s profile has been raised by a controversy over a holiday display in the Iowa Capitol last Christmas, the dismissal of a lawsuit from the group seeking to strike down Indiana’s abortion ban, and a recent bomb threat at the group’s national headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts.

The Satanic Temple (not to be confused with the Church of Satan founded by Anton LaVey in the 1960s) is a fairly young organization, but it already has logged a significant record of challenging what its leaders perceive as government overreach driven by religion or encroachments on the separation of church and state. It was originally conceived of during the George W. Bush administration, as a way of undermining the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI): “Imagine if a Satanic organization applied for funds,” the group’s other cofounder, Malcolm Jarry, told essayist Mark Oppenheimer. “It would sink the whole program.”

The Satanic Temple really took off a few years later, following the enactment in 2012 of Florida’s SB 98, which permitted “inspirational messages” at non-compulsory school events like graduations, assemblies, and sports events. While the bill’s language avoids mention of prayer, opponents, such as the ACLU, argued that the term “inspirational messages” was essentially a euphemism for prayer, and thus a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The law’s supporters, on the other hand, acknowledged that because such messages could include prayer but were not necessarily prayers, there was no Establishment Clause violation. Here’s how one state lawmaker phrased his defense of the law: “I hope many of our students choose to use their time for an inspirational message to offer a prayer, whether that be to God, to Jesus, to Mohammad, to Buddha, or the Great Spirit—I don’t care.”

How much these lawmakers didn’t care about which superhuman power students invoked was immediately put to the test by Greaves and Jarry.

In one of its initial public statements, their Satanic Temple emphasized its support for religious freedom, including the freedom to choose a Satanic religion. Expressing their appreciation for then-Gov. Rick Scott, they argued that SB 98 enabled Satanic children to pray in school alongside their Christian classmates. Subsequently, they held a tiny rally, involving a half-dozen participants in horns and black robes, at the Florida Capitol. “We honor Gov. Rick Scott—hail Satan, Rick!—for providing us this opportunity to make the Satanic cause clear and make our presence known,” said Jarry. But as reports surfaced linking the gathering to a mockumentary, some observers wrote off the group as part of an elaborate hoax. Despite Greaves’s assurances to the contrary, this perception has persisted to the present.

Since those events over a decade ago in Tallahassee, the Satanic Temple has continued its streak of provocative and imaginative actions. They’ve advocated for statues of Baphomet—a goat-headed, winged creature associated with Satanism—to be placed on capitol grounds in several states next to monuments depicting the Ten Commandments or near Christian Nativity scenes during the holiday season. They’ve also spearheaded ‘After School Satan’ groups as an alternative to Christian evangelistic programs in public schools across the country. More recently, they’ve campaigned for religious exemptions to allow members to seek abortions in states where the procedure has been limited or banned.

These initiatives have given the organization some amount of public prominence. Despite starting small, the Satanic Temple now claims to have around 700,000 members around the world, with active chapters across the nation and a tourist-friendly headquarters in Salem. They were the subject of a well-reviewed documentary, Hail Satan? (2019), which chronicled their rise from obscurity to notoriety, and some of their public-facing members have appeared as guests in videos by popular social media influencers and on mainstream media broadcasts.

All this growth in membership and attention hasn’t quelled the suspicion, confusion, ridicule, and hostility with which the group is often regarded. Scholar of religion Joseph P. Laycock, who wrote the first book-length history of the Satanic Temple, Speak of the Devil (Oxford, 2020), finds that the organization has undergone significant internal divisions in addition to much external criticism. Many are puzzled by their use of the word ‘Satanic,’ seeing as the Temple doesn’t worship Satan as a personified being; most members are atheists.

Confusion about the group extends to their intentions. Is the Satanic Temple a political stunt? (“Some people called the Satanic Temple ‘the hot topic ACLU,’” Laycock says.) Is it a parody of religion? Performance art? A genuine new religious movement? These questions could have legal implications, prompting discussions about whether Satanists meet the “sincere and meaningful belief” test from United States v. Seeger. Laycock suggests that because the cultural assumptions of many Americans about what constitutes a religion derive from Protestant Christianity, which wouldn’t give much space to such a directly antagonistic spiritual paradigm, the Satanic Temple’s actions are compelling Americans to reconsider the role of religion in public life.

But just as most people who use mouthwash don’t make a habit of drinking it, many people who appreciate the group’s provocations as a prompt to scour their own assumptions might not welcome the Satanic Temple as a more permanent feature of public life, let alone sign up to become members themselves. Gaining public acceptance could prove more challenging than securing religious liberty through legal channels, especially when you consider the group’s record of pushing the envelope.

One of the Satanic Temple’s most controversial actions was organizing a Black Mass at Harvard University in 2014, which sparked outrage from various Christian student associations. Said the university’s then-president, Drew Faust, “It is deeply regrettable that the organizers of this event, well aware of the offense they are causing so many others, have chosen to proceed with a form of expression that is so flagrantly disrespectful and inflammatory.” Similarly, the Boston Globe labeled the entire episode “an effort at trolling, not a statement about religion or free speech.” This spirit of mischievous, cynical-seeming provocation directed at institutions it is fashionable to hate continues to define the Temple’s brand. (It may be worth noting that while there were initially concerns that the group would use a consecrated host in its ritual, as depicted in J.K. Huysmans’s novel The Damned, no such thing was ever planned.)

It surely doesn’t help on the PR side that one of the group’s immediate predecessors in the public square had an expressly satirical intention. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which came into existence in 2005, has taken a similar ideological tack but without any kind of high-minded pretense. (Remember the controversy over people wearing colanders on their heads for “religious reasons” in driver’s license photos?) Putting daylight between the Satanic Temple and a group like the Pastafarians is a lingering challenge, especially now that the former is attempting to provide actual legal protection for its members to seek abortions in states with bans—an effort that even some of the Temple’s political fellow travelers find troubling. Posing a further problem for the brand is the rise of other less provocative secular groups and even atheistic churches, such as Sunday Assembly, the Oasis Network, Seattle Atheist Church, and the North Texas Church of Freethought. Although untested, it is possible Flordians will have an easier time accepting these groups in their public schools. Even in a godless playing field, Satan is going to have competition.

Ruben van Luijk, another expert on modern Satanism, explains the double-bind in which movements like the Satanic Temple find themselves: They are either so mild that they hardly merit being called “Satanists,” or they are involved in practices that are genuinely harmful and abhorrent, thus validating their adversaries’ reasons for discriminating against them. Laycock via email agreed with this assessment, stating “[Satanists] want to appear ‘nice’ so that Christians seem unreasonable, but not so nice that people conclude they are Satanists in name only.”

The United States has an uneven history when it comes to securing religious liberty for non-Protestant members of its citizenry, but recent legal history also shows that the Supreme Court tends to be very cautious about clearly defining the boundaries of what constitutes a religion. It’s therefore unclear how the Satanic Temple will fare when it comes to potential inclusion under the terms of DeSantis’s new law, should it manage to proceed with a legal challenge. But because they attract more attention for their provocations than for their actual message of self-empowerment and toleration, the governor will likely not be alone in dismissing the group outright.