Satanic Summer of Fun

A couple of weeks ago now, during an ongoing pitched and increasingly violent battle against theocratic incursions that now finds The Satanic Temple named directly as a target of both proposed rights-limiting legislation and violent threats, I was disgusted to see a group of our own ministers on Facebook denigrating the organization and myself for canceling our annual SatanCon in order to focus our resources on confronting this highly polarized election year. These particular ministers, it turns out, are dismissive at best, and openly hostile in some cases, against The Satanic Temple’s efforts to assert pluralism as a counterbalance against Christian Nationalist assaults on public spaces, including our lawfare to secure and preserve religious liberty for non-Christian religions and non-believers. Remarkably, these efforts for which The Satanic Temple is best known, were described by some of them as my own “pet legal projects,” even as others claimed that it is they who “do the work” that makes me “famous.”

When I dismissed one of our ministers for unbecoming conduct after confronting him about this embarrassing behavior, there followed a general meltdown amongst his ministerial coterie who indicated complete shock at learning that I could remove anybody from the organization at all. But now that I have, of course, I am a cult leader and dictator. Ever since the one was removed, others within his circle have spiraled ever further into miles of online text building bizarre narratives of delusion and outrage. Without ever considering whether or not their behavior really is unbecoming of ministerial representation of the organization, they speculate as to what is really going on here. “This seems intentional,” I have now seen it said multiple times, as though their behavior was a reasonable and necessary given, and I was simply using it as a pretext to launch a more sinister agenda. Even when they ran to Reddit, predictably, to make public their grievances in an extremely truncated telling of events that attempted to frame my response to their behavior as an irrational melt-down over a few “light-hearted memes,” the broader public response expressed disbelief that they could feign such confusion over being asked to not publicly denigrate an organization and its leadership when claiming to represent that organization.

Unable to grasp this universal organizational truism, panic set in with some ministers who apparently felt that enforcement of the most basic standards is arbitrary and impossibly prohibitive. Fearing that any one of them could be next, they began mass-downloading internal documents in hopes of taking the organization with them should they be removed. Locked out of their accounts with the explanation that the logs showed their downloading activity, and their own chats which showed the thieving intentions behind their actions, they nonetheless raised an outcry over being “locked out without explanation,” a narrative they have still lined up behind even as masses of our internal documents have been now posted publicly online (the leak now as dutifully ignored as the question of ministerial responsibility was).

Many months ago, we tried to address internal dissatisfaction by exploring the roots and possible remedies of ministerial complaints. Persistent expressions of general loathing toward The Satanic Temple and myself were assumed to have the coherence of underlying well-defined grievances. However, through surveys, we found that the primary complaint was related to their inability to create and sell TST merchandise. To the question as to what it is they wished to do with funds raised from such sales opportunities, none had an answer. 

Now, in the aftermath of all of this, and after the removal and resignations of several more ministers, I was sent a screen shot of a question that had been posed on Reddit that questioned whether I even really care that we are losing congregations and ministers, probably assuming, incorrectly, that we operate on a business model of unending growth and expansion, as though we are a fast food franchise. If the question is whether or not I am disturbed that we are losing ministers, the answer is decidedly no. Aside from the open denigration of our campaigns, mission, and management, the dissatisfied ministers (a loud and increasingly combative minority within the organization) have increasingly been drawing the ire of other ministers who feel that productive activity is being inhibited by the poor conduct and militant internal policing of the aimlessly protesting few. Members, too, have increasingly complained of ministerial misbehavior and, in fact, what we recently previously saw as an unfortunate but manageable problem of professional attitude is now revealed to be an embarrassing and generally recognized organizational blight.

I feel bad for members of congregations who, now having lost congregation heads feel unsure about their ability to interact with TST, but to them I would say that these events are clearing the path for real, productive and engaged congregations to come together with a sense of purpose in alignment with the actual mission and goals that prompted them to identify with us in the first place. Because, to be clear, none of the restrictions on merchandise sales, nor the agreements we demand regarding public representations bearing our name are new developments, and it is difficult to sympathize with those who sign on only to revolt against exactly what they signed on to.

But still, it must be disturbing to lose congregations and ministers, is it not? Surely, an organization can not survive too much of that, can it? That seems to be the underlying assumption as some ministers still, in the depths of delusional entitlement issue demands and ultimatums. In fact, we can not only survive it, but we are already flourishing from it, just as intermittent controlled conflagrations can increase the health of forested areas. Since addressing the problem of ministerial professionalism we have received an outpouring of supportive messages, professional volunteer offers of support, and even an increase in donations as people who previously felt pushed away from us by this internal division are coming back. My own subscriber base has increased dramatically as a result of all of this, and excitement is building among collaborators who are creating proposals for reforms and structural revisions that seek to open the doors to increased interaction with all facets of the organization, focused on unified goals. 

Many ministers had been patiently waiting for this day to come, and now it is, I will admit, a bit embarrassing that they had to wait this long. For it would not be accurate to simply say that the ministers who object to the organization and its objectives are, on balance, counterproductive. They are simply counterproductive, with nothing at all offsetting the scale in the other direction. This being the case, the outcome we are seeing now should not be understood as a bold and unpredictable maneuver, but an inevitability. This is how things have worked: ministers have paid a fee for ordination coursework, a necessary and not-profitable fee that maintains the costs associated with the program. They have no buy-in, dues, or start-up fees paid to TST. Their congregations have been independent with regards to their scheduled activities, meet-ups, and management. They are constrained by the limits placed on their ability to profit in our name and ability to speak broadly on behalf of TST, and that is all. They are not made to fundraise, and the ministers-in-revolt have chosen not to. They are not made to engage with our campaigns, and they have chosen not to. They are not made to endorse the organization, recruit membership (we do not proselytize), or, till now, even behave with any professional dignity, and they chose not to. All of this leaves them with nothing to leverage in trying to negotiate their claims, and nothing for us to lose in their departures. The only leverage they ever had was in the threat that they will steal our property, which they already have in seeing to it that our operational documents have been posted online, and the threat that they would decry our “abusive” practices to the general public online, which is easily reduced to comedy with the explanation of ministry’s relationship to the organization outlined above. It is one thing not to support the mission of the organization through general disengagement with the war we wage against Christian Nationalists, but at the point where we have people who are openly hostile to those efforts, as well as hostile to the organization itself, and they are constantly engaged in the activity of dissuading others from engaging in that mission, they should reasonably expect to be removed from the organization. Especially as their claim to productive collaboration lies in their maintenance of the internal culture of TST, through various online subgroups chats and committees, where their conflict with founding organizational goals creates a toxic and divisive environment that is, again, nothing but counter-productive.

The upshot of all of this is that I am excited to begin personally working with the ministers who have held their own through the abuses hurled at them by their former peers, and I am excited to collaborate with them in re-constructing the ordination program which previously failed to clearly define the role of a minster and appropriately outline ministerial conduct and responsibilities. I have already begun collaborating with some ministers, and have a pile-up of others to reply to and bring into the restructuring task force. Whereas I had no real interaction with the ministry before (which oddly did not prevent some of them from objecting to my perceived tyranny), I will begin personally overseeing the ministry now. Whereas internal unrest and assaults upon organizational purpose were considered endemic and inextricable from any modern organization of a progressive bent in recent years, I think we have finally turned a corner with a belated general realization that a well-defined organizational mission is not a betrayal of all other potentially noble causes, and that in order for an organization to fulfill a purposeful mission, it must stay true to its goals.