What We Stand For

What Satanists believe and why our beliefs compel us to participate in public forums

The Satanic Temple is more active than most people apparently realize. Just this year, we opened our own telehealth abortion clinic that we are prepared to argue is protected under religious liberty laws, even should the Supreme Court decide to limit or ban the distribution of abortifacient pharmaceuticals. We performed music and ceremonial unbaptisms in the Indiana Statehouse just months ago to relatively little fanfare and minimal protests. Despite the insistence of pundits who prefer speaking to our motives without any reference to our own statements, our Iowa congregation did not place a holiday display in their state capitol knowing that it would cause a national uproar, nor given our various other activities was there any reason to believe that it would.

So what do we do it for?

This is what I am called upon to answer for any time something we are doing arbitrarily proves provocative enough to incite an angry mob. I explain ad nauseam that we feel called to balance viewpoint representation in public forums to uphold pluralism where it feels obvious that our opposition prefers exclusivity. I explain that we are defenders of Free Speech and Religious Liberty, and that those who claim to support these principles while demanding that we be excluded from any public accommodations, or resources, that are unquestionably provided to other religious denominations are hypocrites.

That is all well and good, the interviewers typically respond, but what exactly do you believe?

I find this confusing. First, what we believe is not relevant to whether or not we have constitutional rights, but more confusingly, did I not just explain what we believe?

It has belatedly become clear to me that the justifications I provide for our equal access claims are mistaken to be the typical arguments of convenience that serve merely to justify our own actions in the moment, like so many hypocritical “religious liberty” and “free speech” grandstanding causes that happily abandon those principles as soon as any non-preferred person or organization invokes them.

So now let me clearly explain what it is that we believe. 

Be warned, you may not like it.

It is now clear to me that journalists and the public at large have been treating the questions regarding what we feel justifies our presence in public forums and what we believe as a religious organization as separate questions, while I have not. So let me clarify: we believe in pluralism and liberal democracy religiously as fundamental virtues which we seek to protect and advance. We believe in Free Speech in principle, not merely as an excuse to only justify our own actions.

Tenet IV of The Satanic Temple: The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.

We are neither “left” nor “right,” but we will naturally be seen to support whichever side most aligns with our values. We do not conform our beliefs to fit the shifting demands of polarized tribalism. When we invoke Free Speech in defense of our public displays, our social media is inevitably flooded with simpletons who — categorizing us as “left-wing radicals” — decry the hypocrisy of “our” willingness to silence the speech of conservatives on campuses while insisting that our “offensive” displays need be respected. But such arguments are misdirected, as we have never been party to efforts to limit the Free Speech of others, even when our defense of Free Speech has earned us more universal condemnation. We weather such condemnations because this is a matter of religious mission for us.

In 2018, some chapters of The Satanic Temple demanded that we fire a First Amendment attorney who was representing us, but who had represented some odious right-wing clients as well. The attorney, himself a Catholic, had represented far-left groups, pornographers, conspiracy theorists, and many others. The overriding belief that compelled him to offer pro bono services to Satanists, however, was clearly the belief in the value of Free Speech… and one simply does not believe in Free Speech at all if one feels that it can be selectively, rather than neutrally, upheld.

We believe in Due Process.

Some people left The Satanic Temple and renounced their memberships in protest. 

In 2021, a federal judge ruled that Baltimore City could not prevent a rally that was being organized by the Catholic conservative outrage-mongers known as “Church Militant.” The event was to be headlined by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who one year prior had called for the beheading of CDC director Anthony Fauci. Church Militant, by that time, had a habit of attacking The Satanic Temple, sometimes with rather bizarre lies. Once, they were forced to retract a statement falsely describing me as a registered sex offender. More recently, they reported, as fact, the fantasy that Catholic protesters “halted” a performance by my band Satanic Planet at the Indiana State Capitol this past September. Bannon actively attempts to dismantle all the liberal democratic ideals we hold sacred, at one point making active efforts to drum up opposition to our After School Satan Clubs.

Nonetheless, we had filed a brief with the court prior to the federal ruling advocating for the ruling that favored the right of Church Militant to assemble. Why? Was not such an action self-destructive? No. In fact, the opposite is true.

Any time The Satanic Temple seeks public representation anywhere there are no shortage of claims that insist what we do is “hate speech” against Christians. If we allow the government the authority to silence speech merely because it is “offensive” there is little doubt that this overly subjective standard will then be used to silence us, and others whose viewpoints may not at all be “hateful,” but simply misunderstood or unwelcomed. It is minority voices that will again suffer. Did not Steve Bannon call for beheading? Yes. Prosecute him for that. Does not Church Militant habitually lie? Yes. But this is not a carte blanche to justify prior restraint. They can be prosecuted for defamations spoken, but not silenced for defamations anticipated. We were not defending Steve Bannon and Church Militant, we were defending Free Speech from ignorant politicians who were using a popular cause against justifiably unpopular and irresponsible provocateurs to establish a horrifyingly short-sighted precedent that would limit the rights of all.

They had their rally. Members of The Satanic Temple protested the rally. There is nothing about any of this that suggests that our position is incoherent, if you understand what Free Speech means.

We will defend Free Speech not only when our own viewpoint is unpopular, but when it applies to viewpoints we disagree with as well. This we do with a sense of religious mission.

Tenet IV of The Satanic Temple: Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.

Aside from the well-worn political arguments in defense of Free Speech, or opposition to censorship that point out the dubious and mostly futile efforts to limit bad ideas by force, we believe that science should serve as the arbiter to truth claims, and science thrives in social conditions that favor Free Speech. Science is something that transcends peer-reviewed journal articles and university laboratories. Scientific thinking is something we strive to cultivate in ourselves, seeking the evidence for our claims, as well as the disconfirming evidence, always weighing their values and adjusting our viewpoints accordingly. Only with a clear understanding of scientific truths can we arrive at credible moral positions. The witch-hunters of centuries past believed that they burned their victims at the stake because these alleged witches were able to manipulate nature for their own nefarious ends. This was a scientific question. It was a question of causation. Greater scientific understanding reveals the falsity of witch-hunter claims, unquestionably negating any moral justification for their actions.

We should know what our opposition’s arguments are, and we should not accept that we should only receive those arguments through the filter of any other interests. We should know how to argue our viewpoints, and we should be prepared to change our views where appropriate. Otherwise, we can never progress, we can never grow, nor can we have any hope of genuinely persuading others to our viewpoint.

Tenet VI of The Satanic Temple: People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused. 

But what does any of this have to do with Satan?

Satan, to us, is a literary embodiment of rebellion against tyranny: Enlightenment values. In a mythologically constructed viewpoint of world history — such as that narrated by Anatole France in his canonical work Revolt of the Angels — Jehovah is symbolic of a theocratic force that demands blind fealty. He proclaims that there is but one way, and that the way is etched in stone, impervious to revision. His dictates countermand individual liberties and pluralism. His 10 Commands expressly forbid Religious Liberty in insisting that there shalt be no gods before him, and limit the right of expression by prohibiting His “name in vain.” His followers express his will in trying to dismantle liberal democracy, and as Satanists we seek to defend it. His followers insist we recognize His moral supremacy based solely on fiat, limiting our inquiries to those that would not challenge that view; limiting our right to identify with a viewpoint that rejects this claim to supremacy. Jehovah is the collective will of the theocrats who seek to subjugate us in his name, while Satan is the Miltonic icon of autonomy and free inquiry.

And so, those who assume that their arguments directed against every illiberal “progressive” hypocrisy of recent times can easily be invoked to discredit our justifications for equal access are wrong. Unlike so many other “activist” groups, we have in fact been narrowly focused on our own religious values throughout the entirety of our organization’s existence, and when we invoke Religious Liberty and Free Expression, we do so with a full understanding of what that means for both ourselves, and for those we disagree with. It is difficult for theocrats to face their own blatant hypocrisy, but in our case they will have to, for we have always been consistent and open in our positions.

If you now find yourself asking if this is Progressivism, Libertarianism, Republicanism, Democrat, etc., you are still confused. 

This is Satanism.