On April 25th of this year, the IRS granted tax-exempt status to the Satanic Temple (TST), an ostensible religious organization based in Salem, Massachusetts. This was widely seen as a victory for Satanic religion, but I’m not convinced that that’s the case.

Founded in 2013 by Malcolm Jarry and Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple has grown to become likely the largest and certainly the most visible Satanic organization in the world. They’ve made headlines for various protests and campaigns, most famously their attempt to place a statue of Baphomet (a Satanic religious icon) at the Oklahoma state capitol to protest the placement of a monument of the Ten Commandments at the same location.

As with my essay on LaVeyan Satanism, my intent here is to critique but not to oppose. My thought has a great deal in common with the Satanic Temple’s political stance and philosophical positions. I believe that my work is relevant to TST members and I would like for it to remain so, and, as I said in my last essay, I would like to remain allied with those who share similar ideas and interests. I think that the Satanic Temple has done a great deal of excellent work in the world and I support that, but that does not mean that its activities or positions should be exempt from criticism.

The primary reason that I am not affiliated with the Satanic Temple is simple enough: I am a religious Satanist, and the Satanic Temple is not a religious organization, but rather a political organization that uses religious iconography. This is not to say that members of the Temple are never themselves religious Satanists, but the Satanic Temple was founded specifically in order to act as a subversive political organization. A New York Times article by Mark Oppenheimer describes this intention:

“The first conception was in response to George W. Bush’s creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,” said Mr. Jarry, who was raised by irreligious Jews. “I thought, ‘There should be some kind of counter.’” He hit on the idea of starting a faith-based organization that met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them. “Imagine if a Satanic organization applied for funds,” he remembered thinking. “It would sink the whole program.”

The executive branch of the US government instituted a program which directed public money to religious organizations, in seeming violation of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, and Jarry conceived of the Satanic Temple in response. The political cause existed prior to the religious formulation of the response, and the religious formulation is contingent on the political cause. Satanism was selected not for its intrinsic validity as a religion, but because it would be particularly repugnant to those who had established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (now the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships).

I feel two ways about this, and this contrast represents my feelings about the Satanic Temple in general. On the one hand, it’s a valid and pointed criticism of the political establishment’s willingness to ignore constitutionally-established church-state separation so long as it is the establishment’s particular faith that receiving the benefits. And on the other, the Satanic Temple is using valid and meaningful religious imagery not because they endorse its meaning (though they may to some degree), but because it is politically convenient for them to do so.

The Satanic Temple’s mission statement further clarifies its position as a political organization rather than a religious one:

The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will. Politically aware, Civic-minded Satanists and allies in The Satanic Temple have publicly opposed The Westboro Baptist Church, advocated on behalf of children in public school to abolish corporal punishment, applied for equal representation where religious monuments are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy, exposed fraudulent harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners and claims in mental health care, and applied to hold clubs along side other religious after school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations.

The Satanic Temple neither claims nor produces any religious content. The Temple’s reading list includes a great many books about Satan and Satanism, but almost nothing I would describe as being of Satanism, and no religious texts at all. It’s not at all a bad list and I’ve added several of the titles to my own to-read list, but it does serve to indicate the Temple’s stance. The Satanic Bible, which is important enough to modern Satanism that it should be read by all Satanists whether or not they ultimately agree with any of it, is conspicuously absent, though this is hardly surprising given the Temple’s feud with LaVeyan Satanism. The Temple’s website has an extensive page critiquing LaVey and LaVeyan Satanism, and many of the points are entirely valid, but there are some that I don’t agree with. Just to take an example, the aforementioned page seems to dismiss Nietzscheanism in Satanism (a strongly LaVeyan position) on the basis of the book The Will to Power, which was not a completed work by Nietzsche but rather a collection of his notes. I’d hate for my own notebooks to be published after my death; I’ve come up with a great many terrible ideas in the course of brainstorming various content, and I wouldn’t want those to be taken for my actual positions. And I would find it difficult to even conceptualize an authentic Satanism that rejects Nietzsche’s criticism of religion, his rejection of Judeo-Christian moral norms, and his bountiful affirmation of life.

The Satanic Temple has seven tenets, but these are philosophical and political positions for which no religious rationale is given:

One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.

The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

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.

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.

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.

Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

I disagree with almost none of this, nor with most of their mission statement, but there’s nothing here that would indicate that the Satanic Temple is in any way a religious organization, aside from the imagery it uses.

There are some finer points in the above where I do disagree with the Temple’s positions, or at least find them incomplete. To start, I think that “compassion and empathy towards all creatures” is a bad idea. I recently came across an episode of a podcast, “The End of Empathy” by Invisibilia, that describes the problems with that position. Empathy is a limited resource, and there are some who simply do not deserve or warrant it. What’s more, I think that empathy for the wrong people might lead to Karl Popper’s famous paradox of tolerance, where tolerance of the intolerant can result in greater intolerance overall. I want to be as expansively compassionate as possible, but at the same time, I think that enmity and hate for some is not unwarranted. As well, “struggle for justice” can be a problematic term when “justice” itself is left undefined, and the notion of one’s beliefs conforming “to one’s best scientific understanding of the world” is vague, reductionist, and unrealistic. I think that their intention was just to say that established scientific facts like evolution by natural selection and the nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system should be promoted and accepted as such, and I agree with that entirely. Science should strongly inform our beliefs, and one should only accept beliefs that contradict scientific facts with the utmost caution and skepticism, but I don’t take this to mean that the total framework of our beliefs should be a mirror, perfectly universal and consistent between different individuals, of our current scientific understanding of the world. Again, I don’t think that they necessarily intended that, but in the absence of further clarification on the matter (which I’ve been unable to find), I think it’s fair to critique the statement itself rather than just assuming the best of intentions. And I reiterate that these are fairly minor points of disagreement.

The last point I’ll take up here is less of a criticism and more of a concern, and relates to the Satanic Temple in the context of the interpretation of post-industrial capitalist society by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was attempting to answer one of the great questions of political philosophy in the 1960’s: why hadn’t Marx’s predictions about capitalism come true? Why had it perpetuated itself in the West rather than self-destructing and why did the Soviet Union and China look so different from Marx’s predictions about the socialist revolution? Marcuse’s answer was that capitalism had changed so as to incorporate and pacify those things that contradicted it (as an example, you can buy Marx’s Capital from Amazon or Barnes and Noble and in doing so generate revenue for capitalists). He described advanced capitalist society as a kind of democratic unfreedom in which society itself is “totally administered,” capitalism a part of every aspect of it and all of it oriented towards perpetuating the capitalist mode of production, which must invent new needs for people, administer them, and satisfy them by way of justifying ever greater productivity and growth.

What concerns me is that the Satanic Temple might become just the approved means of religious criticism, just another way in which the system absorbs and pacifies contradictions to itself, flattening radical ideas into ideas along a one-dimensional spectrum that differ from the status quo only quantitatively rather than qualitatively. A little more of this, a little less of that, but ultimately playing the same game as everyone else in the service of consumer capitalism rather than seeking to fundamentally change the game itself, which is, I believe, the necessary role of any true religious Satanism. With the Satanic Temple’s recent approval as a religious organization by the IRS, this seems to be exactly the direction they’re headed in. I’m not convinced that the Temple’s secularist campaigns are actually changing any minds — those whom they’re protesting likely reject both secularism and religious pluralism entirely and would favor a more theocratic government, and religious moderates may see them (perhaps justifiably) as mocking the very notion of religion. In such a case, the Satanic Temple would be providing an administered means of protest and an outlet for feelings of anger that do not actually threaten the system in any way. And as such campaigns are not sincere expressions of religious belief (the intended installation of the Baphomet statue was not intended to promote public veneration for Satan in the way that the Ten Commandments Monument that was being protested was intended to promote public veneration for Judeo-Christian morality), they may contribute to a culture of irony and nihilism that would run counter to authentic Satanic values.

But as I said, these last points are more concerns than criticisms, and while I think it’s important that they become part of the conversation surrounding Satanic organizations and institutions, I’m not willing to write off the Satanic Temple until it becomes more clear how they will move forward now that they’ve achieved state recognition as a religious organization.

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