What is the Satanic Temple? A far cry from SF's Church of Satan

Lucien Greaves, spokesman for The Satanic Temple, with a statue of Baphomet at the group's meeting house in Salem, Mass. Scroll ahead for a timeline of the group's history. Lucien Greaves, spokesman for The Satanic Temple, with a statue of Baphomet at the group's meeting house in Salem, Mass. Scroll ahead for a timeline of the group's history. Photo: (Photo By Josh Reynolds For The Washington Post Via Getty Images) Photo: (Photo By Josh Reynolds For The Washington Post Via Getty Images) Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close What is the Satanic Temple? A far cry from SF's Church of Satan 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

When you hear about Satanists in news headlines today, they're likely not referring to those followers of Anton LaVey's particular occultist school of thought, centered in San Francisco. Today, another group is utilizing themes that some Satanists stand for — individualism, free speech and humanism — but without actually believing in Satan.

This group, the Salem, Mass.-based Satanic Temple doesn't worship Satan. In fact, its founders don't even believe in the afterlife, or any deity. They don't herald evil either — far from it. But they do promote one part of what the idea of Satan represents: an eschewing of duties imposed upon a person in favor of proselytizing individual free will.

But it's the dark imagery that often effectively catches the attention of bystanders.

RELATED: Satanic Temple urges people to order Satan-themed cakes to protest anti-LGBT bakeries

The whole thing began in 2001, when George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The program was intended to offer federal funding to religious organizations in their efforts to assist their communities (in non-religious ways), but Malcolm Jarry saw church and state intermingling a little too closely.

"I thought, 'There should be some kind of counter,'" Jarry told the New York Times in 2015. "Imagine if a Satanic organization applied for funds. It would sink the whole program."

More than 10 years later, Jarry met Lucien Greaves at an event at Harvard. The two hit it off immediately, finding similarities in their aversion to organized religion, and, as the New York Times put it: "an inclination to fight back with mischief."

The mischief actually began in 2012, when Florida governor Rick Scott began rallying for a bill that would allow students to pray voluntarily in public schools. Rather than a straightforward protest, Jarry and Greaves took a different approach: They instigated a "mock rally" in favor of the bill, telling the Times that "we were coming out to say how happy we were because now our Satanic children could pray to Satan in school."

The Satanic Temple was born then, not out of an allegiance to any deity, but out of the belief that a person's agency and free will is of the highest priority, and that "the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word."

"The Satan of Modern Satanism is a metaphorical icon for Enlightenment values," Greaves wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. "I identify nontheistically with a Miltonic Satan that defies all subjugation, exalts scientific inquiry and promotes Humanistic, pluralistic values."

RELATED: The Satanic Temple says Netflix's 'Sabrina' stole Baphomet statue design, is 'taking legal action'

In their actions, members of the Satanic Temple work to subvert any legal efforts where they believe the government or politicians are blurring the division between church and state. Most recently, that came in the form of the Satanic Temple commissioning a nine-foot-tall statue of Baphomet in 2015. The statue was then sent to the Arkansas Capitol building in August 2018 as a means to promote free speech and freedom of religion.

The state legislature in Arkansas passed a bill that would allow politicians to erect a monument in the form of the Ten Commandments on government property. So, to point out the hypocrisy of the government favoring a given religion, the Satanic Temple raised the funds to send their statue to Arkansas. It was placed in front of the Arkansas Capitol, and drew protesters waving signs reading, "Honk for Jesus" and "We are a Christian nation — No to Satan!" (As the Post notes, there were also protestors waving Confederate flags for an unknown reason.)

At a rally onsite, Greaves told the crowd that he had no interest in tearing down the Ten Commandments monument, nor in replacing it with Baphomet.

"We have as little interest in forcing our beliefs and symbols upon you as we do in having the beliefs of others forced upon us," Greaves told the crowd.

The Satanic Temple was ultimately not successful, and a second version of the Ten Commandments statue stands in from of the Arkansas Capitol building today. (The first, it should be noted, was destroyed when a man ran it over with his truck, shattering it.)

The statue of Baphomet has come to exist as a visual representation of the church's tenets, and one the Satanic Temple fiercely defends. In 2018, the Temple sued Netflix over its use of a strikingly similar Baphomet design in its "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" series, telling SFGATE that seeing a statue with such a resemblance was "deeply problematic to us."

"It's distressing on the grounds that you have to worry about that association being made where people will see your monument and not know which preceded the other," Greaves said, "and thinking that you arbitrarily decided to go with the Sabrina design for your Baphomet monument, which rather cheapens our central icon."

But despite the argument about the Baphomet statue design copyright protection, which was partially the reason for the suit against Netflix, the Satanic Temple does place a value on semiotics and their ethical implications.

"I think the more people become comfortable culturally identifying with their religions, and realizing they don't have to pretend if they don't have to believe things that are intellectually insulting today," Greaves told VICE in a documentary, "that they can still have their ethics, their symbols, that they can still use this metaphorically to contextualize their lives, I think we'll find a lot of people identifying non-theistically with their religions. I think we're just a little bit ahead of the game."

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

