The Satanic Temple — Constitutional Performance Art

The Fires of History — Episode 43

The Satanic Temple doesn’t worship Satan. It uses Satan as a constitutional argument. If the Ten Commandments get a monument on state property, so does an 8.5-foot bronze Baphomet.

The Lineage

The Satanic Temple is not the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan (LaVey, 1966) is theatrical atheism — Ayn Rand with candles. The Temple of Set (Aquino, 1975) is esoteric theism that broke from LaVey. The Satanic Temple (2013) is neither. It is a legal instrument shaped like a religion, deployed to expose selective enforcement of the First Amendment.

TST does not worship Satan. It does not believe in Satan. It uses Satan as a symbol — specifically, the Baphomet — to force a constitutional question: if the government permits religious expression in public spaces, it must permit all religious expression. If a Ten Commandments monument stands on state property, an 8.5-foot bronze Baphomet has equal right to stand beside it.

The organization was founded in 2013 by Lucien Greaves (Doug Misicko) and Malcolm Jarry, headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts. The location is not an accident. Salem — where America executed people for witchcraft — is now home to an organization that uses Satanic imagery to defend the Constitution. The 330-year irony writes itself.

The Operations

The Baphomet Statue: TST commissioned a bronze Baphomet — wings spread, two children gazing up at it — and proposed its installation at the Oklahoma State Capitol. The occasion: Oklahoma had recently installed a Ten Commandments monument on state property. TST’s application was simple: if one religious monument is permitted, all are. Oklahoma removed the Ten Commandments. TST moved the statue to Arkansas when they installed their own version. The pattern repeats. The statue is not a protest. It is an application. The horror is procedural.

After School Satan Clubs: In Good News Club v. Milford Central School District (2001), the Supreme Court established that religious groups have equal access to public school facilities after hours. Evangelical Good News Clubs have operated in public schools under this ruling ever since. TST applied for the same access. If evangelical programs can operate in schools, Satanic programs have the same legal right. The clubs teach critical thinking, science, and empathy. The name does the rest.

Satanic Invocations: Government meetings across America open with Christian prayer. When TST members request equal time for Satanic invocations, the result is either (a) a Satanic prayer at a government meeting, or (b) the government ending the practice of opening prayers entirely. Both outcomes are wins. The First Amendment is not selective.

Abortion as Religious Ritual: TST declared abortion a religious sacrament, arguing that state abortion restrictions violate TST members’ sincerely held religious beliefs under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The legal framework is precise: the same RFRA provisions that exempt Christians from laws they find religiously objectionable should logically exempt Satanists from laws they find religiously objectionable. If the framework is principled, it applies universally. If it doesn’t apply universally, it was never principled.

“The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic”: TST named their telehealth abortion clinic after the mother of the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. This is not subtle. It is not trying to be subtle. Subtlety is not what moves constitutional law.

The Seven Tenets

TST’s tenets are the quiet payload — the actual belief system that most people never read because they stopped at the word “Satanic”:

1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Put these next to the Ten Commandments. One set demands obedience to a specific deity, prohibits graven images, and forbids coveting your neighbor’s ox. The other demands compassion, justice, bodily autonomy, scientific literacy, and intellectual humility. The “Satanists” wrote the more humane document. The provocation is the comparison. The comparison is undeniable.

The Genealogy of Satanic Trolling

Each organization in this lineage trolled the one before it:

• LaVey’s Church of Satan (1966): Trolled Christianity by adopting its villain as a mascot. Theatrical, egoist, apolitical.
• Aquino’s Temple of Set (1975): Trolled LaVey by taking the theology seriously. Esoteric, sincere, theistic.
• The Satanic Temple (2013): Trolled both by using Satan as a legal argument rather than a spiritual or theatrical one. Constitutional, activist, strategic.

The Baphomet image itself travels a 700-year circuit: from tortured confession under the Inquisition (Templars, 1307) → to philosophical symbol (Lévi, 1856) → to theatrical mascot (LaVey, 1966) → to bronze constitutional argument (TST, 2018). Same image. Four completely different meanings. The image did not change. The contexts did. The meaning was never in the image. It was in the institution looking at it.

The Satanic Panic Inversion

The 1980s Satanic Panic destroyed lives. The McMartin preschool trial. The West Memphis Three. Hundreds of daycare workers accused, tried, and imprisoned on the testimony of children coached by therapists who believed in ritual abuse networks that did not exist. America spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars hunting for Satanists.

It found none. Because there were none.

TST is the delayed punchline. Forty years after the Panic, real Satanists showed up. They are suing for equal rights. They are filing tax-exempt paperwork. They are applying for permits. The Panic’s imaginary threat became a real organization doing the opposite of what the Panic predicted. The Satanists are not sacrificing children. They are opening after-school clubs that teach children to think critically. The inversion is total.

Why It Matters

TST is legal trolling at its most structurally sophisticated. Every action operates within established law. No civil disobedience. No property destruction. No protest signs. Just applications, lawsuits, and public comments filed through proper channels. The provocation is not extralegal — it is the law, applied without the selectivity the law’s advocates assumed.

When you write a law that says “all religions get equal access,” you do not get to define which religions count. When you install a monument to one faith on public property, you have opened the door to all faiths. When you pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect Christian conscience, you have also protected Satanic conscience. The Constitution does not have a footnote that reads “but not the scary ones.”

TST’s genius is forcing that footnote into the open. Every government that fights a Baphomet statue or an After School Satan Club is arguing, publicly and on the record, that religious liberty means Christian liberty. TST does not need to win the argument. It needs the argument to happen. The argument is the point.

The joke-religion lineage — Discordianism (1963) → Church of the SubGenius (1979) → Pastafarianism (2005) → TST (2013) — escalates with each generation. Discordianism was a photocopied zine. Pastafarianism was a letter to a school board. TST has lawyers, tax-exempt status, a bronze statue, and Supreme Court citations. The trajectory is clear: joke religions stop being jokes when they start winning cases.

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