What began as a troll has become a religion.
One night in April someone threw a pipe bomb into the headquarters of American Satanism in Salem, Massachusetts. It failed to explode fully and was not found for another 12 hours. According to the police, the plastic pipe was studded with nails and full of gunpowder. Had the bomb been better constructed, it could have caused a lot of damage. A message found in a flowerpot nearby said that “Elohim” (a Hebrew word for God) had sent the perpetrator “to smite Satan”.
Shortly afterwards the fbi arrested Sean Patrick Palmer, 49, from Oklahoma and charged him with the attack. His intended victims were not literally devil-worshippers – at least not the sort who drink blood and sacrifice babies. The Satanic Temple is a group that campaigns against the encroachment of Christianity in American public life. Their schtick is to apply for permission to do anything that Christians do, and complain vociferously if this is denied. They hold weekly meet-ups, run after-school clubs in schools and perform Satanic marriages.
Their schtick is to apply for permission to do anything that Christians do, and complain vociferously if this is denied
Last year the group went further than ever, by launching a telehealth abortion service in New Mexico, where terminations are legal throughout pregnancy. They called it “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic”, after the conservative Supreme Court judge who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, which stripped women in America of their federal constitutional right to an abortion. The clinic prescribes abortion pills to women in New Mexico, including those visiting from states where abortion is banned.
Before they take the pills, women are asked to recite the Satanic Temple’s tenets (“One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone”) and a personal affirmation: “By my body, my blood. By my will, it is done.” The Satanists say this “abortion ritual” is designed to “ward off the effects of unjust persecution”. Unsurprisingly the religious right weren’t happy about the initiative. The Christian Research Institute, an evangelical group, said the Satanists were “exploiting their cartoonishly dark and villainous branding to agitate the public and pester the Christian Right into a judicial showdown” and described them as “troll lords”.
The Satanic Temple first made headlines in 2013 when a man wearing a pair of goat horns, accompanied by four black-cloaked minions, staged a rally in Tallahassee, Florida, against a law allowing students to deliver “inspirational” messages, including prayer, at school. If Christian pupils were allowed to preach, said the Satanists, then surely anyone should be.
In 2014, after the state of Oklahoma put a giant stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments outside the capitol building, the Satanic Temple announced it would install their own monument nearby – a large bronze statue of Baphomet, a goat-human hybrid associated with the occult. The group was campaigning to have the sculpture placed in the capitol grounds when a judge ruled that the Ten Commandments slab was unconstitutional and therefore had to be removed.
The Baphomet can now be found at their headquarters in Salem – a beautiful Victorian house that was once a funeral parlour. Flying outside the building is a flag in the rainbow colours of the gay-rights movement, with a pentagram superimposed. After paying homage to Baphomet, visitors can see a revolving gallery of Satanic artwork, or buy a t-shirt reading “Hail, Satan”. Some are dedicated Satanists; others tourists in search of spooky entertainment in the smart Boston suburb where America’s most notorious witch trials once took place.
They called it “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic”, after the conservative Supreme Court judge who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson
I travelled there in May to meet the Satanists’ philosopher-in-chief, Lucien Greaves (pictured above), a 48-year-old Harvard graduate from suburban Detroit (whose real name, disappointingly, is Doug). He founded the temple in 2012 with Malcolm Jarry (also a pseudonym), a fellow Harvard graduate.
Greaves has an unnerving lazy right eye, a tiny ponytail and a wardrobe that seems to consist mostly of black (when I met him, his sombre attire was offset with pink sunglasses). But for a man at the centre of a publicity-hungry operation, Greaves does not enjoy the spotlight. He refuses to talk much about his background; from what I could piece together, it seems he had a fairly normal upbringing and is the son of a systems engineer.
He was similarly reticent when I asked him how he came to settle on Satanism. All he would say is that he was energised by the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, when rumours swept America that devil-worshipping paedophiles were inveigling children with heavy metal music and role-playing games. Some religious leaders helped spread the conspiracy theory, which can be seen as a precursor to QAnon. Greaves, who loved Dungeons & Dragons, found the panic mystifying. “It was clearly this bullshit mythology that was just propagating through society.”
By the early 2000s, when accusations of child abuse in the Catholic church were emerging (in 2002 the Boston Globe published its famous exposé of the church’s cover-up), Greaves’s suspicion of organised religion hardened into hatred. Church dogma, he said, allows “a certain crowd…to hide their depravity behind a cross”.
The Satanist label, he insisted, wasn’t intended to provoke. “It is more of a personal declaration of independence from superstition, rather than a calculated insult against people who believe in those things.” He stressed that he had no problem with religious people; that running a church had, if anything, given him “more respect for religious identities”. All he wants is for people to keep those beliefs out of the public sphere.
In America’s constitution, there are no references to Jesus, God or Christianity, and there are only two mentions of religion. One of them says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”; the other bans the government from imposing any sort of test of faith as a condition for holding a state job.
After paying homage to Baphomet, visitors can see a revolving gallery of Satanic artwork, or buy a T-shirt reading “Hail, Satan”
Yet a growing number of Christian nationalists believe this separation of church and state is based on a myth. The Founding Fathers, they argue, were in fact far godlier than the record suggests. They are alarmed by the fact that only 68% of Americans call themselves Christian (down from 83% in 1990) and see it as evidence of national decline. “There’s a deep sense of embattlement on the part of conservative white Christians,” said Philip Gorski, a sociology professor at Yale.
Some believe Donald Trump is the answer to their prayers. In January a group of his supporters released a video called “God Made Trump”, which portrays him as a Messiah sent to save America. Before the former president speaks at rallies, conservative pastors beseech God to return him to office. Many Christian nationalists saw Trump’s narrow escape from assassination as proof that divine forces were protecting their leader.
What Christian nationalists want, said Gorski, is to “capture state power and use it to impose Christian values”, or what they see as Christian values, on everybody else. Sometimes, they get their way. In February a judge in Alabama argued that frozen embryos were children, putting the brakes on ivf services (shortly afterwards the state passed a law to enable the treatment). In Louisiana every public-school classroom must display a copy of the Ten Commandments.
The Satanic Temple is not the only group resisting these attempts to put God into government, but it is the most flamboyant.In April, when Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, signed into law a new bill that would allow religious chaplains to provide counselling in schools, he announced that the Satanic Temple need not apply. “We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion,” he said. Greaves told me he found this absurd. “You don’t just give a governor dictatorial powers to overturn the constitution because you don’t like a certain religious group.” The Satanists plan to challenge the law, which Greaves said could also exclude other groups such as Hindus and Buddhists.
Whatever DeSantis thinks, Satanism is looking more like a religion than ever. In 2017 the Satanic Temple became a federally recognised, tax-exempt church.It has dozens of chapters across the country, and hundreds of thousands of members, many of whom appear to be atheist goths (there is a lot of black eyeliner). They’ve even got their own version of Alcoholics Anonymous, called the Sober Faction. There are dozens of “ordained ministers” of Satan – Greaves oversees the training.
Greaves has an unnerving lazy right eye, a tiny ponytail, and a wardrobe that seems to consist mostly of black (when I met him, his sombre attire was offset with pink sunglasses)
Hundreds of people have had Satanic weddings. Pixie, 27, a Satanic minister in Salem (who did not want to reveal her real name), told me she has married around 40 couples. Among the weddings she has blessed include one themed around He-Man, a comic-book character, and another around “Corpse Bride”, a Tim Burton film.
Many turn to the Satanic Temple after having bad experiences with conventional religion, often on account of their sexuality. Pixie, who hosts Satanic-themed drag shows at the headquarters, described herself as bisexual. She said that when she was a child, her grandfather, an old-school Irish Catholic from Boston, would send money into televangelists’ cable shows so that the pastors would pray for her. “I thought that God could hear every thought that I said, every little moment of, like, ‘I hate my mother, I hate my father’,” she said.
Chris was from a small town in Oklahoma. He had grown up in the Southern Baptist church, in which his grandfather was a preacher. “I have a lot of trauma from that,” he told me. Chris, who describes himself as queer, said that “growing up, I was always told that I was going to hell…that I didn’t belong, that it wasn’t natural.” He discovered the Satanic Temple via a podcast. “If they’re going to call me a Satanist anyway, for not believing, why not embrace it?”
It is a very online sort of religion. On a Wednesday night in Salem, I sat with Greaves as he performed a weekly ritual on the Satanic Temple’s website: screening vintage horror movies (“the worse, the better”), along with amusing infomercials. The live chat beside the video, which Greaves took part in, was far better tempered than what you get on YouTube. Here was a real community – not simply a bunch of trolls who have it in for the religious right.
But not everyone is feeling the cosy camaraderie. The Satanic Temple recently had its first schism. In Reddit threads and on Discord, people have been furiously debating how much control Greaves should have over the church. Some have suggested he is too dictatorial. The fight has led to the leaking of financial documents, and to the surfacing of some pretty ugly remarks Greaves made 20 years ago, which mocked religious Jews – he compared wearing the kippah to “wearing a frisbee”. Some members left and set up their own Satanic groups.
Greaves said he regrets making the comments. “I was speaking from a militant atheist perspective,” he told me. His views have since mollified. Running the Satanic Temple had helped him understand that some religious rituals give people “a sense of social cohesion…that shouldn’t be denigrated”.
Chris discovered the Satanic Temple via a podcast. “If they’re going to call me a Satanist anyway, for not believing, why not embrace it?”
He had little time for his opponents within the Satanic Temple, whom he characterised as hard-left entryists. People were joining the temple and “immediately targeting the organisation with their complaints”, he said.
Greaves has other things on his mind. As well as the battle with DeSantis in Florida, laws have been proposed in Iowa and Arizona that would ban Satanists from erecting displays, such as statues or altars, in public (it seems unlikely that these laws, which are almost certainly unconstitutional, will see the light of day).
Then there is the security threat. The pipe bomb was the latest in a string of incidents that have included vandalism and attempted arson. Last December Michael Cassidy, a test pilot and former congressional candidate, beheaded a model Baphomet in Des Moines, Iowa. “I want to return to a society and culture where everyone agrees that Satan is evil,” he wrote on X.
When I met him, Greaves seemed delighted by the recent scuffles with the religious right: fighting a common enemy is what holds the Satanic Temple together. But he said he had been advised to do more to protect himself. He doesn’t want to carry a gun, so has acquired a guard dog named Lucy, after Lucifer.