History & overview · every faith gets one
Non-theistic, and entirely in earnest about it.
The Satanic Temple holds no supernatural belief at all. Satan is taken as a literary figure — the rebel of Paradise Lost — and used as the emblem of a seven-point ethic centred on compassion, bodily autonomy, and the refusal of authority that cannot justify itself. Its method is to demand for itself exactly what other religions are given: a monument beside the Ten Commandments, an after-school club beside the Good News Club, a religious exemption from an abortion waiting period. The Internal Revenue Service recognised it as a church on 25 April 2019, after the Temple spent years refusing tax exemption on principle. It is not the Church of Satan, which is a separate body founded in 1966 and openly hostile to it.
Why it is filed this way
Filed as a movement rather than a parody, and the argument is worth setting out because it is live inside the Temple as well as outside it. It began in provocation — the first rally was staged, and a documentary crew was present — and Greaves has said the Temple can be both satanic and satirical. But the Seven Fundamental Tenets are held sincerely, the organisation has congregations, ordained ministers, life rites and a membership that describes itself as religious, and the IRS recognised it as a church in 2019 after examining exactly this question. A body that has spent a decade litigating on the premise that its beliefs are real is not usefully described as a joke; the honest description is a non-theistic new religious movement that uses satire as a tool.
The founding
Greaves and Jarry began the project in 2012 and made its first public appearance on 25 January 2013 on the steps of the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee, at a rally thanking Governor Rick Scott for a law permitting inspirational messages in public schools — the point being that a law which lets one religion in cannot keep another out. The Temple opened its headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2016. Its campaigns since have been run mostly through the courts: the Baphomet monument offered to the Arkansas and Oklahoma capitols, After School Satan Clubs, invocation rights before council meetings, and religious-liberty claims against abortion waiting periods.
Its founding is bound to Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry — 2013 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A material world with no supernatural layer behind it, in which meaning is made by people and beliefs are answerable to evidence..
The divine. Satan is a symbol, not a being, and no member is asked to believe he exists. The Temple states this plainly and is one of the very few religious bodies whose founding documents contain no supernatural claim..
Death and after. None. The Temple teaches no afterlife and makes no claim about one..