A SATANIC REBELLION Social justice collides with the Satanic Temple.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

T he last time   Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.

In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife.

The stunt was typical of Greaves and of the Satanic Temple, or TST, the group that he had co-founded months earlier. The Temple uses Greaves’s talent for the profane and the outrageous, along with strategic lawsuits, to target Christianity’s special status in American public life. Think of it as the ACLU with pentagrams. Greaves himself is a striking figure, charismatic and droll, pale and slender, usually dressed in black, often wearing a bulletproof vest and dark glasses. His name—or rather, his pseudonym, because his real name is Doug—shows up on  Fox News chyrons , legal filings, and envelopes containing death threats. For a decade, he has been a master of carefully calibrated provocation. More recently, though, the people he’s offended have been his own congregation.

This past June, he posed for his  second -most-controversial photograph, standing in front of a statue of Baphomet at the Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. The problem wasn’t the nine-foot bronze monument, which features adoring children gazing up at the occult goat deity—and which was then decorated with rainbow balloons in honor of Pride month. The problem wasn’t what Greaves was wearing, either—this time, he was fully clothed. The problem was the man next to him: David Silverman, a former president of the organization  American Atheists . “Great to see you again and thanks as always for your activism!” Silverman wrote when he  tweeted  out the photo.

Greaves barely registered the existence of the photograph at first: “I have a lot of engagement on Twitter,” he told me. But in the small world of radical atheist activism, the image was instantly divisive. Silverman had been pushed out of American Atheists several years earlier amid accusations of sexual misconduct, which he denied, and he had drawn criticism more recently for   arguing   that it wasn’t transphobic to say, in reference to transgender rights, “[live] your life as you see fit, but stay out of women’s showers and don’t groom kids.”

Many Satanic Temple members objected to their leader posing with such a figure. “People immediately hated on me, but they had no idea why,” Silverman told me via email. “They just knew I was an outsider and therefore a hateful, anti-trans, evil person, and Lucien was guilty for knowing me.” Greaves   dismissed   the backlash. He downplayed his relationship with Silverman, and said that he could not vet every person who wanted a photograph with him.

The discontent with that response quickly spread into a full-blown Satanic schism. There were calls for Greaves to apologize, to cede power, to reaffirm his support for trans rights. The Temple’s British congregation announced within three weeks that all   41   of its members had voted to leave; they soon rebranded themselves as Satanists in the Wilderness. In the United States, the Temple’s Sober Faction, which had been providing   court-ordered   sobriety programs for people who disliked the quasi-religious structure of Alcoholics Anonymous, also objected strongly to the picture. The faction’s Intersectionality and Diversity Outreach Legion held a Molotov Mocktails event on Zoom to air the concerns of trans and nonbinary Satanists. Some speakers argued that the photograph had caused harm and that Greaves’s “sarcastic” response to it showed a failure of allyship. Before long, the Sober Faction also splintered off, denouncing “TST and the patriarchal, white supreme [ sic ] structure of its leadership.”

Even some who stayed in the Temple publicly expressed their unhappiness. There was, as there often is when someone strays from the path of social justice, a group letter—earnestly signed by “Harry Hoofcloppen,” “Minister Dick Von ZombieSlayer,” and about 120 other Satanists, including chapter heads from California, Alabama, Texas, Minnesota, and elsewhere. This was “the result of deep reflection, and an earnest desire to communicate and grow together … a call in rather than a call out.”

Over the past few years, I’ve heard similar stories from charities, museums, theaters, media outlets, and political groups—about evolving ideas of “harm” and the difficulty of managing rank-and-file revolts that manifest as social-justice blowups. But this stuff was happening to   Satanists   now? That surprised me. It was a full-scale uprising, with Lucien Greaves cast as God—dictatorial, unbending, authoritarian—and the rebels as a phalanx of would-be Lucifers.

T he most   important thing to know about the Satanic Temple is that its members don’t really believe in Satan. They are atheists, and if they venerate anything, it’s the establishment clause of the United States Constitution, which prohibits the creation of a state religion. They have adopted Satan as their emblem because, in the Christian tradition, he is the ultimate revolutionary—the fallen angel of   Paradise Lost   who decides it is better to “reign in hell than serve in Heaven.”

The group began in 2013 “as high-level absurdist political performance—the closest thing to real-life trolling,” according to Tara Isabella Burton, the author of the book   Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World .   Since then, though, Greaves and his co-founder Malcolm Jarry have turned what could have been a joke organization into a full-scale nontheistic religion. The Temple has 260,000 followers on Facebook, an HR department   called   the “Suryan Council,” and a merch store selling branded hoodies and   hot sauce . Somewhat ironically, it now   claims   tax exemption from the IRS as a “church or a convention or association of churches.”

Many Temple members hide their identity, ostensibly because of the threats and hate mail that the organization receives, and Greaves and Jarry (also a pseudonym) have kept details of their early lives deliberately hazy. Reports suggest that Jarry was raised in New York State and has made documentary films under his legal name, but he doesn’t even show his face in   Hail Satan? , a 2019 documentary about the Temple. Greaves is in his 40s,   from Detroit , and has previously used at least two surnames. The two men’s determination to protect their identity is not absurd: In 2022, a man wearing a   god   T-shirt poured lighter fluid on the Salem building and tried to   start a fire . But the “satanyms” and the secrecy also make the organization seem, well, cool—at least to the type of restless normie who has always yearned to be reborn in a trench coat. In one priceless moment in   Hail Satan? , a man introducing himself before a planned protest in Arkansas says, “I’m Jeremy—Skullcrusher if we’re using pseudonyms.”

According to the academic Joseph Laycock’s history of the Satanic Temple,  Speak of the Devil , Greaves and Jarry grew up during the “Satanic panic,” in which lurid tales of child sacrifice and blood-drinking rituals swept America. They claim to have met in 2012 at an event at Harvard and to have bonded over the dull conformity of public schooling. As young adults, they had watched George W. Bush create the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which gave federal funds to religious philanthropy. According to Laycock’s history, Jarry remembers thinking, “They wouldn’t allow a Satanic organization to take advantage of this.”

That insight has guided the Satanic Temple’s activism ever since. The Temple has called for Satanic prayers in classrooms and city-council  meetings , set up Satanic  after-school  programs, and argued that abortion is part of a Satanic religious ritual and that the Temple’s members should be  exempted  from bans and restrictions. When a state suggests erecting a Ten Commandments monument on government land, the Satanic Temple pops up with its statue of Baphomet to suggest that it should get the same treatment. The rest of the time, Baphomet lives at the Salem headquarters, where—fatefully—visitors such as Silverman love to be photographed with it.

W ho becomes  a Satanist? The Temple’s membership leans white, according to an informal survey conducted by Laycock; although its founders are straight men, it appears to be gender-balanced, and it has high levels of LGBTQ representation. To understand what attracts members, you need to know that the organization offers fellowship and camaraderie—at Black Masses, “unbaptisms,” Satanic picnics, and the occasional orgy—in addition to its legal and campaign work. Some people come to the Temple through an existing interest in “alternative” lifestyles; these members’ hair, clothes, and tattoos proclaim them to be punks, goths, bikers, or heavy-metal fans. Others, though, have different reasons for sticking their middle finger up at organized religion. Some of the members I interviewed were raised in fundamentalist communities and joined the Temple to introduce structure and ritual back into their life—just without the supernatural beliefs. That dynamic helps explain the hero worship—and, on the flip side, intense sense of betrayal—that Greaves can inspire. He is an authority figure over people who claim to disdain authority.

The guiding principles of the Satanic Temple are known as the “Seven Tenets.” These include the ideas that “people are fallible” and that “the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend.” The third tenet is that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone,” so abortion rights have been a campaigning staple since long before last year’s  Dobbs  ruling. In February, the Temple announced the creation of a New Mexico–based telemedicine service  called  “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic.”

At heart, Greaves and Jarry are Gen X edgelords—they use provocation and offense to make serious points. But the two have had to navigate a vibe shift. In the early days, Satanic Temple protests were carried out “winking at the camera,” Laycock told me. Then Donald Trump got elected president, neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and people wanted to be part of a serious resistance movement to what they saw as  fascism  buttressed by  evangelical  Christianity. “For better or worse, nobody really seems to be having any fun anymore,” Laycock added.

The Trump era has also energized a distinct strain of social-justice politics—one that is deeply concerned with inclusion, marginalization, and power differentials, and that employs an expansive definition of the word   violence . In February, the former   head   of the Satanic Temple U.K., Tiffany Williams, proudly tweeted a tabloid front page proclaiming that Satanists had “gone woke” to attract new members. The Temple had “rebranded itself with a new family-friendly crow logo, supports LGBTQ+ rights and is flogging merchandise including plus-size T-shirts to avoid offending larger folk who want to order them,” the   Daily Star   wrote. The Temple has always traded on the cute contradiction between its goth stylings and its grassroots community work—picking up litter in black leather, anyone? But Williams was signaling something different, something more earnest and straightforwardly progressive.

Amid this ideological shift, the Temple’s past compromises between outrageousness and decorum have come under new scrutiny. Consider the Temple’s “sex positive” orgy policy, which one disaffected former member showed me. It tries to create a sanitized form of decadence via first-aid supplies, consent protocols, and pronoun badges. But even so, the orgy policy’s very existence bothered the ex-member because of the power imbalance between leaders and followers. “I got nothing against swingers or whatnot,” he told me. “What bothers me is when you have an authority taking ownership of it, when the people that are pushing for it are the people that are in charge. Those are all just red flags to me.”

The Molotov Mocktails event also underscored the difficulty of Satanic people management. For a group that has an abortion clinic named after the mother of a Supreme Court justice—something calculated to offend many Christians and Republicans—some members observe courtesy and deference rituals that could keep an anthropologist busy for   years . Several members offered land acknowledgements before their remarks, and others requested help following proceedings because of their neurodivergence. After two hours, the organizer concluded the Zoom meeting by offering “a golden sticker to the cis people who shut up and listened to us today.”

This is the congregation that Lucien Greaves has tried to shepherd, despite his own adherence to a very different set of norms. For example, he   didn’t look into   David Silverman’s exit from American Atheists at the time because it seemed like a “messy split that anybody would do well to avoid.” (Silverman had been accused of sexual harassment after encounters at atheism conferences that, he insisted in a now-deleted website   post   from the time, were consensual.) Nor would Greaves   condemn   Silverman—and he objected to the demand that he do so. “I have no interest in re-litigating the transgressions of somebody I now understand to be entirely and effectively canceled,” he wrote. “One does not look upon the barbarity of medieval torture devices and ask,   but were those who were subjected to this guilty? ”

O ne way  to understand social-justice uprisings is that many of them are proxy wars. As my colleague Anne Applebaum  wrote two years ago , those who are targeted tend to be  difficult  in some fashion: “haughty, impatient, confrontational, or insufficiently interested in people whom they perceive to be less talented.” In some cases, complicated interpersonal conflicts are  recast  in simplistic identity terms: a man said something questionable to a woman, or a Latino to an Asian American. In other situations, genuine grievances about pay, working conditions, or exploitative hierarchies are not taken seriously by organizations—whereas issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion are. Suppressed discontent therefore bubbles up in the form of DEI complaints.

The Silverman schism at the Satanic Temple might never have happened without a background of discontent over Lucien Greaves’s history as a provocateur. Five years ago, a recording of him on a 2002 podcast resurfaced. In it, he joked that “it’s okay to hate Jews” based on their supernatural beliefs, but not because of their ethnicity. “Satanic Jews are fine,” he added. (Greaves has since called the podcast “dumb.”) In the early 2000s, Greaves created illustrations to accompany a reprint of a Victorian anti-religious book,  Might Is Right , that was among the inspirations for mid-20th-century Satanism—and is also openly racist and sexist. The Temple’s media guidelines offer a talking point for members who are asked about Greaves’s involvement in its reissue. “I can’t speak to something that happened almost 20 years ago,” Satanists are advised to say. “What we do know is that TST is incredibly inclusive and we welcome members from all walks of life.”

Greaves’s efforts to keep the Temple on message rile his critics. In 2017, its National Council formally declared that the organization shouldn’t take part in marches and rallies held by other groups. Greaves and others wanted to keep Temple members from being seen as rent-a-crowd protesters, lost in a “chaotic mix of people with unspecified agendas and mixed messages,” as the council declaration put it. The anti-Greaves faction has a different interpretation—that the Temple’s leader holds progressive causes in contempt, and his apparent neutrality is a cover for far-right views. These members point to the last time the Satanic Temple had a serious split: in 2018, when Greaves announced that he would sue Twitter for  suspending  his account. His choice of lawyer was Marc J. Randazza, who was also representing the Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and had even appeared on Jones’s show.

For Greaves, hiring Randazza wasn’t a hard decision. “If one needs a First Amendment lawyer, one’s going to get a lawyer who has defended deeply offensive speech,” he wrote in a  post on Patreon . Many members disagreed. In a post announcing her decision to quit, Emma Story of the New York chapter  criticized  “the unwavering commitment of cofounder Lucien Greaves to his particular flavor of free speech absolutism.” Why was he opposed to legislation against hate speech, she wanted to know: “I think hate speech is bad and that to pretend otherwise in 2018 is intellectual dishonesty.” A group letter to the leadership from chapter heads complained that they had not been consulted over Randazza’s hiring and warned that Satanism was “not immune to rising nationalist, supremacist, fascist popularity in the US.” That August, the Los Angeles branch  split off , rebranding as HelLA. Around the same time, the U.K. chapter announced that it was  disaffiliating  because of an unrelated dispute with the leadership and  ultimately  rebranded itself as the Global Order of Satan. (Yes, the recent schism is the  second  time a group of dissident Brits has walked out.)

Back then, the most damaging criticism came from Jex Blackmore, an early member and regular leadership spokesperson. In a post  on Medium  after the Randazza story blew up, Blackmore decried, among other things, a “lack of inclusion and equitability” in the Temple. However, Blackmore (who uses  they / them  pronouns) had already left the organization after falling out of favor. Some months before, during the filming of the  Hail Satan?  documentary, they had staged a ritual complete with nudity and pigs’ heads on stakes. They told the audience: “We are going to storm press conferences, kidnap an executive, release snakes in the governor’s mansion, execute the president.” Blackmore saw this as punkish performance art—part of “an anarchist gathering, a private gathering, to show a complete destruction of oppressive societal norms and boundaries,” they told me. Greaves saw it as the kind of thing that gets you on FBI watch lists.

He called Blackmore personally to remonstrate, and Blackmore soon stepped down because, they later told me, “I didn’t want to engage in any form of self-censorship.” When the backlash over Randazza began, Blackmore took the opportunity to make a splash. Their public repudiation of the Temple and self-depiction as a whistleblower, Greaves told me, became the template for all future schisms.

Talking to Satanists—both loyalists and dissidents—I could feel the familiar contours of a story that is often told about American social-justice politics, one of easily offended, self-centered, and entitled activists who are impossible to integrate into a conventional hierarchy and sow chaos and destruction wherever they go. But a familiar story can be every bit as seductive as the snake in Eden. It was time to hear more from the rebels.

“T his is  supposed to be a religion, but really, it’s a corporation run by two dudes,” David Johnson told me one night over Zoom. Johnson is a heretic from heresy. He used to belong to the Satanic Temple, and is now one of four American ex-members being  sued  for taking over two of its Facebook pages and using them to disseminate complaints about the organization.

His concerns fall into a broad pattern echoed by other ex-members. When I interviewed them and dug into their complaints, many of the issues were managerial as much as ideological, centered on the assertion that the Temple’s leadership was undemocratic and overbearing. The dissidents disliked the nondisclosure agreements given to chapter heads, which the Temple says are necessary to prevent leaks “by former affiliates with poor intentions.” The Temple   actively monitors   the social-media feeds of critics and interested parties—my name turned up in an internal document for tweeting a comment request at a former member—and excommunicates those who, like the Sober Faction, challenge its authority. Its expertise in lawsuits is concerning to apostates who are contemplating taking their grievances public: TST’s suit against the four ex-members was dismissed, but the organization still has the opportunity to appeal. (TST also sued   Newsweek   for libel after it published a story   reporting   the ex-members’ claims; the suit is   ongoing .)

Another frequent complaint is about the centralization of power. The Temple’s org chart shows that decisions are made in consultation with the National Council. But in practice, former members told me, the final say goes to the “executive ministry,” made up of Greaves and Jarry. Local groups are expected to get clearance from Salem for their events and campaigns, and to pass on a percentage of their revenue.

Greaves said that his critics “often seem to be under the delusion that the Satanic Temple makes a lot of money, and that if they just broke free of Satanic Temple management and had their own group, that money would be coming to them.” (The Temple’s   accounts   are not publicly available for review.) Joseph Laycock, who literally wrote the book on the Temple, told me that he couldn’t find a “smoking gun” to support the ex-members’ concerns about fundraising.

Johnson and his friend Nathan Sullivan, who now organize under the name Queer Satanic, no longer defer to the air of mystery cultivated by the Temple. During our conversation, neither man used Greaves’s pseudonym, instead referring to him as Doug. They also endorse some critics’   description   of the Temple as “Scientology for mall goths.” As for Greaves’s co-founder Malcolm Jarry, they pointed to a documentary that he made about a cargo cult in Vanuatu, in which he offers himself as the island’s long-prophesied messiah. (Jarry declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Johnson and Sullivan despair over the counterintuitive narrative that drives so many articles about the Temple:   What if Satanists were the good guys, actually?   “That’s such a fun premise for so many journalists and so many writers and academics,” Johnson said. The real question, he continued, is “What if TST sucks for boring reasons?”

Another one might be: Why does everyone   care   so much? How can one organization generate so much drama and infighting? Why is there such a battle for the non-soul of American Satanism? Laycock, who was researching his book when the 2018 split occurred, regularly found himself cast as the referee between rival factions. Some people asked him to interview them again so they could further unburden themselves. “One person I even interviewed three times, and eventually I was like:   I’m not your therapist ,” he told me.

If you came to Satanism because of a suffocating sense of conformity in your previous life, then you might well be on high alert for signs of incipient totalitarianism in your current one. This is what Johnson suggested was the real problem about the photo of Greaves with David Silverman. “There is no mechanism to remove him,” he said. “There was no mechanism to hold him accountable. I think that’s what pushed people away more so than the incident itself—yet another far-right figure, yet another transphobe, etc. That wasn’t the inciting incident so much as Lucien Greaves going out on Twitter and just saying,   How dare you ask me to apologize .”

O ver and over  again, when I was talking with Satanists—current and former, disaffected and devout—one thought kept popping into my head:  This is New Atheism all over again.   In the early 2000s, New Atheism was  the  countercultural movement. It generated best-selling books, including Richard Dawkins’s  The God Delusion   and Christopher Hitchens’s  God Is Not Great . It supported priests who had lost their faith, as well as thinkers, such as the Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had suffered under fundamentalism. It held conferences where middle-aged males—including David Silverman—who fancied themselves rebellious intellectuals were treated like rock stars.

And then it splintered. In 2011, after a prominent skeptic named Rebecca Watson reported being propositioned in an elevator at a conference, Dawkins  mocked  her complaint in the comment section of a popular New Atheist blog. That prompted the creation of Atheism Plus, a movement designed to integrate godlessness with feminism, racial awareness, LGBTQ activism, and other causes. By the late 2010s, former New Atheist allies no longer spoke to one another: One side talked about identity issues; the other railed against them. And in this fight between snowflakes and dinosaurs, neither camp talked about atheism much. As the rationalist blogger Scott Alexander  put it , “Atheism Plus, the brand name for a combination of ‘atheism plus social justice’ … became entirely social justice.”

In recent years, movements and institutions far more illustrious than the Satanic Temple have struggled to prioritize their original mission. In 2021, for example, Planned Parenthood’s president, Alexis McGill Johnson,  apologized  for “focus[ing] too narrowly on ‘women’s health.’” That year, my colleague Michael Powell, then at  The New York Times ,  reported  on an ideological split at the ACLU over “whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police.”  The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim  chronicled  similar divisions at the Guttmacher Institute, which campaigns for abortion rights; the Sierra Club, an environmentalist group; the liberal think tank Demos; the Human Rights Campaign, a pro-LGBTQ lobby; and the anti-harassment group Time’s Up. “In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult,” he wrote. The historian Robert Conquest’s  second law of politics  suggests that “any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” A corollary might be: Every organization that attempts to be  something   plus social justice ends up being about social justice. Silverman claims to have spoken with many members of the Temple who are unhappy with its political turn but are afraid to challenge the new consensus. “What a terrible place to be; just leaving one closet for another,” he told me over email.

The Satanic rebels argue that their demands—more transparency, more humility, and more democracy—are reasonable and necessary to fulfill the Seven Tenets and continue the struggle for justice. They want the Temple to be an avowedly progressive organization that puts out statements supporting child gender transition and Black Lives Matter. They want Greaves to be more careful about his associations, because his friendships and professional relationships reflect badly on them. Above all, they want to know that, if necessary, they could discipline or remove him. “Lucien, if you’re listening,” the Molotov Mocktails organizer said during that fateful Zoom event, “this is our religion, we—the royal   we —built this together. You are, at this point, just some guy who got the ball rolling. Let us take charge.”

In response, Greaves has done something I haven’t seen any other progressive leader do: He has explicitly rejected these demands. In the recent blowup, he told me via email, “I was astonished by how many times I was told, ‘all you have to do is post a message stating … ’ This would be followed by a meaningless script that contained absolutely no tangible call to action, but instead merely served the purpose of letting people know that I was prepared to conform to their every demand and to their empty catch-phrase laden language.” He didn’t comply, he said, because he doesn’t want to be a universal spokesperson for progressive values: “I didn’t realize necessarily how oppressive this culture was, to me, until this explosion happened with the Silverman thing.”

So who is the real rebel here—the true heir of Satan—and who is the authoritarian? Is the villain Lucien Greaves, zealously guarding his turf, keeping tabs on his critics, and protecting his reputation through lawsuits? Or is it the people who want the Temple to speak with one voice, and who think that Greaves shouldn’t associate with their political opponents?

Toward the end of my conversation with Greaves, I asked him if he was uncomfortable with how dominant he was in the Temple, as its co-founder and public face. “I used to worry about that a lot more,” he said. Now, though, he felt less apologetic, “and I really do grow tired of people who come in after a week and demand my resignation because they think they could do things better.”

I came back to something that Joseph Laycock had told me, that the rebellious ideology of the Temple made it particularly prone to internal dissent: “How can you have an   organization   of people dedicated to total individual freedom and empowerment?” He had heard people within the Temple hierarchy explain their defense of order and structure by saying that “when Satan rebelled against God, and he had an army of angels—they were an   army,   you know, he didn’t have an   angry mob   of angels.” And his angels weren’t even on Twitter.