Two Organizations, Two Different Satanisms

The Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, despite both operating under the broad Satanist label, differ substantially in public orientation, theology and specific ritual practice, with the Church of Satan generally emphasizing LaVey's original philosophical framework of egoism and ritual psychodrama and the Satanic Temple pursuing a more explicitly political and legal activist agenda centered on church-state separation, and scholars of new religious movements treat them as genuinely distinct organizations rather than variants of a single unified Satanist religion, a distinction this entry maintains by declining to generalize across them.

Because both organizations' specific ritual and prayer material remains their own copyrighted intellectual property, and because both have been subject to considerable public misunderstanding and sensationalized media portrayal that neither organization's actual documented theology, which in both cases explicitly denies belief in a literal supernatural Satan, supports, this entry limits itself to recording each organization's general character and the specific legal and organizational reasons their liturgical material is not reproduced here. Both organizations have also been the subject of significant legal activity, including Satanic Temple lawsuits concerning religious liberty and public monument display, litigation that has further reinforced each organization's interest in controlling how its own specific religious material and public image are represented and used by others.