The Temple was founded in 2012 by two men using the names Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, and is based in Salem, Massachusetts. In April 2019 the United States tax authorities recognised it as a church, a status it had sought deliberately in order to litigate on the same footing as the bodies it challenges. Some of its own members objected that accepting a privilege it regards as unjust compromises the argument.
Its best-known actions are the Baphomet monument, commissioned in response to a Ten Commandments monument at the Oklahoma state capitol; the After School Satan Clubs; and litigation asserting that its abortion ritual is protected religious exercise. The last has largely failed. The Missouri effort was rejected in 2020, and cases in several other states have generally been dismissed, frequently on procedural grounds rather than on the merits of the religious claim.
In November 2018 it sued over the use of a copy of its Baphomet statue in a television series, and the matter was resolved within weeks on undisclosed terms.
The criticism it draws divides in two. From outside, that it is a political campaign in religious clothing and that its members do not believe anything; the Temple's answer is that a sincere non-theistic religion is a recognised category in American law and that its tenets are held in earnest. From inside, that the organisation is centralised and intolerant of dissenting chapters: chapters in several cities and countries have separated from it, three state chapters severing ties in 2024.