Church of Satan

The Church of Satan does not believe in Satan, and that is not a technicality or a modern softening. It is the position the organisation was founded on and has held without deviation ever since.

Anton LaVey founded it in San Francisco on the night of 30 April 1966, Walpurgisnacht, chosen for effect. Its philosophy, set out in The Satanic Bible of 1969, is materialist: there is no god, no devil and no supernatural order, the universe is indifferent, and a person's obligations run to themselves and to those they choose. Satan is a symbol (the adversary, the accuser, the figure who refuses to kneel), standing for pride, self-interest, indulgence rather than abstinence, and the rejection of what the Church regards as the herd morality of Christianity. Its current High Priest, Peter Gilmore, has described members as sceptical atheists and put the position bluntly: Satanism begins with atheism.

The intellectual sources are visible and were never concealed: Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, social Darwinism, the carnival, and a great deal of theatre. Ritual exists, and the Church describes it frankly as psychodrama: a technique for working on oneself, not a petition addressed to anything.

The distinction between this and devil worship matters, because a great deal of what was done to people in the name of stopping devil worship was done on the assumption that no such distinction exists.

LaVey's own biography was substantially embroidered (the circus, the police photography, the celebrated affair), and the Church has never much minded, on the view that a good story is a legitimate instrument and that its philosophy stands or falls independently.

The Church of Satan is a corporate body rather than an initiatory order. It is governed by a Council of Nine; LaVey was High Priest until his death in 1997, and Peter Gilmore has held the office since 2001. Local groups are called grottos. There are five degrees of recognition, and their conferral has been criticised, including by those who left over it, as having become honorific and purchasable rather than earned.

Membership is by paid registration rather than by initiation, and the Church does not publish audited figures. Its own implied numbers have run large. The best-sourced statement available is a newspaper report that membership was never above about three hundred, and any figure in the tens or hundreds of thousands should be treated as promotional.

The Church rejects the legitimacy of every other organisation calling itself Satanist. It lost Michael Aquino and others in 1975, who founded the Temple of Set on the ground that LaVey's materialism led nowhere and that the adversary was real. It has been in continuous public conflict with The Satanic Temple since that body appeared, characterising it as an activist campaign masquerading as a religion.

The 1980s brought the Satanic Panic, a documented moral panic in which allegations of organised ritual abuse of children circulated through police forces, therapists and broadcast media. Investigation found no evidence of the conspiracy alleged, the analysis published by an FBI investigator in 1992 remains the standard reference, but the panic ruined careers and imprisoned people, and the Church of Satan, which had nothing whatever to do with any of it, spent a decade as the popular image of what was being alleged.

The Church of Satan continues, is administratively based in New York, and is deliberately small. It does not seek growth, does not proselytise, holds no congregational meetings, and has for years advised members that the practice is a private philosophy rather than a community activity. Its principal outputs are its publications and the occasional public statement.

Its position in the wider culture has changed twice. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a provocation with celebrity attention, and LaVey cultivated that carefully. Since the 2010s it has been the older and quieter body, watching a much larger and much more visible organisation use the same iconography for entirely different purposes.

The rivalry with The Satanic Temple is the defining feature of its public life now, and the disagreement is substantive rather than merely tribal. Both are atheistic. Both take Satan as a symbol. But the Church of Satan's Satanism is an elitist and individualist philosophy that regards political activism as beneath it and equality as a fiction, while The Satanic Temple's is an egalitarian and activist one built around campaigns for the separation of church and state. Each regards the other as having misunderstood the symbol.

The Church's most durable achievement is one it did not set out to make. By existing openly for decades as an incorporated religious body that plainly harmed nobody, it made the claim underlying the Satanic Panic, that Satanists constitute a criminal conspiracy, harder to sustain each time it was revived.