Modern Satanism

The single most common error about modern Satanism is that its adherents believe in the devil. The two organisations that account for most Satanists in the world do not. LaVeyan Satanism, set out in Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible of 1969, is atheistic and materialist. Satan is a symbol: of pride, of appetite, of the human being as an animal rather than a fallen angel, and of refusal to accept authority that cannot justify itself. LaVey was explicit that anyone worshipping a literal devil had simply adopted the Christian cosmology and taken the losing side of it. The Satanic Temple is atheistic on the same terms, invoking the literary Satan of Milton and the Romantics as the eternal rebel against tyranny.

What follows from this is that Satanic ritual is not directed at anyone. Ceremony in the LaVeyan system is described frankly as psychodrama: theatre using blasphemous imagery to produce an emotional effect on the participants, on the reasoning that ritual works on the human nervous system whether or not any spirit is listening. The Satanic Temple has adapted the same logic to political ends, staging rituals whose purpose is to assert legal parity with religions that expect deference.

Where the two differ sharply is ethics. The Church of Satan teaches indulgence rather than abstinence, vengeance rather than turning the other cheek, and responsibility only to the responsible; it is elitist by design and hostile to egalitarianism. The Satanic Temple's seven tenets run in a different direction: act with compassion and empathy, struggle for justice, hold one's own body inviolable, respect the freedoms of others including the freedom to offend, revise belief in the light of evidence, make amends for wrongs, and read any written word by its spirit rather than its letter. There is no supernatural content in either list.

Theistic Satanism does exist. Some groups treat Satan as a genuine being, whether as the adversary of the biblical god or, in the Temple of Set, as an Egyptian deity misnamed by later tradition. Others operate outside any organisation at all. But there is no theistic body of a size comparable to the two atheistic ones, and treating theistic Satanism as the normal case reverses the actual proportions.

The Church of Satan was founded in San Francisco in 1966 by Anton LaVey, a former organist and carnival worker with a talent for publicity. Its text, The Satanic Bible, appeared in 1969 and has remained in print ever since. Much of the book is LaVey's own, but its opening Book of Satan is taken with little acknowledgement from Might Is Right, an 1896 tract by the pseudonymous Ragnar Redbeard, a work of aggressive social Darwinism whose politics sit uneasily with later Satanist self-description. The Church remains deliberately small and non-activist. It does not lobby, does not litigate, and describes itself as a religion of the individual; leadership passed after LaVey's death in 1997 to Peter Gilmore, and membership figures are not published.

The Satanic Temple grew out of a 2012 collaboration between Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry and was publicly active from 2013. Its method is legal rather than ritual. Where a government body grants a privilege to one religion, it requests the identical privilege and litigates when refused. It commissioned a bronze Baphomet monument and sought its placement beside Ten Commandments monuments at the Oklahoma and Arkansas state capitols; the Oklahoma monument was removed after the state supreme court ruled against it, and the Arkansas case ran for years. It has run After School Satan clubs where evangelical clubs are permitted in public elementary schools, and has brought religious-liberty claims concerning abortion access on the basis of its tenet of bodily inviolability. The United States tax authorities recognised it as a church in 2019, a designation it sought precisely because it forecloses the argument that it is not a real religion.

The two are not allies. The Church of Satan regards the Temple as a political pressure group misusing the name, and the Temple regards the Church as inert. They also differ on whether Satanism should be public and adversarial toward the state or private and indifferent to it. Both, again, are atheistic; the disagreement is about what an atheistic religion built on that symbol ought to do.

Between roughly 1980 and the mid-1990s, large parts of the English-speaking world became convinced that an organised network of Satanic cults was abusing and murdering children on a mass scale. It was a moral panic, and the finding that it had no substantiated basis is not a matter of opinion.

The trigger is usually dated to Michelle Remembers, a 1980 memoir by a Canadian psychiatrist and his patient describing recovered memories of Satanic abuse; its central claims were later shown to be unsupportable, including by contemporaneous records that contradicted them. What made it spread was a combination of factors: therapeutic techniques including hypnosis and suggestive interviewing that reliably generate confident false memories, particularly in young children; a daytime television and news market rewarding the most alarming version available; and law-enforcement and social-work training seminars that taught investigators to look for a phenomenon whose existence was assumed rather than shown.

The consequences were real even though the cults were not. The McMartin preschool case in California ran from 1983 and became the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point, ending without a single conviction. Comparable cases occurred across the United States and in Britain, and people were imprisoned for years on evidence that would not now be admitted.

The decisive assessment came from inside law enforcement. Kenneth Lanning, a supervisory special agent at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit and an experienced investigator of child sexual abuse, reviewed hundreds of reported ritual-abuse cases and published his conclusions in 1992: there was no corroborating physical evidence for large-scale Satanic cult crime, no bodies, no sites, and no surviving victims of the killings alleged. He was careful to add that children are genuinely abused in large numbers, that some offenders do use occult trappings, and that the collapse of the cult theory should not be read as scepticism about abuse itself.

The panic receded, but it did not disappear. Its narrative structure (a hidden elite, ritual crime against children, evidence suppressed by the authorities), was recycled directly into later conspiracy movements. Modern Satanists, who were among the accused, generally treat the episode as the defining event in their public reception.