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From the outside, there’s nothing exceptional about the large storage shed that sits just off of Bridge Street, a busy road in Salem.
But on the inside — which houses a massive bronze statue of Baphomet, a widely recognizable representation of Satan — it's another story.
"It carries all these binary elements, which to us spoke to this idea of the reconciliation of opposites and pluralism," Lucien Greaves, the co-founder of and spokesman for the Satanic Temple, says of the sculpture. "The animal, the human. Pointing up, pointing down. The male and female."
The Satanic Temple created the statue for the Oklahoma state capitol building, to counterbalance a controversial monument there to the Ten Commandments. But in 2015, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ordered the latter monument’s removal.
So now, Baphomet could be headed south — specifically, to Arkansas's state capitol in Little Rock.
"Arkansas has already denied our monument going on their grounds," Greaves says. "However, they’re moving forward with putting up [a] Ten Commandments monument."
"We are going to sue Arkansas, there’s no doubt about that," Greaves adds — explaining that, as he sees it, there's no legal justification for allowing one public religious monument while banning another.
As the case of the storage-shed Baphomet suggests, the Satanic Temple isn't engaged in the sort of activity that usually springs to mind when you hear the word "Satanism," their ill-fated attempt to re-enact a "Black Mass" at Harvard in 2014 notwithstanding.
Instead, the group defines itself as a "religious organization" that's opposed to "tyrannical authority," and regards Satan not as a supernatural entity, but as a symbol of personal autonomy and critical inquiry.
Guided by those core premises, the Satanic Temple watches for what it considers egregious breaches of the church-state divide and then enters the fray — arguing that if Christianity can cross certain lines, Satanists can, too.
Another example: After-School Satan Clubs, which are causing a stir in places like Arizona, and boast both a cheery logo and a promotional video that resembles a horror film.
Despite the kitsch, Greaves says, the After-School Satan campaign highlights a serious issue: across the country, so-called Good News Clubs, sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, are pitching fundamentalist Christianity in public schools.
By proposing a provocative counterpoint, he adds, the Satanic Temple was able to generate a slew of media coverage, and spark a conversation that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
"Just the very idea that ... we were applying to have nine After-School Satan Clubs to counteract them brought the Good News Clubs into public consciousness, which was already a win for us," Greaves says.
The Satanic Temple also plays another angle. It identifies practices it finds objectionable, like school-based corporal punishment in Texas, or abortion restrictions in Missouri. And then it urges people to push back — and litigate — by claiming those practices violate the constitutionally guaranteed free exercise of their Satanic religious beliefs.
"We feel that due to our tenets, the body is inviolable, subject to one’s will alone," Greaves says. "[And] on religious principle, we rely on science as the arbiter of truth claims."
So far, Greaves admits, the anti-corporal punishment campaign hasn’t taken off. But a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s abortion policies has reached that state’s Supreme Court.
All of which raises an obvious question: Is the Satanic Temple a real religion? Or just a clever way to provoke and challenge the religious right?
It's worth noting, as you ponder this question, that the Satanic Temple's own literature describes it as a "poison pill" in the church-state debate — and that other self-described Satanists have aggressively challenged the Satanic Temple's authenticity.
But Greaves — whose moniker, it's also worth noting, is an alias — insists that while the Satanic Temple may not fit traditional conceptions of religion in general, or Satanism in particular, its beliefs are both sincere and deeply held.
"We have a sense of culture and ethics and a narrative structure that really binds us together," Greaves says.
"The political battles we fight aren’t all there is to it. And I feel that, even if we didn’t have these fights to fight, most of us would still be here, and we’d still have this sense of community, and we’d still be who we are."
And however one defines the Satanic Temple, its approach currently seems to be working like a charm.
