The Satanic Temple's Benefits on American Politics

By Alejandro Vasquez on February 10, 2016

At first it seems odd that in our modern day, 2016 AD, a group called “The Satanic Temple” is on the rise around the United States. If the name sounds familiar, then you may be aware of the Baphomet statue they tried to get installed next to a Ten Commandments monument on the Oklahoma State Capitol grounds in 2014, which led to the monument’s removal. Or perhaps you know them from the “Pink Mass” from 2013, when some Satanic Temple members went to the grave of the mother of the the Westboro Baptist Church’s founder, conducted two gay wedding ceremonies on top of it, and performed a ritual to make her soul a lesbian in the afterlife. More recently, actions against the Phoenix City Council in Arizona just days ago have once again earned them national attention.

Pardon the pun, but why all this hell-raising? Is this group out to convert the most powerful country on the planet to devil worship? Are its members worming their way into our local and state governments in an attempt to install Satanist regimes?

Well … no. The Satanic Temple doesn’t practice Satanism of the kind people usually see in popular culture, with the virgin sacrifices and the summoning of dark entities, but it definitely uses this image to its advantage. More of a political activist organization than a religious one, it stages protests and other kinds of events in a crusade supporting the separation of church and state.

For example, the Phoenix City Council used to begin their sessions with opening prayers. Ostensibly it was non-denominational, but the Satanic Temple wanted the council to really prove its mettle and signed up a month in advance for two members to speak. This sparked heated arguments within the city government about whether or not they should continue the practice, and rather than allow a self-proclaimed Satanist to lead them in prayer, the council members replaced it with a moment of silence on February 3. This action by the Satanic Temple, which is really a largely atheistic organization removed an element of religion from Phoenix’s public sphere, but perhaps more importantly for their cause, it got people – politicians and citizens alike – to think about and reconsider the place of religious practices in political domains.

That’s what the Satanic Temple is really all about. The reasoning behind their request to put up a Baphomet statue at the Oklahoma Capitol Building was that if even one religious monument, such as the one depicting the Ten Commandments that was installed in 2011, could be placed on those grounds, then a monument for any religion could also be placed there without issue, because otherwise that would violate the freedom of religion. In 2014 they campaigned to have a holiday diorama, depicting an angel falling into Hell, set up inside the Tallahassee State Capitol (they just love our town!) with other religious groups’ displays - and succeeded. As for the Pink Mass thing? Well … the Westboro Baptist Church had announced that they would be protesting funerals of Boston Marathon bombing victims. No further reasoning needed.

The United States isn’t theocratic on any level, but there are still governmental bodies around the country that find ways to uphold a sense of Christian dominance on our culture, such as starting with typically Christian opening prayers and erecting monuments of Christian iconography on state capitol grounds. This can be disheartening for practitioners of non-Christian religions, who are the minority in the United States – a land where “In God We Trust” is printed on currency and “One nation, under God” is part of a pledge of allegiance children are told to repeat every day. This is especially rough and even potentially dangerous now that a growing number of Christians perceive themselves as part of a “persecuted majority” in the wake of stronger enforcement of the separation of church and state.

Thank goodness, then, for the Satanic Temple.

By the way, this is Baphomet. Imagine this outside your state’s capitol building! Gotta love the freedom of religion. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

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