I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions of “canon,” dismissed “authorial intent,” and promoted novel, intersectional ways to read Scripture.
While I’d become accustomed to this, I still jumped when the professor called out “Hail Satan!” That blatant invocation came as a shock, even in such a setting. The professor saluted the devil laughingly in response to a student who had done the same. The phrase made the Christian students uncomfortable, to the professor’s evident enjoyment.
Yet while my classmates and professor seemed to explicitly proclaim their allegiance to the Prince of Darkness, their manner was tongue-in-cheek. They believed they were expressing support for freedom of thought, following the enlightened model of The Satanic Temple (TST). These so-called “Satanists” do not claim any belief in a being called Satan but instead use the Devil as an avatar to project their ideals and critique organized religion.
Founded in 2012, TST claims to “encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.” The group has made a name for itself by erecting shrines to Satan that challenge and mock public religious displays, including a statue of the ten commandments in Arkansas and a Catholic nativity in New Hampshire. Fundamentally, they profess atheism.
They argue this rejection of God accords with a commitment to science, which is one of their core tenets: “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.” In professing belief in a scientifically unverifiable God, Christians do not conform their beliefs to their best scientific understanding. What’s worse, they use their beliefs to justify “hateful” or “tyrannical” opinions, such as those which oppress women or homosexuals, making their adherence to the God-lie all the more reprehensible.
Following William Blake and Percy Shelley, the Satanists take as the mascot of their resistance the great transgressor of Christian mythology. Doing so not only summarizes their mission but expresses their freedom from superstition. They don’t fear God or the Devil because neither are real, but they repudiate the idea of God and embrace the Devil’s ethos: freethinking, transgression, enlightenment.
And yet, this is all a fantasy. Unknowingly, the Satanists truly serve Satan, actively participating in the great cosmic struggle they treat as a game. By holding themselves superior to the very idea of God and appointing themselves the arbiters of right and wrong, the Satanists accept the deception of the serpent in Genesis 3. Eve believed the lie that by eating the forbidden fruit she would “be like God, knowing good and evil,” and her transgression rejected God as sovereign Lord. Likewise, the Satanists believe that by eating the fruit of enlightenment they exile any need for a divine judge and lawgiver, enthroning their own reason in God’s place.
The unique horror of the Satanists is the ignorance in which they undertake their rebellion. As good secularists they embrace the Prince of Darkness in a spirit of irony, thinking they use Satan for their purposes when truly they are offering themselves up to his.
This is why hearing my professor and classmates hail Satan was so gut-wrenching. For months, both teacher and students had held themselves in judgement over God’s Word. With their wide-ranging learning, they dismissed the tenets of Christian belief they found unpalatable, mocked the faithful believers who hold them, and sought to remake God’s Word in their own image. Countless times, my classmates and professor proved themselves servants of Satan. Finally, while consciously denying his existence, they saluted their master openly. It was bone-chilling.
Unlike our God, Satan lies to his servants; he works his will not by decree but by deception. The serpent in the Garden asks a half-question and tells a half-truth, designed to tempt Eve to disobey God without giving her an honest picture of the consequences.
The consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, born of Satan’s deception, extends to all their children. Even though unbelievers know God, they withhold from Him the honor and worship that is His due. Besides inflicting separation from God, this idolatry has a warping effect on the unbeliever’s intellect:
[T]hey became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things (Rom 1:21–23).
The Satanists’ futile thinking manifests in their devotion to science. Psalm 115:2–8 tells us that idolaters become like what they worship: dumb, blind, and deaf. Among other things, Satanists worship science and have become like science. They can only see the material world and so are blind to the forces of evil they serve.
There is little difference between the pagan who challenged Israel and the atheist who challenges Christians. The pagan sets up his idols of gold and silver, contending his Baal is the superior power. The materialist scientist sets up his method, contending that what he cannot see and measure with his instruments cannot exist. Both ask “Where is your God?” yet between the two the pagan is the less ignorant. He at least acknowledges the reality of spiritual forces, though he worships the wrong ones.
The consequences of this idolatry Paul makes very clear:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions (Rom 1:24–26).
The Satanists’ third fundamental tenet reads, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” This belief, which according to Paul is the direct result of their rejection of God, has forged TST into a vocal organ of the pro-choice movement.
Nowhere else is the Satanists’ “ironic” embrace of Satan more horrifying. Taking up the cause of “religious reproductive rights,” the Satanists claim abortion as a religious ritual. According to The Guardian, “women are asked to recite a ritual (‘By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done’) before taking abortion pills to ward off ‘unjust persecution.’” The Temple also expresses its support for all its LGBTQIA+ members, including “TST trans members of any age.”
While cloaking themselves in the language of science, enlightenment, freethinking, and charity, the modern Satanists fall into the ancient pattern of idolatry and sexual immorality. Even their pretense to righteousness fits a mold Paul recognized 2,000 years ago: “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness” (2 Cor 11:14–15).
In one way, the Satanists show themselves the most accurate of idolaters, openly worshiping God’s foremost adversary. In another, they prove themselves amongst the greatest fools, so fervently convinced of their atheism that they do not recognize their own servitude to the Devil.
Yet the truth of God manifests, even among those least willing to admit it. As Cornelius Van Til put it,
Even when man, as it were, takes out his own eyes, this act itself turns revelational in his wicked hands, testifying to him that his sin is sin against the light that lighteth every man coming into the world.1
In their foremost act of defiance and rejection, which they believe best symbolizes their freedom from ideas of God and Satan, the Satanists testify to their own bondage to sin and to the god of this world. Every rejection of God proclaims God’s Word, and none more explicitly and ironically than that of the modern Satanists.
- Cornelius Van Til. Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg: P&R Apologetics, 2003), 78. ↩︎