“Sorry about the mess,” Lucien Greaves, the cofounder of the Satanic Temple, says to the crew of Hail Satan? as he welcomes them into the organization’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. The two-story, formerly cream-colored building has been painted black, and a tasteful Sigil of Baphomet decorates the porch.
Like the Satanic Temple, director Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? isn’t quite what it seems: Yes, Lane’s affectionate and funny documentary does feature some pig heads getting slammed onto spikes, and yes, there are some naked writhing people.
But Hail Satan? is more interested in the organization’s vision of “contemporary satanism”—one that doesn’t include worshipping the devil but does include progressive activism and providing a “sociopolitical counter-myth” in a country that’s too often characterized as a “Christian nation.” (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Satanic Temple, and I urge you to join me. But in a scary demon voice, like this: JOIN ME.)
The Satanic Temple uses a few different tools, from an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall statue of Baphomet that’s used to draw attention to monuments of the Ten Commandments on public property, to “Menstruatin’ with Satan,” a program that distributes menstruation products to women in need. The Satanic Temple has protested anti-abortionists and trolled the Westboro Baptist Church; in Arizona, they’ve adopted a highway, using pitchforks to pick up litter; in Portland, an “After School Satan” club tried to offer a free-thinking alternative to evangelical after-school programs (“Parents protest Satanist club,” read the caption on the TV news).
It’s safe to say these gestures are met with… mixed response, though that hardly dampens satanists’ enthusiasm: In 2014, when the Archdiocese of Boston lost their goddamn minds over a black mass, one anonymous satanist found his beliefs strengthened. “This is the Catholic Church of Boston, which covered up decades of child rape, moved priests around, covered it up, let them continue their raping and child abuse, and then had the gall to say what we’re doing is sinful?” he asks. “I mean, fuck them.”
“What we want to do is force people to evaluate their notions of the United States being a Christian nation. It’s not,” says Greaves, who—in the face of raging right-wingers and perplexed Fox News personalities—remains witty, sharp, and passionate. “We are a secular nation. We are supposed to be a democratic, pluralist nation.” That’s a fact that seems ominously and increasingly forgotten in Trump’s America, so forget about the question mark. Hail Satan. 