In early October, The Atlantic‘s staff writer Helen Lewis finally published a story about the fallout from Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves” taking a chummy photo with his friend the “anti-woke” sex pest and disgraced atheist “firebrand” David Silverman, most notable now for his anti-trans views.
Unfortunately, Lewis is basically your bog-standard TERF Island journalist, so a lot of the thrust of the article and the only places to really pick up this story were reactionaries looking to mock “the left is eating itself” Satanists, such as Fox News and The Daily Wire.
That’s unfortunate, because there was some good material included in there. The inclusion of the revelation that The Satanic Temple has paid contractors to actively monitor the social media feeds of its critics seems like something that might have made a bigger splash if someone else had taken notice of it. And we were able to be quoted and talked about our lawsuit a little bit in a Wikipedia-citeable news outlet.
Our section is reproduced below for anyone who missed it:
“This is supposed to be a religion, but really, it’s a corporation run by two dudes,” David Johnson told me one night over Zoom. Johnson is a heretic from heresy. He used to belong to the Satanic Temple, and is now one of four American ex-members being sued for taking over two of its Facebook pages and using them to disseminate complaints about the organization.
His concerns fall into a broad pattern echoed by other ex-members. When I interviewed them and dug into their complaints, many of the issues were managerial as much as ideological, centered on the assertion that the Temple’s leadership was undemocratic and overbearing. The dissidents disliked the nondisclosure agreements given to chapter heads, which the Temple says are necessary to prevent leaks “by former affiliates with poor intentions.” The Temple actively monitors the social-media feeds of critics and interested parties—my name turned up in an internal document for tweeting a comment request at a former member—and excommunicates those who, like the Sober Faction, challenge its authority. Its expertise in lawsuits is concerning to apostates who are contemplating taking their grievances public: TST’s suit against the four ex-members was dismissed, but the organization still has the opportunity to appeal. (TST also sued Newsweek for libel after it published a story reporting the ex-members’ claims; the suit is ongoing.)
Another frequent complaint is about the centralization of power. The Temple’s org chart shows that decisions are made in consultation with the National Council. But in practice, former members told me, the final say goes to the “executive ministry,” made up of Greaves [Doug Misicko] and Jarry [Cevin Soling]. Local groups are expected to get clearance from Salem for their events and campaigns, and to pass on a percentage of their revenue.
Greaves said that his critics “often seem to be under the delusion that the Satanic Temple makes a lot of money, and that if they just broke free of Satanic Temple management and had their own group, that money would be coming to them.” (The Temple’s accounts are not publicly available for review.) Joseph Laycock, who literally wrote the book on the Temple, told me that he couldn’t find a “smoking gun” to support the ex-members’ concerns about fundraising.
Johnson and his friend Nathan Sullivan, who now organize under the name Queer Satanic, no longer defer to the air of mystery cultivated by the Temple. During our conversation, neither man used Greaves’s pseudonym, instead referring to him as Doug [Misicko]. They also endorse some critics’ description of the Temple as “Scientology for mall goths.” As for Greaves’s co-founder Malcolm Jarry, they pointed to a documentary that he made about a cargo cult in Vanuatu, in which he offers himself as the island’s long-prophesied messiah. (Jarry declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Johnson and Sullivan despair over the counterintuitive narrative that drives so many articles about the Temple: What if Satanists were the good guys, actually? “That’s such a fun premise for so many journalists and so many writers and academics,” Johnson said. The real question, he continued, is “What if TST sucks for boring reasons?”
…
If you came to Satanism because of a suffocating sense of conformity in your previous life, then you might well be on high alert for signs of incipient totalitarianism in your current one. This is what Johnson suggested was the real problem about the photo of Greaves with David Silverman. “There is no mechanism to remove him,” he said. “There was no mechanism to hold him accountable. I think that’s what pushed people away more so than the incident itself—yet another far-right figure, yet another transphobe, etc. That wasn’t the inciting incident so much as Lucien Greaves going out on Twitter and just saying, How dare you ask me to apologize.”
For more background and context on David Silverman, see also our article about that.