Religious Beliefs of The Satanic Temple

The Satanic Temple believes that God is supernatural and thus outside of the sphere of the physical. God’s perfection means that he cannot interact with the imperfect corporeal realm. Because God cannot intervene in the material world, He created Satan to preside over the universe as His proxy. Satan has the compassion and wisdom of an angel. Although Satan is subordinate to God, he is mankind’s only conduit to the dominion beyond the physical. In addition, only Satan can hear our prayers and only Satan can respond. While God is beyond human comprehension, Satan desires to be known and knowable. Only in this way can there be justice and can life have meaning.

Hail Satan!

That’s the earliest Web archive capture of the site, back in 2013 when it was still using the cattle skull. They had 9 tenets back then, and their issues included a weird bit about the traditional family.

This is probably why their legal arguments for all of their court cases have had such trouble being successful everywhere they’ve been tried so far.

As a matter of practicality, a religion like Judaism that can say, “we have thousands of years establishing this is a bedrock principle” like pikuach nefesh and life beginning at first breath has a much better case than one that says, “Last year we came up with holidays; this year we came up with the idea that abortion is a ritual in our religion.” Judges, so far, have perhaps not been as sympathetic to TST’s argument as they might be otherwise.

TST have not yet had a successful argument with regard to their statues, or, so far, the monument in Belle Plaine. At present, they are just nice photo ops for tourists visiting their headquarters.

That headquarters is 64 Bridge St, in Salem, Massachusetts, owned by 64 Bridge LLC (d/b/a “The Salem Art Gallery”). Who owns that corporation? Cevin Soling. Does Cevin own anything else? Well, yes. He owns The United Federation of Churches LLC (d/b/a “The Satanic Temple”), Cinephobia LLC, which owns TST.tv, and Reason Alliance Ltd., a nonprofit. Soling doesn’t appear on any of the documentation for The Satanic Temple Inc, formerly known as “The Satanic Temple”, full stop, but GuideStar lists him as a co-principal officer. Or rather, lists him under his pseudonym, “Malcolm Jarry”.

The owner of Winstonian Enterprises Ltd. is not listed due to corporate laws in Colorado, but it also lists its mailing address as—you guessed it—64 Bridge St, Salem, MA. Winstonian Enterprises owns and operates The Satanic Estate and TSTVHQ but was formerly known as “Goddess: The American Stripper”. That’s a saga for a different time.

Of all of these entities (and some others, but this is confusing enough), only one has public finances that we’re aware of. That is, only one was a nonprofit that had to file Form 990s with the IRS: it is Reason Alliance Ltd.*

“The Satanic Temple” (by which we mean, United Federation of Churches LLC) used to use Reason Alliance for tax-deductible fundraising campaigns prior to TST Inc getting church approval in 2019. The most recent public Form 990 for Reason Alliance is 2019 which showed them bringing in $360,418 in donations and spending $154,903, the largest of which was unspecified professional expenses ($70,913) followed by legal fees ($65,345). It also spent $8,378 in occupancy, presumably paid to 64 Bridge LLC, altho that’s not specified.

However, we don’t believe any such thing exists for any of the other companies because for-profit companies aren’t required to do it, neither are churches, and neither are nonprofits that receive less than $50,000 in donations per year.

But this is all to the best of our understanding, so if we’re mistaken anywhere, we would like to be wrong for as short a time as possible and have that error pointed out.

*Funny enough, Reason Alliance has the exact same seven tenets as TST but they called them “seven values” and ordered them slightly differently. Dunno why.