The Heretics
Queer Satanic antifascism
The four of us — David Johnson, Nathan Sullivan, Leah Fishbaugh, and Mickey Powell — were former members of a Puget Sound religious group ostensibly dedicated to religious freedom and community care but one that we eventually discovered did not live up to its own stated values, not at the local level or especially at the national level. However, once outside of that group, we were never an organization of our own, never properly even a collective or anything of that sort.
As "Queer Satanic," we were four people stuck together because we were all being attacked in the same way by a much stronger aggressor, and that commonality required our collective defense. As individuals, our own levels of ability, resources, resilience, and interest were not all equivalent to one another, nor capable of staying individually constant in the face of four-and-a-half years as targets of incredibly expensive multi-district litigation, of online harassment, stalking, and literal slander.
Despite this, we won.
We were sued by The Satanic Temple, an abusive but internationally famous non-theistic religious organization claiming hundreds of thousands of members but in actuality owned and controlled by two thin-skinned men, Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling. These men use their organization’s collective wealth and resources to intimidate and punish critics, particularly those who were once members themselves and therefore more vulnerable. TST trumpets its IRS-recognized, "tax-exempt church" status in its every press release yet sent out no press release about us and instead quietly used the for-profit corporation “United Federation of Churches LLC d/b/a ‘The Satanic Temple’ ” to sue these four former members of its Washington State chapter from April 2020 till September 2024. TST sued us in federal court, appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court, dragged us into the Southern District of New York to give depositions for their lawsuit against a magazine and reporter who'd reported on us, and sued us in King County Superior Court on what had failed in federal court. But TST lost everywhere it went, and we won.
We always maintained that the Temple's claims against us were frivolous and wholly without merit, and, indeed, those claims were found so in every court TST made them by every judge who looked at them. In October 2024, a month after TST’s most recent failure against us, the deadline for the Temple’s appeal came and went. So, we’re done.
We are finally allowed to go our separate ways and again have a life without The Satanic Temple in it, meaning we are taking a hiatus that may well become permanent. This has been a long time coming. One of us was overwhelmed by everything and stepped away within the first few months of the suit beginning. Another fought for two years but by 2022 had become too unwell to continue fighting. The other two went on because the lawsuit went on, and the work continued. Legal bills continued to come in, online harassment and contractors paid to stalk us and our loved ones continued. Only so much help was offered outside of us and only some of that could be accepted without opening more people up to suffering in the same way we did. "Many hands make light work," and this was heavy work for a long time. Yet if we surrendered and allowed ourselves silenced, TST would hurt even more people, as we came to learn they had hurt those before us. So we did not surrender.
If this hiatus becomes permanent, we'll try to keep the lights on here as long as we can. We are eternally grateful to our legal team at Arete Law Group PLLC for continuing to represent us and get us across the finish line of this cause, but many of the bills from our legal defense remain still for us to pay. All proceeds from merchandise sales and donations will continue to go toward that purpose as they have all along — as in all likelihood they will for some years to come. "It's a legal system, not a justice system." So it goes.
And yet, since this began, "Queer Satanic" has found that there is an audience for a sort of Satanism that is actually rebellious, that is unapologetically queer, that actually strikes against tyranny everywhere in all its forms rather than just wearing black and making hand gestures (rather than just feeling superior while elitely licking boots). Along the way, people thanked us not just for helping them understand what The Satanic Temple and its owners really were but for what Satanism has always been. They thanked us not just for calling attention to what problems exist in Christianity and persevere in Satanism but what problems exist in essentialism and hierarchies more generally. We did much bitter, thankless, joyless work in the past years because it had to be done and there was no one else doing it, but it has been immensely gratifying to discover that we created joy and wonder along the way during our heretical-heretical rebellion, and that all of that effort gathered an audience to itself. Thank you all so much for showing up and showing that.
If we do come back, it won't be all of us — or possibly even any of us! We've earned this. If we do come back, it will be so that this audience can continue to coalesce and redirect toward more efficacious purposes rather than meander and dissipate. But that is in the future, or one possible future, anyhow, because for now, Hail Satan, we won and are out of service.
