Introduction

These now multiple frivolous, incompetent lawsuits by The Satanic Temple against four former members is a rare window into what the so-called “bona fide religion” actually is: an abusive, predatory organization that actively targets the most vulnerable people in its reach.

As TST’s whole campaign against us shows, it is an one actively willing to corrode the separation of church and state just to protect its ability to profit further from the exploitation of those people.

In this three-year period, we have seen the first case dismissed by a federal judge once in February 2021, and again in January 2023. We have seen the Temple’s incompetent defamation claims refuted directly on the simple basis that the First Amendment protects the right to criticize a religion’s beliefs, and seen the original excuse for the case resolved back in May 2020 via Facebook ticket with no need for litigation at all.

Again: ostensibly this is all about The Satanic Temple claiming the Temple’s for-profit corporation’s owners — rather than the actual page admins or especially rather than Mark Zuckerberg and Meta corporation — own Facebook pages, and that any criticism of TST as a religion is de facto defamation because TST’s owners disagree with it.

At any point, the Temple had the power to end this, even to declare victory at their retaliation being credible and efficacious, if they so chose. Instead, they appealed their federal court loss to a higher court and started a new lawsuit over the same issues in state superior court.

We continue our fight to defend ourselves because we have to but also because it’s clear that if The Satanic Temple is not stopped here, they will grow into something even more dangerous and abusive. This is not a problem that will resolve on its own or that can be trusted to let someone else rescue us from.

Consider that since suing us, TST has now also sued Newsweek and its reporter as an individual for writing about the case, and has even sued a Texas TikToker who made two videos critical of the Temple.

TST and its loyalists have been shown more than willing to move the goalposts however much they feel is necessary in order to justify the existence of this suit, as they pursue it for over three years and in three different courts to date. Their justifications both in and out of court run the gamut: acording to them, we’ve stolen their property, committed cyberpiracy and fraud, and funneled away donations and members that TST was theoretically entitled to in order to prop up a competitor organization called “The Satanic Temple 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

None of those claims have any factual or legal weight, and the court has so far repeatedly recognize this dearth.

But this is always expensive, and TST continues to allege them and prop them up whenever they have to acknowledge this suit’s existence because ultimately, no matter no matter how many justifications that TST invents, they all follow one consistent thread on formal examination:

If someone talks about The Satanic Temple in terms of its actual actions and track record, rather than merely regurgitating TST’s own press releases and “both sides are equally bad” whitewashing, TST’s owners and legal team will find — or just make up out of whole cloth — an excuse to retaliate.

Despite the Temple’s claim to simply want back property they (falsely) profess was stolen from them, one of TST’s final briefings in federal district court was an all-but-explicit admission that their real concern was the theoretical harm that might arise from seeing us criticize them on any platform. So regardless of whether or not TST had any whiff of a property claim to that platform, such as a working class leftist podcast about Southern history and culture, The Satanic Temple wanted the courts to call discussion of its failures to live up to its own stated values something legally prohibited and at least civily actionable.

This is not a religion that deserves the benefit of the doubt — from anyone! — that it is interested or even capable of advancing the rights of marginalized people anywhere in the country, and certainly not against the oligarch-powered, multi-generational project of Christian fascism.

The Satanic Temple is not the underdog in this story; they are vastly better-funded as a national organization than we are as a handful of individuals scrapping for donations on GoFundMe and Paypal. But we keep winning. Every motion, every stage of the case: we win and the Temple loses. And the reason that keeps happening is because despite all of its bloviating about how “beliefs should follow evidence” and that “we believe in Enlightenment rationality,” The Satanic Temple simply cannot survive in any arena where it is expected to be able to defend its claims against any kind of sustained, factually-informed pushback.

And yet TST persists with its accusations because, ultimately and by their lawyer’s own admission, they’re much less concerned about the merits than they are about retaliating against the very sort of protected speech they claim to value (as long as it’s pointed at someone else).

The Satanic Temple puts incredible weight on their reputation as a counterweight to the Christian Right; it generates countless donations every year on the idea that they can be trusted to protect human rights and social progress via the sheer novelty of “trolling Christians.” The Temple generates endless headlines that ultimately do no more than repeat TST’s press releases and rehash their website’s “About Us” sections, while utterly failing to conduct the necessary follow-up discussion as to how TST’s supposed theory of change meaningfully benefits anyone outside its owners and inner circle.

There is a common saying on the left: “a better world is possible“. We would argue that the reality is TST has no interest in building a world where it is not in the position to profit from the trauma and desperation of the marginalized, and that its dogged use of SLAPP suits is just one more way it manufactures that trauma in an attempt to profit further. We would argue that this makes TST uniquely and imminently dangerous to people around the country marginalized in so many other ways already.

We think you deserve better than TST. We think the entire world deserves better than TST.

There is nothing remarkable about us. We are so utterly mediocre it is almost a joke. Except in one way: we are the only ones to have been stubborn enough and resourced enough by our allies to fight back.

Our thesis is simple: We refuse to be held liable for damages allegedly caused by things that never actually happened, and especially when conceding would make it easier for TST to perpetrate its structured abuse on anyone else.

And just to clear up a misconception that keeps springing up: we’re not suing TST. We have always been the defendants, legally forced to respond to the complaints made by TST. We’re not the ones keeping this farce of a suit in court, let alone dragging it into three different courts as of April 2023. TST is the one consciously deciding to file new complaints, refusing to defend its own claims, and then appealing the dismissal that inevitably results, and so the fight continues.

Legally, TST is comprised of a stack of for-profits and nonprofits owned solely by two men who have admitted in court to operating with no oversight at all – and over the last several years, they have established a pattern of overt contempt for the legal standards of protected speech, harassing and threatening with financial ruin anyone who draws attention to the numerous problems that flow from an institution arranged in this manner.

This writeup, as long as it is, is intended to be a sort of highlight reel — we want to focus on the most egregious and bad faith arguments that TST makes in this lawsuit, because we think that the very existence of those claims, and the fact that TST finds them compelling enough to present to multiple judges, highlights the Temple’s fundamentally predatory worldview towards its own members, towards the general public, and towards public institutions like the press and the legal system.

And this is all just stuff that’s already on the record — either because TST put these facts down itself, or gave us the opportunity to contradict them in sworn statements. None of this is new information.

And as always, we encourage you to read the court documents and see for yourself.

(Download the RECAP browser extension to pay it forward and help others get around the paywalls.)

• United Federation of Churches LLC v. Johnson (2:20-cv-00509) – District Court, W.D. Washington
• United Federation of Churches LLC v. David Johnson (23-35060) – Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit