Part II

What kind of church sues former members?

By now, a decade into it, most people will have come across The Satanic Temple already in one way or another.

We have already written about the Temple’s origins, specifically as yet another prank documentary film project by a NYC landlord scion that ultimately evolved into a grift with no set end date.

What the hell is “The Satanic Temple”? — Ep. 5: The Satanic Temple (Inc.)

We have shown how the owners’ prior interests in the spheres of white nationalism and cultic messianism are not just incidental curiosities to understanding their current endeavor and its priorities, but directly explain many otherwise inexplicable activities by the Temple, such as material support of fascist speech or targeting public schools for disruption.

Thus, that’s not really the focus here.

Besides reiterating that it is definitionally not defamatory to talk about how a self-described religion fails to live up to its stated values and the facts relating to that — and has been affirmed by two different judges at this point — we are largely setting those issues aside for our purposes here.

In regards to their claims against us, we are no longer required to pretend The Satanic Temple’s claims are factually true — not only because their claims been dismissed by the Temple’s own failure to substantiate them, but more importantly, because we were finally able to submit our own counter-evidence in December 2022 and expose the foundations of their claims as overtly false.

We’ll discuss those further throughout this article.

As you’ve probably noticed, this is a very extensive article. This thoroughness may be overkill, but it’s the only antidote we know to combat TST’s reliance on exploiting the goodwill and good-faith presumptions of public institutions and the public at large; that’s what makes it so dangerous to the people who resonate strongest with the Temple’s public messaging.

We want to be explicit about this in particular: TST’s decision to sue us on claims they knew were false — and their multiple attempts to force the court to issue rulings that it had no legal or even constitutional authority to give — is not merely an issue of hypocrisy on TST’s part. As ham-fisted and unethical as their conduct has been within and around this lawsuit, the Temple’s decision to file the suit was perfectly in keeping with how TST itself is structured and how it decides what its priorities actually are.

Other members and even whole chapters have left the organization, both before and after us (St. Louis, Detroit, Portland, Los Angeles, the United Kingdom), taking all their social media pages with them or deleting the accounts outright.

At least one (Chicago) apparently even took the local chapter’s physical property with them.

None were ever sued on strained accusations of “hacking” — although in the years since, we have subsequently found out that many of those people were threatened in other ways or for other justifications but ultimately and actually for their public disloyalty to TST.

We’re inclined to think that a much larger part of TST’s decision to sue us was the fact that we didn’t just leave quietly. Rather, we also talked publicly about some of the other corporations TST’s owners have, and how they actually represent — and misrepresent — themselves on the legal documents that, when put together, give shape to TST as a legal “religion.”

Moreover, the fact that this was also accompanied by a frank discussion about the common threads between why people have left TST in the past, continue to leave to this day, and how TST is fundamentally set up to hurt people and drive them away in the future — in front of an audience that TST had probably considered to be safely protected from encountering any real criticism of TST, no less — posed an immediate, existential threat to TST that probably weighed much more heavily into their ultimate decision to file this suit in federal court than any theoretical (and to this day, unproven) breaches of law.