They’re friends. They’re Satanists. They have a plan to save American democracy. - The Boston Globe (2024)

This was not his first visit to the temple, a black building decked with pentagrams in a residential part of the so-called Witch City, about 20 miles north of Boston. Seven months earlier, he had left a message on the side of the building in white spray paint: three Bible references, including John 3:18.

Whoever does not believe stands condemned.

The stranger tossed the letter into a flower bed. Then, he lit the fuse of the pipe bomb and aimed for the temple’s front door.

A few weeks earlier, on an upper floor of The Satanic Temple, a man who goes by the name Lucien Greaves was talking about the constant drumbeat of online threats to him and his organization, and how hard they are for authorities to trace. “They never get the bomb threat guys, do they?” he asked one of his employees, leaning back in his chair.

“No-o,” she said.

Greaves is 48. He has a striking, almost serpentine face, like his skin might be cold to the touch. In moments, he’s surprisingly shy, though when he’s in his element — on message — he’s astringent and funny.

Greaves cofounded The Satanic Temple more than a decade ago with a friend who goes by Malcolm Jarry. The temple now lists dozens of congregations around the world, including in Kentucky, Iowa, and Finland.

It is emphatically not the Church of Satan, which was founded in 1966 by the late Anton Szandor LaVey — who apparently believed that he could cause earthquakes and once served human thigh, stolen from an autopsy, at a dinner party — and which celebrates values including “vengeance.”

The Satanic Temple, recognized as a church by the IRS, is a “non-theistic religion” that doesn’t believe in a literal Satan. Through its seven tenets, it promotes values including empathy, bodily autonomy, and individual freedom — kind of like Unitarianism for goths.

Nevertheless, in calling themselves The Satanic Temple, Greaves and Jarry sometimes play with hellfire. In 2014, a radio personality on Imus in the Morning called for them to be shot. In 2021, the Sovereign Citizens movement, a right-wing extremist group, put out a kind of fatwa-lite on Greaves: “WANTED DEAD or ALIVE.” The next year, a man wearing a T-shirt that read simply “GOD” poured lighter fluid on the temple and ignited it. The ominous Bible verses appeared on the walls this past September. Then came the pipe bomb.

The threats are why Greaves uses a pseudonym, though I suspect it might also be because his real name is Doug, which doesn’t exactly scream angel of death. Greaves has the looks, though, with waxen skin and eyes of different colors, like the devil in The Master and Margarita.

“Central casting couldn’t have thought it up, if they tried to think of what the leader of The Satanic Temple should look like,” says the film director John Waters, who befriended Greaves years ago in Detroit, at an erotic art exhibition.

The Satanic Temple says it has over 600,000 members — almost five times as many as the Unitarian Universalist Association — although all you have to do to join is enter an email address, so it’s hard to gauge how many are deeply committed to the cause. It was founded after Greaves met Malcolm Jarry (also a “satanym,” as they call it) at a 2011 event at Harvard, where they both studied.

If Greaves is a Satanist out of central casting, Jarry, 58, is the opposite: balding, with wire-rimmed glasses, a polo shirt, and an air of being on the way to pick his kids up from summer camp (which, when I first met him, he was). His neighbors in a leafy, upscale Boston suburb don’t know what he does, he says, though his daughters occasionally visit “Daddy’s office” in Salem.

At that event at the Faculty Club, Greaves and Jarry became immediate friends. Both men had followed the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, when baseless allegations of ritual child abuse swept the country. And both were alarmed by what they saw as the creep of Christian fundamentalism into public life, particularly after President George W. Bush started his office of faith-based initiatives, which let religious groups receive government money. “The theocratic coup has been unfolding for decades,” Greaves says, “and it’s just been easy for some of us to see and not so apparent for others.”

Jarry, a secular Jew, had long toyed with an idea: How would the people inviting religion into public schools, courts, and government react if Satanists answered the call? What if religious conservatives opened the door to Jesus and the devil snuck in behind him?

After then-governor of Florida Rick Scott signed a 2012 bill allowing prayer at mandatory events in public schools, Jarry saw their chance. He hired actors, and staged a small mock rally to “thank” Scott for inviting Satanists into schools. Five or six people assembled on the steps of the state Capitol in robes and horns, with a banner reading “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott!” while a group of bemused local reporters looked on.

“You’re going to hell!” a passerby shouted.

One of the actors leaned into a microphone. “I believe it,” he said, smiling. “And I’m very excited about it.”

A series of escalating stunts followed, all aimed, broadly speaking, at pantsing the religious right.

Greaves and Jarry were having dinner together in 2013 when they heard that the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church was planning to picket the funerals of victims of the Boston Marathon bombing — which the Kansas church said was God’s punishment for the Commonwealth legalizing gay marriage.

Greaves and Jarry decided to use similar tactics against church founder Fred Phelps. Inspired by the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead, they would hold a “pink mass” — a ritual to turn the Rev. Phelps’s late mother into a lesbian in the afterlife.

The ceremony would involve same-sex couples kissing over her grave in Mississippi while Greaves presided in a horned headdress.

There were hiccups. The two women slated to kiss couldn’t stand each other; the two men, a real couple, contracted scabies right before the shoot. Eventually, they found stand-ins, and the photographs they circulated — including one of Greaves smirking broadly while resting his testicl*s on the headstone of Phelps’s mother — launched them into further infamy.

Early in the history of The Satanic Temple, there were two possible paths, Jarry explained to me recently, while we sat at a sleek suburban sushi restaurant.

Excitable and erudite, Jarry is a collector of Harvard degrees — one from the extension school and three from other graduate programs at the university. He also directs documentaries shot in remote locations around the globe, writes books, publishes articles, and is the frontman of a band that produces strange, droning music inspired by the French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote on the relationship between reality and spectacle.

After that first mock rally in Florida, “I had a real tough decision to make at that time, which was, do I continue this? And which direction do I go?” Jarry says, plucking the decorative petals off of his appetizer. Should they do more political spectacles or try to make something real? He decided on “going the route of sincerity and actually developing it into an organization,” he says.

Soon, what began as provocation started to take on the trappings of a real religion — and also started to take a legal turn. Jarry and Greaves knew that the law was on their side. The Establishment Clause of the Constitution means that the government cannot privilege any one faith over another.

So, you want to put up the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol? Great. Then you have to put up this sculpture of a hermaphroditic, Satanic goat deity.

You want to start a City Council meeting with a religious invocation, as is customary in Boston? Great. Satanic chaplains will sue the city for the right to offer a blessing.

You want to start an afterschool prayer group? Great. After School Satan Club has coloring books.

(Last year, a Pennsylvania school district settled with TST for $200,000 in legal fees after trying to prevent one from forming.)

But even at their most provocative, Greaves and Jarry insist there has to be a real point. “It’s not just some kind of crass prank where we say, well, if you can do that we can do this,” Greaves says. It’s a “vital and important message,” he adds, to show “these points of view, even though people might see them as diametrically opposed, can coexist on these common public grounds.”

At the temple in Salem is a towering bronze sculpture of Baphomet, the goat deity. His expression is mild; his sinewy torso modeled on Iggy Pop’s. Two smiling children look up at his impassive face.

TST originally commissioned the Baphomet statue for the Oklahoma State Capitol, to counterbalance a Ten Commandments monument. When the state supreme court ordered the Christian monument taken down, TST dropped its plans for a lawsuit and moved the specter of Baphomet on, like a chess piece across the board.

In 2018, another Ten Commandments monument was installed, this time on state Capitol grounds in Little Rock, Arkansas. Then-state Senator Jason Rapert sponsored a bill that allowed for it. “Many of our laws find their basis and their inspiration out of the Ten Commandments,” Rapert tells me when I ask him why he wanted to put it up. “Thou shalt not kill. Does that sound familiar? Thou shalt not steal. Does that sound familiar?”

TST joined a lawsuit — filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups — asking for the Christian monument to come down. If it didn’t, the temple wanted Baphomet to go up.

“What motivates The Satanic Temple is evil,” Rapert says. “People need to get educated that these entities are actually anti-American. They’re coming after our children. They’re coming after the principles that have made our country great.”

The temple disagreed. They trucked Baphomet to Little Rock for a rally, which was met by a crowd of armed protesters. Greaves, wearing glittery pink sunglasses and a bulletproof vest, stepped up to the lectern. “We have as little interest in forcing our beliefs and symbols upon you,” he said, “as we do in having the beliefs of others forced upon us.”

This is quintessential Satanic Temple, suggests Joseph Layco*ck, a new religion scholar who wrote a book about the organization, Speak of the Devil. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, sure. I’m fine with all religions. This is a free country’ when it’s just different types of Christians,” says Layco*ck, who is Catholic. He says one of Satan’s roles in the Bible is to test people’s devotion to God. “I see The Satanic Temple as doing a similar thing,” Layco*ck says. “Forcing people to prove: Do you really believe in religious freedom? Or were you just saying that because it was convenient for you?”

Last December, The Satanic Temple’s Iowa congregation put up a display in the state Capitol, testing a rule allowing religious displays during holidays. But the spangle-headed Baphomet they created for the occasion was promptly decapitated by Michael Cassidy, a Republican former congressional candidate in Mississippi. Initially charged with a hate crime, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but not before Florida Governor Ron DeSantis publicly pledged to donate to his legal fund.

DeSantis has become a useful adversary. Recently, Florida passed legislation allowing chaplains to offer counseling for students in public schools. Naturally, the temple responded, saying they’d also be providing Satanic chaplains. In the end, DeSantis was twisted into a position of needing to publicly deny his administration was inviting Satanism into classrooms.

“They use humor as terrorism, which I’m all for,” John Waters tells me, “and it’s politically very, very effective.”

The temple’s latest big project is an abortion clinic, which provides telehealth and medication via mail to residents of New Mexico. TST opened it after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, naming it Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic.

The clinic is, despite its name, not only a stunt but also an audacious legal experiment. The temple claims abortion can be performed as a Satanic sacrament, and therefore is a legally protected religious ritual. They plan to use this to sue to reestablish abortion rights that have been rescinded in other states.

TST is now raising money for a second clinic. One of the names under consideration is Mrs. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Pool Boy’s Satanic Abortion Clinic.

While Jarry and Greaves seem mostly concerned with their political activism, there are also TST congregations across the country that perform rituals, hold black masses, have book clubs, organize orgies, adopt highways, and celebrate Satanic holidays such as Hexennacht (“Destruction Ritual with bonfires, music, and dance”).

Members of The Satanic Temple are “people who really embrace their marginalization and are deeply independent,” Jarry says.

Once a week, Greaves smokes a lot of weed and hosts a virtual movie marathon with viewers tuning in on the temple’s online channel, TST TV. Films can be anything from B horror movies to Christian romcoms — interspersed with scenes Greaves splices together, one minute a topless woman performing in front of bongos, the next dancing meatballs. In the chat on a recent Wednesday, viewers keep track of the number of naked breasts that appear on screen. They get up to 74 (or 148, I guess) before I give up, log off, and go to sleep.

While some want to join the temple for the activism, or the prospect of Satanic movie nights, others seek out the temple for deeply personal reasons, as a way to throw off the baggage of strict religious upbringing, or to find ritual and community outside of God. “Atheism really loses a lot,” Greaves says, “when it disregards people’s need for storytelling and for ritual and those kinds of culturally identifying markers.”

Shiva Honey (a satanym she uses for safety reasons) grew up in an evangelical family in Michigan, and is one of the founding members of the Detroit congregation. She’s been publicly “milk boarded” — it’s what it sounds like — as a form of counter-protest against antiabortion activists picketing Planned Parenthood, and gone undercover to film deceptive tactics at so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which look like clinics but try to dissuade women from having abortions.

But Honey’s interest was personal as well as political. When she was a child, she tells me, her “religious fanatic” stepfather began abusing her. After another relative said the stepfather had also abused her as a girl, Honey’s mother went to her pastor. I feel like God’s telling me that I need to divorce him, Honey recalls her mother saying (her mother and stepfather are both dead).

The pastor, who was friends with her stepfather’s parents, replied, Are you sure that’s God’s voice, and not the devil’s voice?

After that conversation, “We just kept going to church pretending like nothing was wrong.” Honey says. The abuse continued.

Now, Honey leads group “unbaptisms” at the temple for others recovering from “religious trauma.” Participants begin bound and masked, and Honey releases them one by one, as they burn items from their past lives, or they “drown” them in red wine, intoning “Hail Satan.”

“The unbaptism is a way for us to separate from religious trauma from our previous religious lives,” Honey says. To “move more into ourselves and establish our own set of values and establish an opportunity to heal through ritual.”

But not all members are brothers and sisters in Satan.

The Satanic Temple is riven with infighting and schisms, with all the intricacy and intrigue of the papal succession wars of the 14th century, if they were conducted on Reddit.

“Satanists don’t play well together,” Layco*ck says. “Their entire worldview is built around rebellion and denying authority.”

Some congregants and ministers feel TST headquarters is overbearing. One infamous memo sent to congregations outlines best practices for orgies (“Latex use should be in a designated space in play area to help avoid accidental allergy exposure”). Fair enough, some thought, but what kind of amateur-hour Satanists can’t be trusted to throw their own orgies?

The schisms are numerous, and often have some tie to Greaves’s general unwillingness to apologize for things members see as mistakes but he doesn’t. There was the exodus after free speech lawyer Marc Randazza, who has defended figures such as Alex Jones, came on board pro bono. (“The situation is too dire right now for us to make those kinds of optics calls in which we say we don’t want to be tainted by somebody else’s past affiliations or whatever,” Greaves says.)

Another exodus followed a photograph of Greaves posing for a selfie with an activist some saw as transphobic. Greaves declined to apologize, saying it isn’t his responsibility to vet everyone he interacts with. (“What kind of person am I if I begin yielding to calls from angry mobs to denounce people publicly?” he asked.)

Still another mass departure followed Greaves’s firing of a minister who posted memes making fun of Greaves and TST — a number of congregations disaffiliated, and dozens of Satanic ministers resigned or were fired when they protested. Greaves wrote a fiery post asking discontented members to simply leave, and so more did.

“It just created this vicious cycle where each new incident was piled on to all of the previous incidents. And it never felt like it was getting better,” says Evan Anderson, a former member. Greaves’s hostile tone in dealing with dissent was “unsatanic,” he adds.

Some former members cite a 2002 recording, from before the founding of the temple, that resurfaced in which Greaves joked that it was “OK to hate Jews” if it was because they were practicing Judaism, but not OK to hate them for being ethnically Jewish. “Satanic Jews are fine.” (Greaves did apologize for that one.)

TST is now locked in legal battles with four former members who go by the name Queer Satanic, after they took over various social media accounts and started posting mocking memes on them, as well as a lengthy manifesto denouncing TST. The group now has a website dedicated to collecting dirt on the temple leaders.

Last year, there was a fight over the tearing up of a “thin blue line” flag during “SatanCon,” a three-day event held at the Marriott Copley Place. Greaves felt that antagonizing cops was a bad idea given how many threats the temple receives. His anger over it “was just sort of a head-scratcher,” says former member Jenny Green, who uses a satanym because she’s a public school teacher.

“I think he has isolated himself in the extreme,” Green adds, “to the detriment of his own mental health and the organization.”

Two months after the bombing in Salem, Greaves’s mother and I follow him onto the wide lawn of the temple, which seemed to pulse in the heat. It’s impossible to imagine Greaves — oddly ageless, black-clad, notorious for exposing himself in a graveyard — as a child. But here was his mother with her quiet, tremulous voice, sporting a nice blouse and a lilac manicure. After her husband died a few years ago, she came to live with her son.

“You’re freckling,” she told him as we paused in the sun on the day in late June. Greaves looked down at his milk-pale arms, stamped with tattoos — a demonic head with twisting horns, a 666 written in binary code. She was right.

Greaves’s new protection dog, a gold-flecked Dutch shepherd, had just arrived. Someone from one of the various law enforcement agencies that swarmed after the bombing had advised him to either get a gun or a trained guard dog. So here was Luci, short for Lucifer.

The pipe bomb had been assembled poorly and only partially exploded, damaging the porch but not hurting anyone. Thanks in part to the temple’s security cameras, as well as DNA testing of a hair found on the bomb, police had identified a suspect, a 50-year-old Oklahoma man named Sean Patrick Palmer. (He has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Boston; his case is ongoing.)

The letter Palmer allegedly wrote, addressed “DEAR SATANIST,” was six pages long. “ELOHIM SEND ME 7 MONTHS AGO TO GIVE YOU PEACEFUL MESSAGE TO HOPE YOU REPENT. YOU SAY NO, ELOHIM NOW SEND ME TO SMITE SATAN AND I HAPPY TO OBEY,” it read in part. “TURN FROM SIN. ELOHIM NO LIKE THIS PLACE AND PLAN TO DESTROY IT. MAYBE SALEM TOO?”

On the lawn, Greaves’s security team was practicing with another security dog. Bite, release. Bite, release. Greaves watched them for a moment, then wandered closer. He was going to need to know how this works.

“I say to him, why do you want to put yourself through all that?” his mom said, watching him go. Greaves grew up in a suburb of Detroit in a mixed Protestant-Catholic household. (“To their credit,” Greaves says of his parents, “they really did their best to understand it and were not unsupportive.”)

He spent a few years doing odd jobs, then attended Harvard as an older student. He toyed with the idea of becoming a science writer, but got a job in publishing before leaving to work for TST.

Greaves’s mother grants she couldn’t really see her son in an office. “I was a secretary. Shorthand, you know,” she says. “I always knew he was going to do something different.”

As the only truly public face of The Satanic Temple, Greaves lives a strange life. TST doesn’t pay him or Jarry (though he does get a housing stipend), so Greaves’s income comes mostly from newsletter subscriptions (he charges $6.66 a month on Substack). He doesn’t have a car, or air conditioning, or other basic niceties you’d expect from the head of a religious organization.

While Joseph Layco*ck was researching his book, he recalls visiting Salem just after Greaves had been hit by a car. I don’t have health insurance. I can’t see a doctor, Layco*ck recalls him saying. I have to just kind of walk it off.

Greaves is squirrely about his personal life. He invites almost no one over to his apartment, and says he’s resigned himself that dating is “not happening with anybody at this point.” His right eye is scarred white from a childhood accident, but, when I ask what happened, he won’t say. “Sometimes you lose an eye,” he says uncomfortably. “And you gain a signature look.”

The bombing has clearly unsettled him. The normal attention the temple gets is “uncomfortable enough for me,” he says, “But with the whole security element too, I feel like my whole relationship to humanity has been changed.”

I notice that when someone shouts “Hey!” too loudly in a restaurant, he starts. If a strange car lingers by the temple gates, he retreats inside. He won’t call Ubers to or from the temple or his home, preferring to walk to nearby locations so drivers won’t connect the dots. “I don’t go out much,” he says.

At one point, I ask him if he ever thinks about what life would be like if he were someone else. If he could disappear and start over as someone new, would he? Greaves pulls out his phone and plays me a song he wrote for his band, Satanic Planet.

In a different time and

In a different place

I wear a different head

And have a different face.

Nobody would ever hire him for a normal job now, he believes. He has no choice but to follow this through to the bitter end, whatever that may be. “When you get kind of locked in, you need to be vindicated or — or you suffer forever.”

The temple has long been legally active, but the election of Donald Trump — and his ultra-devout vice president — brought new urgency, and more attention. “People like Mike Pence gave people a real sense of how we could have moral high ground as Satanists,” Greaves says dryly.

He and Jarry are eyeing the next election warily — Greaves calls Evangelicals’ alliance with Trump the “real devil’s bargain.” But they’re also making plans. Jarry has a vision of opening parochial schools focused on nurturing children’s innate curiosity, like Satanic Waldorf schools.

A question Jarry and Greaves get often is: Why Satan? Couldn’t they have the principles — separation of church and state, free speech, individual liberty — without offending so many people, and without risking their lives to do it?

For Jarry, Satan is clearly just a tool — a “poison pill” that would make introducing religion into public life so untenable for Christians that they give up and retreat. “I have little to no background or history in Satanism,” he admits. He thought to use the image of Satan for its sheer provocative power.

But for Greaves, the devil means a bit more. He sometimes talks about a song he learned in Sunday school when he was a kid.

O be careful little eyes what you see

O be careful little eyes what you see

For the Father up above

Is looking down in love

So, be careful little eyes what you see

For him, this is one of the darkest messages that Christianity can deliver: that curiosity is a sin. That the urges of your own body, your own mind, are wrong, and should be suppressed. That you should close your eyes.

“At the core of the mythology was this character whose real crime was trying to bring knowledge to humanity. And that was supposed to be a horrific thing,” Greaves says. Satan is the one who urged us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. What if it was a gift?

Today, there are a number of lawsuits ongoing, although the temple just lost an appeal against the City of Boston for denying Satanists the chance to give an invocation before City Council meetings. Meanwhile, TST is working on rebuilding the organization: So many congregations have disbanded in recent months that Greaves and Jarry can’t tell me how many still exist. Despite the calls from former members for him to step down, Greaves has no plans to. “This is my life’s work,” he says.

Of the lawsuits, the longest-running is the Arkansas suit over the Baphomet sculpture, approaching seven years of litigation without an end in sight. So for now, Baphomet sits in a darkened room in Salem, waiting for his moment.

Update: After this story was originally published, a federal appeals court held that The Satanic Temple does not have a right to give an invocation at Boston City Council meetings. The story has been updated.

Annalisa Quinn can be reached at annalisa.quinn@globe.com. Follow her @annalisa_quinn.