The Weird Travails of a Post-Satanist
On community, outsiders, and belonging.
It was about this time last year that, under very ugly circumstances, I resigned from leadership in The Satanic Temple (TST). I won't go into specific detail of what happened — I'm content to let sleeping dogs lie. I will only say that the culture internal to the Temple was, at the time of my departure, extremely dysfunctional, and I eventually could not handle it any longer. It was better for everyone, myself included, that I resigned because I was no longer able to serve the community in a healthy and sustainable manner. It’s also important for me to clarify that I did not leave because of conflict with Executive Ministry (the highest leadership of the Temple) but rather with the community more generally.
I’ve been mulling over my six years in the Temple ever since. My thoughts are mostly disjointed, and some of them conflict. I’ve already written an article on why I am moving beyond Satanism, and I hope you will check it out. But I thought, to celebrate a year of being religiously homeless, I would compile these disjointed thoughts in no particular order.
It's more boring than you think
First, let’s clear up some misconceptions about TST. No, there was no animal sacrifice, child abuse, or murder. Obviously. Instead, TST is mostly neurodiversity and pathological demand avoidance with candles. Online conspiracy theorists and deranged Christian nationalists tend to think TST is full of menacing, dangerous people. Nothing can be further from the truth. I know dozens and dozens of Satanists, most of them within TST, but also a few outside the organization, either unaffiliated or with the Church of Satan (CoS). They are all just weird, cool, introspective people who are a bit too quirky to feel comfortable in society.
And no, neither TST nor CoS believe in a literal Satan, nor do they see him as the embodiment of all evil. They instead see him as a powerful literary and mythical symbol who rebels against insurmountable odds. Theistic Satanists do exist, though even they tend not to have a traditionally Christian view of Satan — see The Temple of Set, for example. And yes, there is a minority of Satanists who are into fucked up shit, like the Order of Nine Angles, or the odd unaffiliated loner like the serial killer Richard Ramirez. They are not the majority, and they certainly don't represent TST. The specter of an underground of Satanists who rape and sacrifice people is an ancient conspiracy that goes back centuries but has no basis in fact.
Everyone assumes my time as a leader in TST must have been incredibly exciting. No, not at all. I was never invited to any orgies, for example. It was all just Zoom meetings, paperwork, and interpersonal dramas. I was a middle-management administrative demon. Occasionally wild stuff did happen, like when a candidate for public office destroyed a Satanic Christmas display. But these events were usually just hassles to me. Outsiders may scoff and say, "But that's the point, isn't it? Weren't you trying to rile people up?" No, not me. I was always in the Temple for the religious and community aspect, which is generally invisible to outside eyes, and I saw the public-facing social activism as the natural outgrowth of religious conviction. Most of the time, the social kerfuffles were a nuisance, taking up an enormous amount of oxygen.
My co-Satanists were all delightfully weird. They included sex workers, puppeteers, fire-breathing clowns, circus freaks, body modification enthusiasts, transhumanist bodybuilders, goth morticians, polyamorous witches, occult furries, trans dominatrixes, pagan war veterans, and many more. The Satanic Temple is an astonishing array of misfit toys. But the novelty of the weirdness wears off quickly. Beneath the weirdness, body modification practitioners who hang from hooks from the ceiling get depressed, have bowel movements, and scroll Instagram just as much as you do.
Satanism is a neuro-tribe
When I left TST leadership, I could practically hear people exhale with relief. “Oh thank god,” I could hear some of them say, “he’s normal now.” While I may now be expanding past Satanism, everyone needs to realize that the qualities that led me to Satanism are still in me.
I didn’t have to work to see Satan as a hero. I didn’t have to contort my mind to see him — and the attendant iconography, dark though it may be — as beautiful and inspiring. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t become a Satanist because I was mad at Christianity or wanted to offend Christians. I joined because it made me feel at home and I found it beautiful. It fit like a well-worn glove.
I have now taken that glove off. I no longer consciously think of myself as a Satanist. But my hand — my mind — is still the same shape as it was before. I still have the propensity to be immune to certain taboos, I still have a low disgust response, and things still arrive inverted, just as Satan arrived inverted. I don’t have to work for that to be the case. It just happens. I have always been enthralled by the weird and beautiful, be it horror movies or goth aesthetic.
After a year of thinking about this, I have come to believe that, at a certain level, Satanism is less about Satan and more about being part of a particular tribe of people who have similar brains. The ability to effortlessly see Satan as a hero instead of a villain is the key that unlocks access to a club of other weird people. Satanism provides a social filter for people with fun-house mirror minds to find each other. We don’t just idolize the same symbol. We think similarly in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable everywhere else. Satanism is, in other words, a religious neurotribe.
Now that I am distanced from that club, I feel alone. In Satanic circles, I was the most conservative person in the room. Now I feel like the weirdest person in the room. I know I come off as a fairly normal and well-adjusted person, but that’s because I spent my youth learning the hard way how to keep people from nervously backing away from me at social gatherings.
I lived for six years on the island of misfit toys, and there’s a feeling of alienation off that island. I’m reminded why I was there in the first place. Now I’m just a weirdo with no context; an octopus trying to fit in with golden retrievers.
Losing religion, and losing community, is hard. It’s unbearably lonely. And religion is deeper than mere beliefs or shared values. No no no. It’s a shared neural pathway; it’s a way of being a mind.
I'm now suspicious of any group based on outsider status
Paradoxically, despite all the benefits of being part of a tribe of outsiders, I am now suspicious of any group that organizes itself around outsider identity. This not only includes religious and activist groups like The Satanic Temple, but many LGBT, queer, artist, or subculture spaces. I don't have any data to back this up, but my experience suggests that they are uniquely vulnerable to bad actors.
Just as high-power corporate settings tend to attract psychopaths, outsider spaces tend to attract the most dysfunctional, dysregulated, disagreeable people. You won’t be surprised to learn that Satanism has a self-selection problem. The people who self-select to identify with the ultimate rebel and outsider tend towards narcissism and don’t work well together. More broadly, people who self-select to be identified as outsiders will, in my view, have a higher-than-average level of pathology and dysfunction. This might be due to having a greater level of trauma in life, but it might also be due to personality traits that lead one to embrace outsiderdom in the first place.
Again and again, in Satanic, queer, and outsider spaces, I have seen bad actors posing as the immaculate victim to hijack the community. In these settings, fragility and narcissism are bedfellows. Any organization like TST practically sends out a bat signal to the entire world that, if you are a weirdo, if you are an outsider, if you identify as an oppressed minority, you will be welcome here. Often, that welcomes in a hoard of maladapted and dysregulated people.
Not only does an emphasis on outsider status make a community vulnerable to cynical and anti-social opportunists, I find it personally unfulfilling. What will matter on my deathbed is not that I was gay, not that I was weird, not that I always felt like an outcast, but that I lived a virtuous life. As I get older, it matters less to me that I have an outsider status, and it becomes more important that I comport myself with character, that I love people unconditionally, and that I act courageously. Being a rebel, being gay, being a minority — none of these things are fulfilling in themselves, at least not for me. In the long run, they are indifferent. What matters is character.
Towards the end of my tenure in TST, I found myself starved for a community that didn’t care what I was and instead helped me focus on what I could be — a man of integrity, nobility, and courage. So many minority and subculture spaces, in my view, have left me unfulfilled because they didn’t offer what the Christians call “discipleship” — a focus on building one’s character. To its credit, TST tries to do this. In Satanic Ministry, we did our best to create a culture where spiritual and personal growth was nurtured. However, the setting was so mired in interpersonal strife, stress, and drama due to the aforementioned self-selection problem of Satanism that I felt continuously handicapped in this goal.
None of this means that people shouldn’t congregate on the basis of outsider status. Outsiders still exist and have the right to organize. But I now believe outsider movements live or die on the basis of their emphasis. In my opinion, the greatest human rights movements succeeded because they emphasized, not their outsider nature, but their inclusion in humanity. This doesn’t mean denying or refusing to celebrate one’s outsider nature. Instead, it means continually drawing one’s attention to a deeper truth: that we are first and foremost human. This is narcissist repellant because it removes their foothold. It makes outsiders the opposite of special. We are, in fact, just as human as everyone else.
To be fair, I think the leadership of the Temple is aware of this problem, and they are doing what they can to fix it. My hope is that TST will become a healthier organization, and be able to enforce standards that reduce the pathologies of outsiderdom.
Life is harder without a tribe
And yet.
Despite all the turmoil TST brought into my life, my life was generally more stable within the Temple than outside of it.
While I had a few serious mental health crises during my six years in the Temple, they were nothing compared to what came before the Temple, or after. For all its faults, being a member of TST had an insulating, protective effect. The Satanic Temple was like a sunscreen that protected me from the harshest rays of life. The conditions of my life haven’t significantly changed, and yet I have suffered tremendously since leaving the Temple. Medical challenges have gotten worse, my days are more difficult, and my mood is darker. In a thousand small, nearly imperceptible ways, life is harder.
Why? We all know about the importance of close relationships. But, just as important, I think, is having strangers who care about you. It is just as important to have those second, third, and fourth-order relationships; people you never talk to, but who still care about you because you are one of them.
This, ideally, is what religion should offer people, and it is what TST offered me. For six years, I felt cradled by an admittedly dysfunctional family that cared about me.
After leaving leadership, and losing a number of dear friendships that mattered intensely to me and a community that supported me, I felt left out in the cold. I still had friends, of course, but what was missing was that tribe — that sense of being cared for not just by people I know, but by people I don’t know.
I was an ideologically vulnerable young man.
Looking back at the time I first discovered TST in my 20s, I realize just how vulnerable I was. I was ripe for just about any radical ideology, religion, or cult to scoop me up and put me in its bicycle basket. I had just left Christianity, and I was desperately searching for a community and ordered ideology to give me direction.
In retrospect, it's extremely fortuitous that TST is what picked me up, instead of some weird new-age cult or extremist online community. TST might appear radical, but that is an illusion. It espouses nonviolence, adheres to enlightenment liberal principles, and is obsessed with free speech and freedom of religion. Whatever extreme action it takes, they are all shadow puppets — symbolic provocations that never hurt a fly. Onlookers treat TST as if it is some kind of radical cult because, at an irrational, instinctual level, humans respond to physical violence and symbolic edginess in the same way.
But my ideological vulnerability as a young man primed me to identify with any group that made me feel at home, despite the cost of doing so. This desperation for community and ideology allowed me to overlook the enormous social costs of identifying with Satanism and The Satanic Temple. I was willing to take a huge social fall just so I could have a home.
It's somewhat embarrassing to admit this, but I think I'm still ideologically vulnerable. I'm exactly the type of thirty-something guy who needs a cranky professor in an expensive suit to screech at me to clean up my room and stand up straight. For whatever reason, I need a life philosophy, and I need mentors and comrades to walk that philosophy with me. I need a way to impose structure, growth, and symbol onto my life. Otherwise, I just sleep in and get fat because I'm eating pizza every day. A lot of guys are just like me — we are only as good as the principles and communities that guide us. So, I have a lot of time for the dudes who are enthralled by the Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates of the internet. I get it. You may roll your eyes, and I don’t care. Someone needs to empathize with the dudebros. It might as well be me.
Rather than deny that I am ideologically vulnerable, I just try to practice greater judiciousness in my search. I am now conducting my search for meaning with safety measures. I’ve made a rule to not take on the label of anything I’m interested in.
For example, I’ve been doing a deep dive into Stoic philosophy (not to be confused with stoicism – the modern term for suppressing emotions, which has little to do with the ancient philosophy.) I like the culture of modern stoicism — it is rigorously self-reflective, well-read, and self-critical. It is ruthlessly committed to virtue. But I’m deliberately not thinking of myself as a Stoic; I’m just exploring Stoicism for a time, and I don’t know if it will just be for a season or for a long while.
If I have one big regret, it’s that I was so quick to label myself a Satanist. I wish I could have engaged in my love of the symbolism, culture, and literature without taking on the identity. Labels make me stupid — they immediately turn off a necessary, critical part of my brain. The moment I take on a label, I can no longer look at that label clearly. I now find it best to keep my identity small and to label ideas instead of myself.
I regret the more extreme actions
I do regret some of the actions of the Temple. I didn't take part in them personally — TST is a big, big organization with thousands of members — but I was part of the organization while they happened. I regret, for example, the naming of the abortion clinic "Sam Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic." I won't say these actions are never effective, only that I fear they have escalated hostilities in our culture. Remember what I said above about people not being able to differentiate between symbolic and literal violence? That bug goes deep in the human mind. Provoking it can have the opposite intended effect by escalating tensions and making the cultural landscape more dangerous for everyone.
I’ve feared for a while now that someone will get killed. TST headquarters in Salem has received innumerable death threats. Someone tried to burn it down a couple of years ago, and a pipe bomb was thrown at it in early 2023. Tensions are escalating, and I fear that someone I love will get killed.
I will likely live with the consequences of my religious affiliation for many years to come. I do worry about my safety, even though I have rejected the more provocative actions of the Temple, and I have mostly turned to more conventional religious and spiritual paths. TST engages in a sort of symbolic warfare, while I have embraced symbolic pacifism. Youtubers and commentators continue to use my work on Satanism, and journalists and content creators still reach out to me, hoping to get some commentary about Satanism.
I still love a lot of Satanists, consider them friends, and care about their religious freedoms. But I also want to move on. This whole journey is terribly heartbreaking to me. It's time for me to turn a new leaf, find new communities, and pursue justice in new ways.
But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.
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“The people who self-select to identify with the ultimate rebel and outsider tend towards narcissism and don’t work well together. More broadly, people who self-select to be identified as outsiders will, in my view, have a higher-than-average level of pathology and dysfunction. This might be due to having a greater level of trauma in life, but it might also be due to personality traits that lead one to embrace outsiderdom in the first place.”
This is also the case in Catholicism with many in both the Tridentine Mass crowd and the “Spirit of Vatican II crowd” who both claim to be more Catholic than the Pope, in different ways.
Now, to be fair, I do have dear friends who attend the Tridentine Mass because they like its reverence and aesthetics, but stay away from the toxic “rad-trad”, for lack of a better term, that the Tridentine Mass also attract. I’m not talking about people like my friends who are deferential to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and are the antithesis of pharisaicism: but there is a big crowd of holier-than-thou people who are sourpusses who want to gripe about Vatican II and how awful the post-Vatican II Mass is and complain about the Pope (the theology of the Spirit of Vatican II crowd has the same mindset and mannerisms but is theologically opposite except they agree that Vatican II is a break with the Church’s tradition and look at it through a hermeneutic of rupture rather than the hermeneutic of continuity that Pope St. Paul VI and every single one of his successors say is the correct way of reading and interpreting Vatican II, but I don’t want to go too far out into the weeds here).
All this to say, with a few exceptions who are level-headed people and dear friends of mine, I tend to avoid both these factions in the Catholic Church to the furthest extent possible.
My last-ditch attempt to stay in Christianity, in the late 2010s, was trying to create a theology centered on the wisdom and needs of child abuse survivors, and perhaps a blueprint of a community of the same. It didn't go anywhere because, #1, the church leadership thought "survivors = crazy and high-maintenance", and #2, people who are healed enough to create a functional community have mostly moved beyond centering their trauma in their identity.