The “Satanic Temple” isn’t just an insult to Christians. It’s an insult to Satan.
The group known as the Satanic Temple has been trolling Christians the last few months, with a holiday display in the Florida capital serving as their latest attempt to be edgy. A fifty-four year old woman wearing a T shirt reading “Catholic warrior” failed to destroy it but succeeded in showing how far Catholic aesthetics and the Crusading spirit have fallen under the pointless Pope Francis I.
The Satanic Temple has made a profitable little business out of this kind of predictable clickbait. They have a parody of a Nativity scene featuring a snake at the Michigan State Capital, though there is no actual Nativity in Lansing because of a technicality. Last summer, the Temple rustled some jimmies by trying to hold a “Black Mass” at Harvard University. And the Temple is building a statue of Baphomet next to a representation of the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol.
Yet, as you’ve probably guessed, we’re not dealing with people who believe in Satan, or indeed in anything different than a Unitarian or your typical New York Times subscriber. Instead, it’s just nauseatingly conventional American liberals who feel compelled to slap an NS color scheme on top of some tiresome clichés about secularism, “reproductive choice,” “same-sex marriage,” and “individual liberty.” It’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster all over again, only now SWPL’s are trying to catch up to the artistic sensibilities of albums produced when Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated. It’s so bourgeois it could be equally utilized by the CATO Institute or the Hillary Clinton campaign.
There are, of course, theistic Satanists, though many who consider Satan or Lucifer an archetype of rebellion would call “theistic Satanists” a contradiction. Yet whatever one thinks about offering worship to the Devil, it makes far more sense than trying to enlist the Prince of Darkness as an avatar of egalitarianism.
After all, the most prominent school of “Satanism” is laid out in the Satanic Bible published by Anton LaVey in 1969. Though Levey was not without original insight, sections of the book are simply outright plagiarisms of Might Is Right, though with the overt racism and anti-Semitism pruned away. LaVey also borrows heavily from Ayn Rand and the writing occasionally has the unfortunate tendency to lapse into the style of the 90 page John Galt speech. The fame of the “Black Pope” and the exposure granted to his Church of Satan owed far more to his showmanship and the reaction of triggered Christians than any revolutionary doctrine.
Yet LaVey’s explicitly anti-egalitarian Church of Satan can hardly be reconciled with modern progressivism, and certainly not with the Social Justice Warriors pleading they are oppressed by church ladies in Oklahoma. LaVey is more scornful of fashionable “Eastern mystics” than he is of Christians. More importantly, LaVey saw Satanism as inherently transgressive of real taboos, not simply attacking the same things as the New Left. In a remarkable passage for its time, he scoffs:
A black mass, today, would consist of the blaspheming of such “sacred” topics as Eastern mysticism, psychiatry, the psychedelic movement, ultra-liberalism, etc. Patriotism would be championed, drugs and their gurus would be defiled, acultural militants would be deified, and the decadence of ecclesiastical theologies might even be given a Satanic boost.
In contrast, the Satanic Temple, whatever its stated influences, operates as if it is trying to overtly repudiate the whole point of Satanism. They are still pretending it’s “transgressive” to protest the Westboro Baptist Church. It’s just another outlet for gleeful conformists to pile on the increasingly pitiable remnants of American Christianity, while sternly enforcing the far more intolerant creed of radical egalitarianism.
What’s pathetic is that these conventional liberals insist on using the imagery of “evil” and the aesthetics of violence and domination to promote ideals that can only be taken seriously inside a Gender Studies Department. Take pseudo-singer Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless. She’s still mad she’ll only be remembered as Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, so she snarls that she’s “Going to Hell” in her latest by the numbers quasi-metal production. At the same time, she also solemnly intones against “bigotry,” telling us, “Whoever you are, whatever that means, is the best person you can be.” Satan, it seems, is now some kind of homosexual high school guidance counselor.
Fresh off the heels of #Gamergate, we have #Metalgate. Having won a foothold within the gaming community, SJW’s are moving to make sure that music will stay only on the “right side of history,” with lots of “conversations about racism, politics, and feminism.” As we’ve already seen, it’s perfectly fine to sing (or scream) about burning down churches, decapitating and eating people, or serving the powers of hell, but if you oppose Christianity because Jesus was a “Jewish Prophet,” that’s, as they say, “problematic.” And Satan help you if you said the word “faggots” a few decades ago.
This kind of faux rebellion is at the heart of the modern Left. Even as they have established monolithic control over the commanding heights of academia, media, and culture, progressives continue to insist that they are fighting some mystical Establishment of reactionary White Anglo Saxon Protestants. Standing up for “marginalized communities” involves not a bottom up struggle for survival, but attracting sympathetic media attention and using it to secure government action against perceived enemies and financial payoffs for yourself. “Social justice” is less a political movement than a rent seeking tactic which can survive as long as the Parasitic Class that practices it can continue to secure resources.
But this only works if the “rebellious” image can be maintained. We see continuous attacks against institutions like the Catholic Church, European monarchies
, and the national state, even though all of things are now objectively anti-European in their effect. The Left is not attacking the substance of these institutions, but their history, aesthetic, and links to European populations. The Right then predictably rallies to defend them, only to be condemned by the very people they are trying to save. Thus, Germans rallying to defend their country from Islamization sing Christmas carols, and are predictably condemned by the Protestant Bishop of Dresden, a leader of the very church they are trying to defend.
At the last H.L. Mencken Club, Paul Gottfried observed:
The Left has recycled Christian beliefs and Christian symbols. Indeed the Left is unthinkable without Christianity. It is Christian vision of the triumph of the suffering just and the belief that the last will be first that animate the Left. Like the Primitive Church, the Left appeals to individual men and women as parts of a new universal covenant.
Such a bastardized Christian vision animates not just the secular Left, but the “social justice” churches and apparently, the Satanic Temple. However, this has to be reconciled with the Left’s shrieking hysteria about and loathing of Christianity, a hatred that only seems to intensify even as the Christian churches do their best to echo the progressives on race and immigration.
As we see in Germany, Christianity as a symbol may be more important than Christianity as a doctrine or faith. Leftists know full well that even if the Church outright condemns Europeans as such, the cathedrals, Crusades, and conquests of European Christians will forever be part of White Identity and must therefore be deconstructed. As for some Europeans, the label of “Christian” serves as a kind of “false consciousness” for Identity, rallying Whites together even if the flock commanded to disperse by its own supposed shepherds. In the absence of a socially acceptable way to talk about race, many Whites see no alternative.
Given how Christianity is developing and the outright treason of the clergy, this development has obvious drawbacks. But whether Christianity is worth saving – or alternatively, whether the West even exists as a concept without Christianity — is beside the point.
The real divide in politics and culture is not between capitalist and community, statist or anti-statist, or even between Christian and Satanist. In every way that matters, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden is utterly identical with the leader of the Satanic Temple. So too are most other “New Atheists,” mainline Protestants, giggling pro-immigration evangelicals, and the the current Vicar of Christ himself. Every single one of these figures worships universal egalitarianism as their true God and while they may disagree on dogma, they share the doctrine of no heretics to the Left. The labels have become meaningless.
Ultimately, “folkish” heathens, kinist Christians, racially aware SWPL’s and even anti-egalitarian Satanists have more in common with each other than with anyone else, if only because they all share the same fate. You can call yourself a man of the cloth, an introspective atheist, or a servant of the Ruinous Powers, but whatever your self-image, you’re still getting fired or losing that gig if the wrong Facebook photo hits Gawker. Whatever happens in the afterlife or on the Dies Irae, anyone guilty of thoughtcrime has the same temporal destiny. And only those willing to accept that destiny are really “rebelling” against anything.
Today, the imagery of Satanism and “rebellion” generally is less about authentic revolution than it is about demanding those outside the multiculturalist and consumerist consensus be brought to heel. Paradoxically, the only way to be a rebel today to champion a new order, to be what Evola called “the bearer of a new principle of a higher authority and sovereignty.” The revolutionary builds the upward path for Europeans. The form his rebellion takes is less significant than his break with the System that currently exists and the egalitarian universalism it perpetuates.
Identity contains the revolution within itself, because it holds that blood is superior to gold. Our purpose is to bow to no order except our own, not to destroy order or hierarchy as such. The contemporary anarchist is nothing if not the model consumer. The faithful Mormon who puts his church first is more of a nonconformist than a social democratic edgelord with a pentagram and a trigger warning on his blog about date rape.
Once, to declare allegiance to Satan as a deity or a concept at least implied God was worth rebelling against. But now, some great social worker in the sky is as unworthy as devotion or hatred as a Satan sporting a Human Rights Campaign equality sticker. Being asked to pick the fuzzy Judeo-Christian “God” of the megachurches or the Dark Prince of Tumblr is like choosing between Mellow Yellow or Mountain Dew. Identitarians need to reject this false choice and build (or bow to) something worthy of our love and our enemies’ hate.
As for the Baphomet statue in Oklahoma City, it’s of no more significance or meaning than a statue of Ronald McDonald. If it blasphemes anyone, it’s Lucifer. After this, saying you worship the Devil is pretty much the same as buying a ticket to a convention for My Little Pony. The Satanic Temple managed to turn even the King of Hell into just another whining liberal pussy.
