Inside America’s Satanist movement

The largest gathering of Satanists in history is taking place in Boston this weekend. It’s not open to the public. Or, to be more precise, no longer open to the public. That’s because all the tickets have been sold.

The second annual SatanCon is being organised by The Satanic Temple or ‘TST’, the world’s biggest Satanic sect, at the Marriott Hotel in Copley Square. That’s the same Marriott chain founded by a devout Mormon family who, back in the 1960s, only agreed to serve alcohol to guests after securing permission from the president of the Church of Latter Day Saints. As recently as 2018, it advertised its faith by placing 300,000 copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon in its guest rooms. Now it’s ushering Satanists into its hospitality suites. Is it possessed?

The Christian protestors who will be waving placards outside the hotel certainly think so. Others will conclude that Marriott is just commercially savvy. It’s a measure of the scale of the earthquake that has hit America’s religious landscape that TST, based in Salem, Massachusetts, now receives more indulgent coverage from liberal journalists than the Catholic Church.

A report last week by WBUR, a Boston online news service, was gushingly excited about the conference. TST ‘focuses on core values of compassion, intellectualism and personal freedom’, it said, insisting that attendees at SatanCon ‘aren’t coming to worship the devil’.

Really? This is where it gets complicated. ‘The thing is we’re not theistic,’ says Dex Desjardins, a spokesman for TST. ‘We don’t have beliefs in a literal theistic Satan.’ That might seem an odd thing for a Satanist to say, but not if you understand the Temple’s antecedents.