if i walked into the satanic temple assuming that there is a building the satanic temple is it is yeah correct okay see you on massachusetts if if i walked in there if i walk into any other place of worship uh there'll probably be a sign sort of almost their mission statement that i will i would be welcomed to what would be in a sentence the mission statement of the satanic temple as i walked through those doors we don't have a mission statement on the doors but anybody's welcome to come in it's set up more like
an art gallery where people can come in on their own and tour through um but the simple kind of elevator pitch for the satanic temple is that we're a non-theistic religion in opposition to arbitrary authority we align ourselves against the rising theocratic movement particularly in the united states today and we have a set of affirmative values we feel that are in line with that kind of rejection of arbitrary authority and and tyrannical motions that we see being enacted is this what uh satanism has always been about because if you ask some people out there what
you know actually before i even looked into this today i mean i would have had all kinds of views about what satanism is actually devil worshiping and actually probably stuff you don't really want to get involved in have we had it wrong all this time has it always been about what you've just what you just described well i think there's been a kind of concept of what satanism could be ever since milton and milton imagined satan is this ultimate rebel against tyranny and that's the kind of mythological construct that we use it's very uh it
can be very shocking and be seen as offensive to a lot of people but to a lot of us who embrace it and identify with it it's not merely to shock and offend we grew up in a judeo-christian culture and we began to question some of the superstitious norms that were being imposed upon us like these notions of uh of the impending apocalypse uh the return of jesus the the fact that there's uh that there's biblical fiats that ban people from gay marriage or abortion in other words in alabama just two weeks ago right in
america essentially that there is a a law which says there should be sort of freedom of religion and and equality of religious expressions but you're saying that actually christianity dominates the law dominates social constructs views and so you're trying to counter that dominance right well on paper is a constitutional republic we're a pluralistic nation a secular nation that respects religious liberty we're supposed to be premised on religious liberty and what we're finding now is there's a theocratic movement to redefine religious liberty to mean that a specific religious viewpoint is allowed to encroach its will upon
the rest of the population and how are you received you know when you go out and you presumably you you take a stand you know you do protest or whatever you do i mean are you vilified are you demonized because of the name of the church things are getting more and more polarized as time goes on in the united states and as that happens a lot more people seem to understand what we're doing and embrace it and a lot more people get more violently opposed to what we're doing to the point where you see in
the climactic scene at the end of the film i'm speaking at a rally and it's found necessary that i should wear a bulletproof vest because we're getting death threats from uh the ku klux klan some neo-nazi organizations and other kind of christian supremacist groups of course nobody took a shot but that's kind of what we deal with right so all this all this started as a initially was it just a stunt i mean rick scott was a florida governor he'd signed a law which basically was saying that you know encouraging more inspirational messages to be
read in schools and that the thought was what that was really about was encouraging chris teaching of christianity now initially you what you began was just a stunt in reaction to that actually i was kind of consulting on a stunt and i was somebody who authentic authentically identified already as a satanist and this resonated for me but it wasn't something i wanted to do publicly because it kind of puts a target on you so some friends of mine were doing a film project and they wanted to kind of exploit this idea of an alternative religious
voice trying to gain the same access and privileges that were being demanded by uh christians and so satanism seemed the obvious thing because i had an expertise in that and then it grew into what it is now now but the thing is you know there will be people out there who are christians out there okay well you know the christian religion teaches good things it teaches good morals it teaches a good way of being so why are you opposing that sometimes it does and another thing that you don't see in the film is that at
the final climactic rally that was actually an interfaith rally that we put together and there were christian ministers speaking before i came on the stage and they knew they'd be standing with our monument the baphomet monument and they knew i was the headlining speaker but they still understood the value of what we were doing they understood the value of making sure that the government remains neutral and so far as religious viewpoint is concerned and to that end they supported what we were doing even though they might not embrace the symbolic structure we use yeah it's
interesting here we have a debate going on in in in the uk about sort of the teaching of of things in school whether it's about you know homosexuality or multi relationships between people and certain religious groups are opposed to that are you saying that actually the answer is not necessarily to ban religious teaching or any kind of teaching like that in schools but to encourage all kinds of have a plurality of of teachings of thought of thoughts and beliefs within schools right uh there you would have to question whose freedom is he actually being imposed
upon is it the freedom for children to learn all points of views or the freedom of certain religious parents to say they don't want their children exposed to certain materials and it kind of goes back to our fight for putting our monument next to a ten commandments monument on the public grounds we were never asking for exclusive access what we were saying was so long as you have one religious monument privately donated on public lands you need to accept other religious monuments as well and we didn't even want ours there if another religious monument was
there and and calling your movement is more of a movement rather than religion i guess using the word satan that is a that is a brilliant way of being noticed is it i mean you could call yourself something else couldn't you but it is such a provocative word actually i don't feel we could call ourselves something else we're not theistic so we don't believe in a personal satan but it's still deeply meaningful to us having grown up in judeo-christian culture and this kind of socio-political counter myth resonates for us in a way that's unique that
we couldn't choose arbitrarily another character it wouldn't resonate for us as strongly some of us came out of superstition ourselves and found it very liberating to be able to embrace the blasphemous not just to offend other people but to be liberated from superstition ourselves so you're like a science base you sort of believe in facts and science that you can touch and see and believe in that sense right and a lot of people kind of question whether a non-theistic religion can really be considered a religion so long as you allow certain privileges and exemptions for
religions to only allow those for groups that believe in some superstars you have rituals you know religions have rich rituals don't you know i'm a sikh you go in you bow down you cover your head you take your shoes off right you go into a mosquito thing do you do you have rituals in the in your rituals have kind of naturally developed within the satanic temple and it's interesting to see what would i have to it kind of goes along with our kind of anti-authoritarian philosophy where most of the rituals enacted by our different chapters
and various groups are very much creative performance art pieces and often created just for the moment and for specific events right right okay uh luton griefs thank you very much and good luck with the movie hale satan will be released on august 23rd and the film will be closing the sundance film festival in london this sunday
