Penny Lane (2019)
The Satanic Temple (TST) started life in America in 2013 with a handful of founder members. By the time Penny Lane was making this documentary about the movement and its development, TST had grown to around 50,000 people. While Hail Satan? indicates the inception date and current membership numbers, it’s frustrating Lane doesn’t supply more facts and figures. Perhaps TST is now so high-profile in the US she thinks them unnecessary. Armed with a good supply of scandalised, worrying but laughable representatives of the Religious Right and well aware of how easily entertaining her material is, perhaps she wants to avoid anything that might interrupt the flow. Though, as Ava DuVernay showed in another recent documentary, 13th, it doesn’t take long to put key statistics on the screen.
Whatever Lane’s reasons, the result is lack of clarity about TST’s geographic scope and exactly when certain events are taking place. She makes clear that, and how, the Temple’s political activism has expanded in the few years since it began. She gives little attention to how much this was influenced by, or whether membership rose exponentially in the light of, Trump’s election. An interview with Lane used as the BFI programme note, in combination with the Wikipedia entry for The Satanic Temple, filled in some of the gaps: I’ve had to draw on these sources to piece things together for this account of Hail Satan?
As with 13th, a particular clause of the US Constitution is central to Lane’s film. In this case, it’s the First Amendment[1]. As the question mark in the title suggests, TST doesn’t believe in Satan as a supernatural entity; nor, for that matter, does the Church of Satan (CoS), founded in California in the mid-1960s, from which TST definitely distinguishes itself. Although they make use of traditional Satanic iconography and rituals, both constituencies are largely atheistic, or non-theistic. They view Satan, rather, as the archetypal adversary to the powers-that- be. TST soon grew however, to espouse a more political programme than CoS. It was created in reaction to what its co-founders, Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, saw as the theocratic tendencies of the George W Bush administration. Although its first initiatives seemed jokey, it always positioned itself as a faith-based organisation that, in Jarry’s words, ‘met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them’. The Temple has taken, and continues to take, a stand against the increasingly evident convergence of politically right-wing and fundamentalist Christian agendas.
According to Wikipedia, TST has chapters in 13 US states and Canada. The film’s settings are entirely North American, except for one brief, puzzling detour to London. This could be London, Ontario (the screen indicates just ‘London’) but the young man interviewed in the group there has an English accent. Confusing as his presence in the narrative is, what he says touches on a central issue. He explains that he was born and raised a Muslim, became an atheist, then decided that atheism ‘wasn’t enough’. His remark anticipates what lawyer Stu De Haan, the most seemingly honest TST spokesperson among Lane’s talking heads, says when she asks him why the movement doesn’t present itself as non-religious.
De Haan replies that he’s reluctant to define himself in terms of something he’s not. He acknowledges too that, in order to claim the religious equality rights enshrined in the First Amendment, TST has to be a religion. Its official branding has certainly proved effective in securing its financial position. In April 2019 (three months after Lane’s film premiered at Sundance), TST ‘officially received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, being classified as a “church or a convention or association of churches”’ (Wikipedia). Whether TST has risen above defining itself in terms of something it’s not, is more arguable.
Controversies covered in the film revolve largely around the installation of Ten Commandments monuments. In 2012, one was erected in the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol. In 2015, TST campaigned successfully for its removal on secularist grounds, invoking a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution prohibiting the use of state resources to promote particular religious views. According to Lane’s narrative, this wasn’t, however, the Temple’s original plan. They first sought to erect their own Satanist monument in the form of a statue of the demon lord Baphomet. After Oklahoma, the Ten Commandments were installed in Arkansas State Capitol grounds, with Republican State Senator Jason Rapert a prime mover in the project. In the climax to Hail Satan?, TST’s Baphomet statue is unveiled in close proximity to the Arkansas Commandments, albeit for a very temporary stay.
It’s understandable that TST has opted for headline-grabbing tactics to raise public awareness of its mission, and that Lane gives much attention to Baphomet, with its strong visual impact. (It’s also amusing to learn the sculptor of the angel-winged, goat-headed demon based its torso on Iggy Pop’s.) But the focus on Jason Rapert reflects one of the film’s most striking features: the minimal disparagement by TST of religions other than Christianity. Beyond the evidence of a clip from the Cecil B DeMille movie, there’s no suggestion that the Ten Commandments derive from Jewish scripture – just as there’s virtually no acknowledgement that Satan is a figure in the Abrahamic religions generally. TST member Mason Hargett, having declared himself an atheist, goes on to say he’d like to see emblems of many different faiths erected in public places. At first, I wondered if Hargett was a loose cannon within the movement. The picture that Lane proceeds to build up gives the impression that he’s not.
In order to major on the confrontation between TST and the Religious Right, Hail Satan? largely skates over other secularist casts of mind. A brief clip of a TV discussion programme shows David Silverman, then president of the American Atheists association, inveighing against conventional religious objections to the Temple. It would have been helpful to hear from other practising non-theists, though: it’s hard to believe they’re all comfortable with an outfit whose modus operandi depends on the continuing prominence of organised religion and takes issue with only the Christian version of it.
When the Arkansas Ten Commandments was first installed, it lasted no more than a day: a man called Michael Tate Reed rammed his car into the monument (live-streaming what he was doing). Lane skimps on information about Reed in a different, more surprising way. The film mentions that he claimed to be a theist but disagreed with the public promotion of particular religious beliefs that the monument represented. It doesn’t mention that he’s been a serial destroyer of monuments of this kind and that, ‘According to … mental evaluation by state doctors, Reed has regularly acted out [sic] at the direction of various voices that he has believed to be divine, among them God, angels, saints and spirits, although some of the voices came from demons and false prophets’ (Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 1 June 2018).
Two Christian women interviewed in Arkansas have sharply differing views of what The Satanic Temple is up to. The first woman refers disapprovingly to its attempts to preserve the separation of church and state – a perfectly respectable objective and not a battle that TST is fighting alone (although Lane doesn’t allude to this). The Arkansas Ten Commandments monument ‘was challenged by the ACLU as being a violation of clauses in both the Federal and State constitutions prohibiting the government from favoring any religion’ (Wikipedia). The second woman interviewed says, ‘They’re just doing it to annoy’. Her dismissive tone does no justice to the energy and diligence with which TST members promote their cause but you see why she thinks what she does: the particular imagery of their initiatives is calculated to offend Christian sensibilities. In spite of which, the press and TV report excerpts included in Hail Satan? suggest that plenty of Americans, rather than being alarmed by the Temple, persist in seeing its members as a bunch of pesky anarchic hoaxers.
The documentary is at its most instructive in describing the historical context of TST’s struggle against a Christian monopoly. It seems the Ten Commandments installations of today have their origins in political and commercial phenomena of the 1950s. The affirmation of national Christian values in public places assumed a new urgency in that fearfully anti-Communist era. Cecil B DeMille promoted his 1958 movie by placing Ten Commandment monuments in American cities as a publicity stunt. An epidemic of anti-Satanic hysteria in the last years of last century – which railed against, inter alia, Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons – has also made and left its mark.
Hail Satan? does well to show too how TST, in spite of its subversive cachet, is, like any organisation, having to deal with dissidents within its own ranks – thereby risking accusations of itself suppressing freedom of expression. This has led to the expulsion from the movement of Goth motormouth Jex Blackmore – a main contributor to the performance art side of TST activities. On the evidence of the film, Blackmore’s creative output is noisy, boring and sometimes bizarrely confused. At an anti-anti-abortion event, adults wearing nappies and foetal masks are led round on chains. Blackmore sees this as a vivid illustration of the Pro-Life campaign’s fetishisation of the unborn child. In effect, the sight of enchained foetuses is ambiguous, to say the least. Blackmore’s expulsion, however, is the result of a performance rant that advocated various aggressive action, including killing the President. TST is fundamentally opposed to violence, as reflected in its codification of seven basic tenets, which blend humanism and humanitarianism[2].
In the end, though, you have to wonder how fairly Penny Lane represents the Temple of Satan. In her interview with David Morrison reproduced in the BFI note, she says she sympathises with the views its members hold and the things they do: ‘I felt like here’s a religion that I really believe in,’ she says. Lane is taking ‘religion’ to mean ‘an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group’ (Merriam-Webster) rather than ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’ (OED). Fair enough, except that, in doing so, she ignores the question of what ‘religion’ means in the context of the First Amendment. After all, it’s the ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ part of the clause that TST have homed in on, rather than the broader freedom of speech part.
If Lane doesn’t convey the political seriousness of TST, perhaps Lucien Greaves is complicit in this. Greaves, who looks to be in his forties, is by some way the most interesting character in the story told here. His identity and appearance encourage the idea that he’s the leader of a crazed insurgency – but as if to make fun of the idea. His pseudonym (not, he says, his only one) is a few letters away from Lucifer Graves. His somehow damaged right eye emblematises a sinister occultist. But he talks quietly, reasonably and often humorously. A quick look online at some of Greaves’s pronouncements, including his statement on the (for him) vexed question of religious organisation tax exemption for TST (quoted on Wikipedia) confirm his high intelligence. At the same time, you get the sense that all-publicity’s-good-publicity thinking led him to go along with Lane’s entertaining but shallow approach, signalled by Brian McOmber’s jocose music, which opens and closes Hail Satan? Neither Lane nor Greaves (in the film, at least) is prepared to wrestle with the irony that TST, for all its resourceful opposition to Christianity, is parasitic on it.
28 August 2019
[1] ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance’
[2] In January 2016, the online publication Progressive Secular Humanist asserted that, as moral statements, these tenets compared favourably with the Ten Commandments. It’s worth adding that, as noted by Stephen Brown in his perceptive Church Times review of Hail Satan? (22 August 2019), ‘The organisation’s Seven Tenets comply closely with what many a liberal Christian would subscribe to: compassion, justice, respect, etc’.
