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What we get wrong about Satanism — and why it matters
“The Satanic Bible” as a classroom source sounds alarming. The media literacy failure that makes it seem so is the real story.
Analysis By Michelle Kistler | For FāVS News
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
I teach strategic communication at a public university. Over the years, students have asked whether they can ground their arguments in scripture — the Bible, most commonly. My answer is always the same: Of course, provided it isn’t your only source, connects meaningfully to course concepts and serves your overall argument. The evidentiary standard applies equally to every source.
So when a student approached me wanting to anchor a persuasion argument in principles of self-agency drawn from LaVeyan Satanism, my answer was the same: Of course.
He was surprised. More surprised, he admitted, when he discovered how much I already knew about the tradition. But the framework he was reaching for was sound. LaVeyan emphasis on individual sovereignty and rational self-determination maps directly onto Bandura’s concept of human agency in Social Cognitive Theory: The capacity to self-organize, self-regulate and act intentionally rather than simply respond to one’s environment.
What LaVeyan Satanism actually is
Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966, naming his foundational text “The Satanic Bible,” a title chosen, by most accounts, precisely to provoke. It succeeded. But the provocation was always the point: LaVey was demonstrating how thoroughly a label could override content in the public mind.
What “The Satanic Bible” actually contains sits closer to secular humanism than to anything supernatural. LaVeyan Satanism is explicitly atheistic. Satan functions as a symbol of individual sovereignty, rational self interest and rejection of herd conformity, not as deity. The philosophical DNA is recognizable: Rational inquiry, rejection of superstition, ethical behavior without supernatural enforcement.
These are the pillars of Western humanist thought, articulated most influentially by John Dewey, whose commitment to rational inquiry and human agency has driven educational philosophy for over a century. Dewey was himself a signatory to the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.
LaVey was writing humanist philosophy in deliberately transgressive packaging.
The Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, operates as an atheistic, non-proselytizing tradition that explicitly rejects the religious indoctrination of children, maintaining that individuals should only engage with philosophical tenets once they possess the capacity for independent, critical thought.
These are the characteristics of a philosophy that takes individual rational agency seriously; what Bandura would recognize as the capacity for intentional self-organization and self-determination that defines genuine human agency.
My student wasn’t reaching for something dark. He was reaching for something Dewey and Bandura would have recognized academically.
The conflation problem
Public misunderstanding of LaVeyan Satanism is substantially a predictable media literacy failure.
Consider the term “psychic vampire,” lifted directly from “The Satanic Bible.” It sounds alarming. Occult. Predatory. The stuff of horror films. In context, LaVey is describing something every therapist in America would recognize: People who systematically drain your intellectual and emotional energy, undermining your capacity for intentional self-direction.
The label does work that the content never asked for, and that gap between what a symbol “activates in us” and what it “actually refers to” is what W. James Potter identifies in his book “Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach” as a mismatched meaning construction.
The same mechanism operates at the organizational level. Most media coverage collapses two entirely distinct organizations into a single threatening entity. The Church of Satan is the philosophical tradition described above: Atheistic, non-proselytizing, explicitly cautious about introducing the tradition to children.
The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, founded in 2013, operates from an entirely different premise: Explicitly political and activist, it deploys Satanic imagery to challenge religious privilege in public institutions.
The two organizations do not share a philosophy and are sometimes in active tension with each other.
When school boards across the country panicked about “after school Satanic clubs,” they were reacting to The Satanic Temple, and to a label. When a Pennsylvania school district blocked a Satan Club and lost a $200,000 legal settlement, a federal court found the decision was driven by “the community’s negative reactions” rather than any legitimate policy concern. The community reacted to a symbol. The court applied the law.
Holding LaVeyan Satanists responsible for the Satanic Temple’s activism is roughly equivalent to holding Lutherans responsible for Westboro Baptist Church, a conflation most Christians would recognize immediately as unfair, and would be correct to reject.
Media functions as a primary vehicle through which people construct understanding of the social world, including traditions they will never encounter directly. Applied here, mediated representations of Satanism, shaped by decades of horror film imagery, moral panic journalism and coverage that never distinguishes between organizations or documented beliefs, construct a public schema with almost no relationship to what LaVey actually wrote.
We learn about traditions through media, and when that coverage is systematically distorted, public understanding follows faithfully downstream.
What consistent standards actually require
John Dewey argued in 1910 that genuine thinking begins not with “answers,” but with authentic “problems,” and with uncertainty that demands inquiry.
That principle anchors my teaching philosophy. When students arrive with unconventional frameworks, my first obligation is to the inquiry itself. In practice this means one standard, applied to every student equally.
Can you cite the Bible? Yes, provided it connects to course concepts, serves your argument and sits within a broader evidentiary base. Buddhist sutras? Same. The Quran? Same. “The Satanic Bible”? Same.
A public university educator who applies different evidentiary thresholds to different religious traditions has quietly substituted preference for principle. The First Amendment doesn’t have a comfort clause.
When my student wanted to ground a persuasion argument in LaVeyan principles of self-agency, the intellectually honest response was straightforward: The framework was theoretically sound, the source was a legitimate primary text and the argument was his to construct. His tradition deserved the same serious engagement I would extend to any other. He was surprised I knew it well enough to meet him there.
That surprise is the problem this piece is trying to name.
The muted voice you weren’t expecting
FāVS News exists to amplify voices that have been muted or ignored within religious discourse. LaVeyan Satanism has been buried under the weight of its own label for decades.
I knew someone once who lived this philosophy seriously and quietly. Intelligent, well-read, psychologically reflective. He appeared on a podcast about healthy masculinity and mental health, grounded in principles of self-examination and personal responsibility that Dewey would have recognized immediately. People found him unsettling before they knew him. Afterward, less so.
Closing that gap is a media literacy problem. It requires the discipline Dewey demanded of genuine thinking: Suspend the reflex, examine the actual content, follow the inquiry wherever it leads.
Especially when the label makes you uncomfortable.
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