DN:FILM Hail Satan?

“Do you think that most people think you’re kidding, or that most people think you’re evil?” filmmaker Penny Lane asks a member of the Satanic Temple in HAIL SATAN?, her fair, thorough and thoughtful portrait of the controversial group. Evil? Temple members scoff at such knee-jerk notions of their assumed malevolence, supernatural capacities and religious devotions. They don’t believe in an actual Satan, one member makes clear. Satan, she says, is strictly symbolic. He is, rather, a sort of cloven-hoofed ACLU. Still, “People don’t like the idea that we’ve taken a religion’s villain and made him our champion for rebellion.”

A 50,000-member-strong, nationwide activist group of social-political pugilists—punks, goths, hippies and radicals—the Satanic Temple is a fiery advocate for religious pluralism, separation of church and state, LGBTQ equality, reproductive rights and other progressive issues that rile MAGA culture. From showy, in-your-face demonstrations—plastic devil horns and all—to charitable works like blood drives and highway adoptions, the Temple is all about godless do-goodism and nothing about brimstone balderdash. Its performance-art protests echo feminist art activists the Guerrilla Girls and the Yes Men, whose high-wire pranks spotlight corporate hegemony.

Yet the Temple does itself few favors with extracurricular hokum that for some puts the “evil” in devil, like ghoulish black masses, replete with candles, cloaks, pentagrams and nude offerings. (An antecedent is Anton LaVey’s risibly self-serious First Church of Satan, whose carnivalesque rituals you can see this summer in the restored 1970 doc “Satanis: The Devil’s Mass,” R-rated clips of which appear in “Hail Satan?”)

The central drama in this impressively layered, often sober film is the Temple’s unbending battle to get an 8-foot-tall statue of a goat-headed demon erected next to a monument of the Ten Commandments at the Arkansas State Capitol. Despite members chanting “Hail Satan!” and flashing dual-finger devil horns, it's no jape. Here, friction between the Satanic Temple and Christian adversaries comes to a head and the Temple’s righteous calling comes to the fore. “As a Satanist I believe that directly confronting injustice and corrupt authority is an expression of one’s Satanic faith,” says spokesperson Jex Blackmore. “Activism is a Satanic practice.”