A Satanic Rebellion
The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.
In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife.
The stunt was typical of Greaves and of the Satanic Temple, or TST, the group that he had co-founded months earlier. The Temple uses Greaves’s talent for the profane and the outrageous, along with strategic lawsuits, to target Christianity’s special status in American public life. Think of it as the ACLU with pentagrams. Greaves himself is a striking figure, charismatic and droll, pale and slender, usually dressed in black, often wearing a bulletproof vest and dark glasses. His name—or rather, his pseudonym, because his real name is Doug—shows up on Fox News chyrons, legal filings, and envelopes containing death threats. For a decade, he has been a master of carefully calibrated provocation. More recently, though, the people he’s offended have been his own congregation.
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This past June, he posed for his second-most-controversial photograph, standing in front of a statue of Baphomet at the Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. The problem wasn’t the nine-foot bronze monument, which features adoring children gazing up at the occult goat deity—and which was then decorated with rainbow balloons in honor of Pride month. The problem wasn’t what Greaves was wearing, either—this time, he was fully clothed. The problem was the man next to him: David Silverman, a former president of the organization American Atheists. “Great to see you again and thanks as always for your activism!” Silverman wrote when he tweeted out the photo.
Greaves barely registered the existence of the photograph at first: “I have a lot of engagement on Twitter,” he told me. But in the small world of radical atheist activism, the image was instantly divisive. Silverman had been pushed out of American Atheists several years earlier amid accusations of sexual misconduct, which he denied, and he had drawn criticism more recently for arguing that it wasn’t transphobic to say, in reference to transgender rights, “[live] your life as you see fit, but stay out of women’s showers and don’t groom kids.”
Many Satanic Temple members objected to their leader posing with such a figure. “People immediately hated on me, but they had no idea why,” Silverman told me via email. “They just the backlash. He downplayed his relationship with Silverman, and said that he could not vet every person who wanted a photograph with him.
