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Where It Is Now

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Where It Is Now

The Church of Satan continues, is administratively based in New York, and is deliberately small. It does not seek growth, does not proselytise, holds no congregational meetings, and has for years advised members that the practice is a private philosophy rather than a community activity. Its principal outputs are its publications and the occasional public statement.

Its position in the wider culture has changed twice. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a provocation with celebrity attention, and LaVey cultivated that carefully. Since the 2010s it has been the older and quieter body, watching a much larger and much more visible organisation use the same iconography for entirely different purposes.

The rivalry with The Satanic Temple is the defining feature of its public life now, and the disagreement is substantive rather than merely tribal. Both are atheistic. Both take Satan as a symbol. But the Church of Satan's Satanism is an elitist and individualist philosophy that regards political activism as beneath it and equality as a fiction, while The Satanic Temple's is an egalitarian and activist one built around campaigns for the separation of church and state. Each regards the other as having misunderstood the symbol.

The Church's most durable achievement is one it did not set out to make. By existing openly for decades as an incorporated religious body that plainly harmed nobody, it made the claim underlying the Satanic Panic, that Satanists constitute a criminal conspiracy, harder to sustain each time it was revived.

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