The Seven Fundamental Tenets

The Satanic Temple affirms its Seven Fundamental Tenets as the core of its ethical outlook. They enjoin acting with compassion and empathy toward all creatures; struggling for justice; holding the inviolability of one's own body; respecting the freedoms of others, including the freedom to offend; conforming beliefs to the best scientific understanding of the world; recognising that people err and striving to make amends; and treating these tenets as guiding principles to be weighed with wisdom rather than as rigid rules. Together they present a humane, reason-based morality.

The Temple formally published the Seven Tenets in 2015, distinguishing them explicitly from Anton LaVey's earlier Nine Satanic Statements, which the Temple regards as excessively self-assertive and insufficiently grounded in compassion for others; where LaVey's Statements open by praising indulgence over abstinence, the Temple's Tenets open with the injunction to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures, signalling a deliberate ethical contrast between the two major modern Satanist traditions despite their shared symbolism. The Tenets are stated to be revisable statements of principle rather than fixed commandments, and the Temple has periodically clarified or reordered them, most notably around bodily autonomy amid its litigation over reproductive rights.

The Tenets function as the Temple's statement of values and underpin its activism for bodily autonomy, science, and equal treatment of belief. Their emphasis on empathy, personal responsibility, and evidence sets The Satanic Temple's non-theistic Satanism close, in ethical substance, to secular humanism, while its Satanic framing signals opposition to authoritarian religion. The affirmation is described here as the Temple's own declared code, expressing a morality grounded in compassion and reason rather than in divine command.

The Temple's formal status as a religion was contested for years: after an earlier application was rejected, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service granted The Satanic Temple recognition as a tax-exempt church in 2019, a decision the organisation had actively sought as both a practical and a symbolic victory, since it placed Satanic Temple congregations on the same federal legal footing as any conventional church, synagogue, or mosque. The recognition did not resolve the more informal public debate over whether an explicitly non-theistic organisation using Satanic imagery is a "real" religion, a question the Temple's own leadership has answered by pointing to the sincerity of its members' ethical commitments as the relevant test, consistent with how the Tenets themselves function as its actual creed.