The Seven Fundamental Tenets

The Satanic Temple states its position not as a creed about the supernatural but as seven ethical commitments, published from 2015 and treated as open to revision by its members rather than fixed by a single founding authority. Among them: one should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason, the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over the written or spoken word, one's body is inviolable and subject to one's own will alone, and beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world, revised if that understanding changes.

The organization describes Satan not as a being to be worshipped but as a literary figure representing rebellion against arbitrary authority, in the tradition of Milton and the Romantic poets rather than in the tradition of ceremonial occultism, and explicitly states that it does not believe in a supernatural Satan or in the supernatural at all. On this point the Temple stands apart even from LaVey's Church of Satan, whose atheism concerned Satan's literal existence but which retained a broader occult and ceremonial framework the Temple does not.

The Seven Tenets have functioned in practice as the doctrinal basis for the Temple's public activism, including legal challenges to religious displays on government property and to abstinence-only sex education, framed as the direct application of tenets concerning bodily autonomy, scientific literacy and the separation of religious privilege from public life.

The Satanic Temple presents its Seven Tenets as a deliberate evolution beyond, and in several places a direct rejection of, the Nine Satanic Statements that had defined organized Satanism since 1966. Where LaVey's statements drew on social Darwinist language and prized a hierarchy of the strong over the weak, the Temple's own materials explicitly reject what they describe as LaVeyan social Darwinism as inconsistent with a modern understanding of evolutionary biology and cooperation, and reject what they call a LaVeyan fetishization of authoritarianism as incompatible with individual sovereignty, the value the Temple places above all others.

The two organizations have traded public criticism since the Temple's founding in 2013. The Church of Satan has characterized the Temple's activism as a political project with no real connection to LaVey's philosophy and has questioned whether the Temple constitutes a genuine religious tradition at all, while the Temple has dismissed the Church of Satan as an aging and largely inactive organization no longer central to Satanism's development. Scholars of new religious movements have generally treated the dispute as a genuine doctrinal split rather than mere rivalry, since the two bodies disagree in substance: LaVeyan Satanism keeps a broadly occult, ceremonial self-presentation even within its atheism, while the Temple's Satanism is explicitly rationalist, political and without a ceremonial or ritual claim to hidden or esoteric knowledge.