Hail Satan? (2019)

Hail Satan? reached theaters on April 19, 2019, days after an event its own subject had been working toward for years. On April 25, 2019, The Satanic Temple announced that the Internal Revenue Service had granted it recognition as a church, a tax exempt religious designation carrying more legal weight than the general nonprofit status it had held before. It was the first organization identifying itself as Satanist ever to receive that classification from the federal government.

The recognition mattered less for taxes than for standing. A federally recognized church has an easier legal claim to the same access other religious organizations get to public spaces, school programs and after school clubs, and to religious exemption arguments in court, all grounds The Satanic Temple had already been contesting case by case around the country. Co-founder Lucien Greaves, interviewed around the film's release, framed the designation as confirmation of an argument the group had been making publicly since its founding: that its combination of activism, ritual and a shared set of Seven Tenets amounted to a genuine religious practice rather than a prank aimed at Christianity, whatever its name suggested to people who had not looked closely. The Satanic Temple does not hold Satan to exist or worship him; its members describe him as a literary figure representing rebellion against arbitrary authority.

The film's central thread follows a specific, documented campaign rather than a general profile of Satanism. In 2015 the Oklahoma legislature had a Ten Commandments monument on its state capitol grounds, and The Satanic Temple responded by commissioning its own monument, a roughly nine foot bronze Baphomet, a horned, winged figure seated between two children, funded through a public Indiegogo campaign and intended for the same grounds under the argument that a state accepting one religious monument on public land had to accept others on equal terms.

Oklahoma's own supreme court ordered the Ten Commandments monument removed on separate state constitutional grounds before the Baphomet statue could be installed there, but the same argument found its next stage in Arkansas. A Ten Commandments monument went up at the Arkansas State Capitol in June 2017 and was destroyed within a day when a man drove a car into it; a replacement went up months later. In August 2018 The Satanic Temple brought the Baphomet statue to Little Rock and unveiled it at a rally outside the capitol, the scene the documentary builds much of its second half around, and later won a lawsuit establishing its standing to challenge the Arkansas monument in court.