Salem's Satanic Temple Sues Boston Over City Council Prayer

SALEM, MA — The Salem-based Satanic Temple has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Boston, accusing the City Council of unfairly preventing the group from reciting a pre-meeting prayer.

City councilors are responsible for inviting religious leaders to say a prayer before their meetings — not only has the council not invited the Temple, but it hasn’t granted requests to read a prayer at a meeting, the suit says.

“This really is a much bigger issue than I think people recognize on the face of it,” said Lucien Greaves, founder of the Satanic Temple, in an interview with Patch. “I think some people see these kinds of disputes that we fight and think that they're petty and prankster-ish. But we don't feel that way at all.

“We feel that this cuts right to our fundamental values as a democratic republic that respects pluralism, and part of that is ensuring that our public officials do not show preference for one viewpoint over another, but rule by principle and rule by law.”

The city of Boston said it would not comment on ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit asks that the court order the City Council to give the Satanic Temple an opportunity to say a prayer at a council meeting. It also requests that the court issue a permanent injunction that would prevent the council from excluding certain religious groups from leading prayer, and order the council to create a mechanism for religious groups to “obtain an equal opportunity” to lead the prayers.

The Satanic Temple states its mission is to “encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.”

Greaves said people are often shocked to hear that the Satanic Temple has nothing to do with infant sacrifice and other “bizarre satanic panic tales” that were spun in the 1980s and 1990s, but that shouldn’t matter.

“Even if we were everything people claimed us to be, it would still be important that we're ruled by people who understand those basic principles of government viewpoint neutrality, and respect pluralism to the point that they don't put those kinds of litmus tests on whomever is speaking,” he said.

The city needs to be prepared for varying viewpoints when they open a public forum, Greaves said.

“They need to be prepared to deal with the perspectives of people they might not agree with, or religions that seem bizarre to them,” he said. “And I feel that it's far better that we preserve those values than we go astray from them just because we don't like what somebody has to say.”

Greaves sent Patch a prayer the Satanic Temple could read at a City Council meeting — it was first published in the Los Angeles Times in 2014 when a columnist wrote about a court decision that upheld the right of a town in upstate New York to begin council meetings with a Christian prayer.

The Satanic Temple’s prayer reads:

"Let us stand now, unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds in darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old. Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations. Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of One or All. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise. It is Done. Hail Satan."