The devil’s work is moving with the times. Gone are the days of hell-raising and animal sacrifices. Followers of the Satanic Temple in Florida collect socks for the homeless. Other Temple chapters donate tampons to women’s shelters (“Menstruation for Satan!”) and protest against anti-abortionists. Across the US, civic-minded millennial satanists combine activism with pranks calculated to wind up the Christian right. With her funny, light-hearted documentary, Penny Lane lets the sunshine in, focusing on the Temple’s message of open-mindedness and inclusivity – LGBTQ followers speak of a sense of belonging.
The reason for the question mark in the title is that Satanic Temple followers don’t worship the devil. Most are atheists who skew to Milton’s representation of the prince of darkness as a rebellious bad boy sticking it to authority. The “satanist” label is clever marketing – calculated to maximise shock value by the Temple’s co-founder Lucien Greaves, a hoodie-wearing Harvard graduate who talks in corporate buzzwords like a frozen yoghurt entrepreneur.
Much of Greaves’s activism is directed at the separation of church and state, what he sees as the creep of Christian values into public life. When the government of Arkansas erects a monument to the Ten Commandments outside the state capitol, he applies to have a bronze statue of Baphomet put up next to it. Outraged Christian groups duly protest: “Honk if you’re against Satan!”
Lane doesn’t appear in front of the camera. But you do hear her giggling behind it when an interviewee explains that the Ten Commandments statues began life as a promo tie-in for the 1956 Cecil B DeMille film starring Charlton Heston. Lane selects hyper-articulate Temple followers to interview, such as the guy who lost his faith as a teenager when his history teacher told him that Gandhi was going hell because he wasn’t Christian.
The film dips into a dispute with a hardcore Temple chapter in Detroit but Lane’s sympathy is entirely with devil.
• Hail Satan? is released in the UK on 23 August.
• This article was amended on 22 August 2019. It was a statue of the goat-headed deity Baphomet that was put up outside the Arkansas state capitol, not of Satan as stated in an earlier version.
