Hail Resistance: Spiritual Resistance to Christian Hegemony Within the Satanic Temple

Abstract: Founded in the US by Malcolm Jarry and Lucien Greaves at the end of the year 2012, the Satanic Temple (TST) is both a non-theistic religion, a secularist group and a satanic group fighting for the strict separation of Church and State (Laycock 2020, Introvigne 2016). The Satanic Temple aims at raising the question of the integration of non-Christians as respectful and respected citizens within the public sphere, thus negotiating the tensions at the core of the American national identity and of its civil religion, both heavily influenced by Christianity, with the help of Satan’s symbol (Colin 2022, Cragun 2023). This paper will focus on the central contribution and inclusion of racial and sexual minorities in this group as part of the spiritual resistance strategy, in order to read both secularism and Satanism through a decolonial lens exploring tensions, power and empowerment in new complex social movements.

Presenter bio: Mathieu Colin is a postdoctoral fellow at the UNESCO Chair in Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Extremism. He earned his PhD from the University of Montreal. He focuses on extreme right-wing ideologies such as accelerationism, and he is also interested in the study of secularism in the United States, and of contemporary Satanism.

Affiliation: University of Montreal, University of Sherbrooke