One night in April someone threw a pipe bomb into the headquarters of American Satanism in Salem, Massachusetts. It failed to explode fully and was not found for another 12 hours. According to the police, the plastic pipe was studded with nails and full of gunpowder. Had the bomb been better constructed, it could have caused a lot of damage. A message found in a flowerpot nearby said that “Elohim” (a Hebrew word for God) had sent the perpetrator “to smite Satan”. 

Shortly afterwards the FBI arrested Sean Patrick Palmer, 49, from Oklahoma and charged him with the attack. His intended victims were not literally devil-worshippers – at least not the sort who drink blood and sacrifice babies. The Satanic Temple is a group that campaigns against the encroachment of Christianity in American public life. Their schtick is to apply for permission to do anything that Christians do, and complain vociferously if this is denied. They hold weekly meet-ups, run after-school clubs in schools and perform Satanic marriages. 

Last year the group went further than ever, by launching a telehealth abortion service in New Mexico, where terminations are legal throughout pregnancy. They called it “Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic”, after the conservative Supreme Court judge who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, which stripped women in America of their federal constitutional right to an abortion. The clinic prescribes abortion pills to women in New Mexico, including those visiting from states where abortion is banned.

Before they take the pills, women are asked to recite the Satanic Temple’s tenets (“One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone”) and a personal affirmation: “By my body, my blood. By my will, it is done.” The Satanists say this “abortion ritual” is designed to “ward off the effects of unjust persecution”. Unsurprisingly the religious right weren’t happy about the initiative. The Christian Research Institute, an evangelical group, said the Satanists were “exploiting their cartoonishly dark and villainous branding to agitate the public and pester the Christian Right into a judicial showdown” and described them as “troll lords”.