The most surprising thing about this whole story is that the cover of Hobbes’ magnum opus already gave it all away.

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This week, I came across a news story titled “Satanic Temple Opens Abortion Clinic in Maine, Tells Women to Do Evil Chants Celebrating Killing Babies”. The story has a goat with a pentagram as an illustration, and is from a pro-life website called Life News. In the past, I would read such a headline and think it was an fabrication by that kind of evangelical who claims that there are satanic chants in a lot of pop songs when listened to backwards. But this is 2025, the year in which it is unscientific and criminal to say that women do not have penises.

The story on the thematic website uses as its source a story from a local news website in Maine. There, we get to the bureaucracy of the matter: there is a Satanist temple in Salem, Massachusetts, which in 2019 managed to register with the IRS as an exempt religious entity. In fact, if all religions are equal before the liberal state, discriminating against Satanists would be an injustice. The name of this distinguished entity is The Satanic Temple, abbreviated as TST.

Just as churches have philanthropic hospitals, TST has TST Health, which “provides free religious telehealth medication abortion care”. Unfortunately, I know what the tele-abortion part is. It consists of giving abortion pills to a pregnant woman and sending her home, where she will ingest the pills and run the risk of bleeding to death. If she dies, she can inform people later in a virtual consultation. In Brazil, during the pandemic, a university hospital began promoting the practice in defiance of the law and, fortunately, it was stopped.

A TST Health pamphlet explains that “the ritual serves to assist in affirming their decision and to ward off the effects of unjust persecution, which can cause one to stray from the paths of scientific reasoning and free will that Satanists strive to embody.” As for preparations for the ritual, the pamphlet suggests reviewing “the safety, the debunked claims, and the scientific reality regarding abortion. You may also choose to read stories or listen to podcasts about people who made great sacrifices in the struggle to establish the reproductive rights we have today. These stories can be inspirational and may subdue stigmas you might feel from those who oppose abortion.”

What does the ritual consist of? Reciting two Satanic Temple principles and a “personal affirmation.” One is principle III, which states that “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone” and the other is principle V, which states that “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.” The personal affirmation is as follows: “By my body, / my blood / By my will, / it is done.”

After all, there are no chants. There is only the reading of principles and a kind of prayer. Therefore, I could write a striking fact-checking story, claiming in the headline that the religious fundamentalist website lied. In the body text, the reader would discover that, after all, a Satanist temple only opened an abortion clinic, but there are no chants sung there at all. Phew! The reader can breathe a sigh of relief.

* * *

This story is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of liberalism. It was this ideology, and nothing else, that triggered this series of events.

Since Antiquity, Western Europe has had a state religion. In the Roman Empire, worship was given to a Roman pantheon that was extended to accommodate all the gods – a fact that bothered only the Jews, who believed in the existence of only one god. With Christianity, Western Europe ended Antiquity and went through the Middle Ages with a supranational religion, Catholicism, and brought it to most of America. The Protestant Reformation initially meant the creation of national churches or churches with power over principalities. This is not without reason: religion determines what is the common good and what are acceptable moral standards. Politics, with regard to the polis, is by nature public; moral standards are obviously public. Possibly no European politician thought of creating a State in which morality was a private matter, and religion as well, before Cromwell.

As we saw in another article, this Puritan established a peculiar freedom of worship (every Christian or Jew is free, except for Christians of the majority religions). His invitation to the Jews, with the right to establish a Sanhedrin (which subjects the Jews to a private court) shocked the Englishmen at the time, because it was unthinkable to admit an anti-Christian morality in society. However, Cromwell’s social philosophy was that of his secretary Thomas Hobbes: man is a wolf to man, and Leviathan – which is literally a demon – is the one who subjugates everyone and, through threats, prevents war. No social cohesion, nor unity of values.

With the advent of the French Revolution, which was a liberal revolution, anti-Christianity was the explicit institutional position. In both the secular scientistic world and the Protestant world, science became the guarantor of authority. Over time, the same thing took hold in the Catholic world as well, and the entire West became liberalized. The state is neutral, religion is something subjective and private, and in the public sphere the authority of science prevails. So it is no surprise that a Satanist temple appeals to science to justify abortion. If science now says that women have penises, saying that a fetus is merely maternal blood is a small piece of cake. (By the way, the temple’s website does not specify the sex of the pregnant individual, and has a button in Spanish that says “estoy embarazade,” that is, in neutral gender.)

The most surprising thing about this whole story is that the cover of Hobbes’ magnum opus already gave it all away. A man with a face similar to Cromwell’s, holding a sword, towered over lands and men. His name was Leviathan, and at the top was reproduced in Latin a biblical quote: Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei. Iob 41:24. Or: There is no power on earth that can be compared with his. Apparently, the Puritans gave up on creating a theocracy and, after reading the Bible a thousand times, enthroned the most powerful creature they could find: a great demon, the Leviathan from the book of Job. Let’s wait until someone opens the Church of Leviathan in the United States.