Satanism today

In Mephistopheles, the final volume in his magisterial study of the history of the Devil, Jeffrey Burton Russell contemptuously dismisses contemporary, religious Satanism as represented by Anton Szandor LaVey, the Church of Satan, and the Temple of Set. Russell, obviously irritated by what he characterizes as “Satan chic,” asserts that “Satan is by definition evil.” Hence modern Satanism’s effort to recover the positive Satan of the Romantic poets is “inherently meaningless” because it “contradicts itself.” Alternately, in the same section where he discounts LaVey and others as pseudo-Satanists, Russell characterizes Jim Jones’s People’s Temple as a “Satanic” group that merely used the “name of Christianity” to disguise its true diabolism—as if to imply that no truly Christian organization could do anything bad or evil.