His Infernal Majesty often hears His church proclaim that there is no such thing as a Satanic community. The Devil can follow the arguments made by His church some of the way: it is not a social enclave whose members are committed to meeting and organizing events for each other, “doing good” for their local areas as an excuse for socializing, or otherwise performing group activities together. (Satan has no issue with doing good as a byproduct of selfish needs, mind you; He believes that much good comes from selfish purposes.) The Devil has not asked but presumes that His church prefers to lay distance to the common American phenomenon of Christian denominations serving the role of a local community, and Satan would certainly be suspicious Himself if some new member requested such a function of His church.
Yet, Satan thinks that such a use of the term “community” is overly restricted. People with religious backgrounds may be prone to thinking of religious communities when they hear the word, and to believing this is how others think, too. But the term has many other uses: in politics, “community” refers to demographic profiles, markets, or businesses, and has little connotation, often none, with religion, physical proximity, or socialization. It names an abstract group that usually has an affinity for a certain identifier. It demarks in somewhat loose terms the market for certain fashion, readers and writers of a literary subgenre, special-interest political groups, etc., and their “members” usually interact only indirectly or in very small groups. Such abstract grouping into “communities” is based on shared features and shared interests not physical contact or even interaction nor necessarily shared agreements.
The Devil’s church is therefore a virtual (not meaning “online”) community, too, whether it likes it or not, and even Peter Gilmore, the current high priest of The Church of Satan, is known to have used the terms “Satanic arena” and “assemblage” for this phenomenon. And yet the Devil’s followers often form a community in also the aforementioned meaning of a religious community whether they have never met another follower. They read The Satanic Bible and joined The Church of Satan (or other groups) and know that others have done so, too. They may even think that everyone else interpreted the ambiguous scripture in the same way as themselves. This knowledge and these assumptions bind the members together much like a regular church community does, only without the social interaction. They may each be alone out there, but they are alone together.
A leading scholar in the study of religious Satanism, Jesper Aagaard Petersen, coined the term “Satanic milieu” as a designation for Satanists in any shape or size and how they interact with both non-Satanists and each others, and thereby arguably manages to cover a larger area than had he chosen “community,” because it enables the existence of a variety of different communities within the milieu.
Satan thinks that Peter Gilmore—and Anton LaVey, whom he quotes and paraphrases—simply chose a misleading word to communicate that The Church of Satan’s twice-failed “Grotto” system led The Church of Satan to conclude that it should strive to prevent its members from meeting and thus realizing how little their ideology really defines their lives and how accordingly little they have in common. But by the force of religious scripture, the word became a taboo word within The Church of Satan, whose members will readily yell at anyone who speaks of a “Satanic community” (even when they obviously mean Petersen’s “milieu”) and struggle to explain why they themselves shun the idea. It sometimes leads to amusing results when a member explains that they are not a community, only a means that enables them to find contacts and interact—which is exactly what a community does.
Satan prefers to suppress any laughs, deserving as they might be, because He appreciates His followers being a cooperative body. Satan thinks that His church, and several of His other communions, are in fact Satanic communities, virtual or tangible. Satan thinks that when Peter Gilmore wrote his article on the “myth” of Satanic communities twenty years ago, he reacted correctly against members asking The Church of Satan to mimic Christian church communities but failed to understand that communities imply neither Christian churches nor herd mentality.
Satan thinks that Satanic communities are provably real by the sheer reason that they are observable, and with the advent of The Satanic Temple’s local chapters, several of which focus on organized local community actions complete with photo documentation, the myth of the Satanic community has been dispelled as itself a myth. Time will tell if also these local communities will stay alive, or if they—dependent on the yet uncertain destiny of The Satanic Temple—will run out of steam. For now, they are real: the Satanic community is no myth.