Satan Not Hatin’: Pushing Back Against Hate & Bigotry in Alt Music Scenes

One of the projects that DIY Solidarity was able to fund this year was Satan Not Hatin’, which is a grassroots campaign launched by the Global Order of Satan to push back against the racism, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and other far-right currents that have crept into alt music scenes.

Their goal is straightforward: to build an ecosystem, encompassing bands, labels, venues, festivals, promoters, zines, studios, illustrators, and merch makers, where zero tolerance for bigotry is the baseline, whether the music is metal, punk, goth, folk, industrial, or electronica. Satan Not Hatin’ wants listeners to know they can enjoy the sounds they love without supporting hateful rhetoric. In short, Satan Not Hatin’ is working to make hate-free scenes the norm. The following interview with Leraje from Satan Not Hatin’ was conducted by Gabriel Kuhn.

What is Satan Not Hatin’?

Satan Not Hatin’ (SNH) is a campaign run by the Global Order of Satan (GOS) that is set up to stand against bigotry and fascism in alt music scenes. All participants (more than 500 now) are opt-in, meaning we’ve contacted them or they’ve contacted us. No one has been added without their express permission and full information about what the campaign stands for. Consent and autonomy are central to our beliefs.

The long-term aim is to demonstrate to music fans that there’s a lot of great art out there that is made by non-problematic people. We also want to demonstrate to the music industry that there is a large, unmet appetite for signing, promoting, and booking non-problematic bands. As such, our participants are bands/artists, venues/festivals, labels, media and radio shows, collectives, zines and blogs, and merch designers and sellers. No participant is obligated to make or promote music that is overtly political—although many do—we’re interested in what they think as people. If they choose to make music about (off the top of my head) Tolkien or whatever, that’s up to them.

What’s the Global Order of Satan?

GOS is an international collective of non-theistic Satanic Orders, all operating independently as best suits their locale and culture, yet sometimes working together when required. We explicitly condemn fascism and bigotry and have as flat and non-hierarchical a structure as possible.

As atheists we don’t believe in gods, devils, fairies, astrology, or crystals, but believe evidence-based science, employed with compassion, is the best way to interpret the universe. We stand in direct opposition to theist religions who use their arbitrary authority to enforce their beliefs on the rest of us.

How did the Satan Not Hatin’ Campaign come about?

Around 2019–2020 our UK Order started noticing an overt and disturbing increase in the number of bands, and fans, prepared to be openly bigoted and “fash” in their music or their opinions. Quite a lot of them also use Satanic imagery or claim to be Satanists, which made it even more problematic for us. So we decided to fight back, and Satan Not Hatin’ was launched in 2020.

However, as the whole world knows, COVID then happened and the planet hit the collective “pause” button for almost two years. It wasn’t until early 2024, lockdowns having been lifted in most places, that we had regrouped enough to think about re-launching. When we did, we asked if any of our other Orders would like to join us, and three did—GOS: Steel City (Pittsburgh, USA), House of Heretics (GOS Seattle, USA), and Satanistiska samfundet (GOS Sweden).

On your website you say that you are acting against hate and bigotry in “various alt music scenes—rock, metal, punk, goth, industrial and more.” Is the problem more pronounced in some of these scenes than in others?

It is, yes. Everyone knows that black metal has a problematic reputation, but there has been a concerted push-back to create opposition to that—Red & Anarchist Black Metal (RABM) is a recognised subgenre now, and hopefully we’re helping get that word out even more. However, we’ve been dismayed to find pockets of bigotry and far-right extremism in all the scenes/genres we list, so we do want to cover as many as we can.

Are there big differences between countries/regions? If so, why?

Yes and no! You might expect Scandinavian countries—being hotbeds of black metal—to be more problematic than somewhere else, and there is some truth to that, but it is possibly more accurate to say that it’s the older bands that are, as a rule, more prepared to let their singer stop a gig to go on a ten-minute rant about “the gays” or some such bullshit. We have a fair amount of Scandi bands from a few subgenres, and they are not problematic in any way. They’re also younger!

Most outsiders would associate Satanism mainly with black and death metal. True or false? I’m sure you can enlighten us.

Traditionally, true. The old-style LaVeyan Satanism is pretty right-wing, and I guess their musical tastes reflect that! However, modern Rational Satanism (a phrase I’m indebted to our Chaplain Leo for popularising!) has no real investment in black metal. A lot of us (myself included) love that subgenre, but we also love lots of other genres too. The band Ghost are a firm favourite among many of us, for example, and I know quite a few Satanists who don’t really like metal at all.

Your website lists almost 400 bands in support of your campaign. Which genres do most of them fall into?

Metal, it’s true! But the reason for that is that it was the genre I’m personally most familiar with, so I sort of started with that genre. We’ve also got a lot of hardcore/crossover/crust and old-school punk, some neo/dark folk, goths, and electronica—but yeah, lots of metal so far!

Knowledge about Satanism in general is rather limited, also in alt music scenes. Perhaps names like Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey come to mind. What is Satanism, and how do you interpret it?

If you ask ten different Satanists you’ll get twelve different answers, is what we always joke. In a general sense the split is theist/non-theist. We fall into the latter category. Then within that, there is LaVeyan Satanism and modern Satanism—again, we fall into the latter. Anton was a problematic guy and lifted his Satanic Bible pretty much entirely from a proto-fascist manual called Might Is Right and the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. About the only thing we have in common with them is the atheism.

To us, Satanism is a way to take atheism further. There’s nothing wrong with atheism, but we feel it is mainly about what you don’t believe, which is fine, but we want something that also says what we do believe.

I understand that within the Global Order of Satan there are some political links to anarchism. Can you explain?

I’ll try! It’s possibly more accurate to say that modern Rational Satanism has its origins in Romantic Satanism—using Satan as a metaphor to stand against arbitrary authority in a tradition that began with people like Godwin, Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys (both of them), Byron, and Blake. They used the allegorical Satan in their work to oppose religious and political oppression in the UK when it seemed the French Revolution might spread. This Satan figure was, of course, inspired in turn by the character from Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.

This revolutionary, rebellious aspect of Satan was also picked up by thought-leaders such as Thomas Paine and Voltaire, as well as proto-anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and leftists such as Mikhail Bakunin—God was worshipped by the rich and powerful (or the State), so Satan became a symbol for the poor and oppressed in their writings.

So these are our roots. As a consequence, all of our members are leftist to varying degrees; a number are anarchists, and many more sit somewhere between the two. Only one of our Orders states outright that they are anarchists—Free Society Satanists (GOS Resurgens, Georgia, USA)—but that’s only because not many Orders like to pin a set political label on themselves. Individually, though, lots of us do, which is not surprising given our roots.

Can non-Satanists help Satanists in pushing back against hate and bigotry in alt music scenes? If so, how?

Most definitely! The easiest (and also hardest!) way is to check what your favourite bands are up to. I’ve been sadly disappointed to find a couple of bands whose music I love are actually fairly terrible people. Don’t listen to them; don’t promote them. Instead, find bands or artists who aren’t right-wingers or bigots (there are lots out there) and recommend them.

If a fash or bigoted band is playing near you, organise resistance—tell the venue, tell the promoter.

And tell us about any bands or artists, labels, venues or festivals, collectives, promoters, media groups, etc., that you know are non-problematic so we can approach them and ask them to participate!

Get in touch with Satan Not Hatin’ on their website. SNH is also on Bandcamp (releasing benefit compilations), social media and the fediverse: Instagram, Facebook, Pixelfed, Mastodon, and Bluesky.

Watch a short documentary about the GOS UK Order below.