Minister Nectaire OlivevilO, The Satanic Temple Arizona

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/27

Minister Nectaire OlivevilO, elected as congregation head of The Satanic Temple Arizona in June, shared his Protestant upbringing and gradual shift to atheism driven by a passion for science. He discussed the Temple’s principles, emphasizing resistance to arbitrary authority inspired by “Paradise Lost” and “Revolt of the Angels.” They highlighted coalition building with interfaith and secular groups, advocating for scientific understanding, compassion, and bodily autonomy. OlivevilO explained how conversations with skeptics reveal cognitive biases and the importance of bidirectional consent, reinforcing the Temple’s commitment to reason and ethical principles.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: After many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years, I am back with the Satanic Temple of Arizona. Previously, I was interviewing Michelle and Stu. What has changed over the years that I’ve been away?

Minister Nectaire OlivevilO: A lot has happened. We’ve gone through several generations of council leadership within the congregation, a few cycles of chapter heads, a regent, and eventually, I became one of the elected individuals. In June, I was onboarded as the congregation head of Arizona. 

Jacobsen: When were you first introduced to TST or that style of philosophy? Did you grow up religious, for instance, or in any other religious context?

OlivevilO: Not strictly. I grew up in a household with Protestant parents. On my mother’s side, there was a mix of Methodist and—I believe—Lutheran. On my father’s side, I do not remember what his religious background was. When we visited my maternal grandparents on weekends, we would alternate between different churches. It was not a monoculture of church experiences. When we visited my dad’s mother’s church, it was another different church.

Growing up, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and Legos. I would read paleontology books for kids and popular paleontology books for the general public. I was deeply into science. When I went to Sunday school, they talked about the flood and the ark, which lost me completely. It felt absurd, and I decided I was done with it. 

Jacobsen: Did that moment of disbelief cause any confrontations with people, or was it an internal realization?

OlivevilO: It was entirely internal. I no longer wanted to attend Sunday school; my parents were fine. I would read novels in the pews instead. Eventually, once I had a Walkman, I would listen to music during services. They were okay with that, too.

My parents never forced indoctrination or imposed religious beliefs on me, and I recognize how privileged I am for that. Many people have endured significant religious trauma due to their upbringing, but I was fortunate not to have that experience. My sister was similarly unaffected by it. My atheism continued without conflict. When I learned the term “atheism” in high school, I would have identified with it if I had thought about adopting a label. However, I did not consciously choose an identity then.

I knew the Bible held no value for me. I tried reading it once, but when I got to the genealogies, I stopped, thinking, “I don’t have time for this.” It felt pointless. I didn’t care about who begat whom. That’s where my attempt at reading the Bible ended.

Despite not reading the Bible cover to cover, I was exposed to its content through various sources. For the past 15-plus years, I’ve read atheist blogs, listened to atheist podcasts, and engaged with counter-apologetics. I have delved into the Skeptics Annotated Bible and heard its contents discussed repeatedly through platforms like The Atheist Experience and more recent shows like Talk Heathen. These have been excellent resources for having meaningful conversations with religious people and understanding their beliefs. It is fascinating and engaging work.

\And the folks who call in often expose their cognitive biases immediately. If they’re evangelizing and trying to make claims, their biases show up immediately to the hosts. Many people don’t go into that stuff and have other reasoning, and it doesn’t have the Bible intersection. But yes, from observing these conversations between skeptics and religious people, there’s much exposure to the Bible that I’ve had.

Yes, that’s much of it as far as religious backgrounds are concerned. So, getting to TST is when I connected to or when I first heard about TST. It probably would have been the Pink Mass. That’s the first thing I heard on Evan Etta’s blog when he covered that. So, the blasphemy—I left at that and enjoyed that. But the coverage of that and something you mentioned earlier, I forget the name of the event, but the BDSM babies.​​

That was another one of the things covered in those sorts of media. But those articles included the tenets and went down the list. It’s like, “Hell, yes!” Awesome. Dig it. Do that. Awesome. So, you hear this from Satanists all the time. These things click, and you realize, “Well, I guess I’m a Satanist.” So, I enjoy that—turning a thing on its head.

With blasphemy, you’re taking something sacred and turning it on its head. With this identity with Satanism, you’re taking the attribution of atheists being called Satanists because Christians don’t accurately name the thing that they’re seeing and calling out. It’s embracing Satanism when it has been thrown at you as if it were a weapon. “Got it. Yes. It’s me. Now what?” 

Jacobsen: The taking away of the power of that accusation is empowering. I can see that in other folks, too. So, it is a form of attributing an epithet to something of a benevolent self-identity, self-identification in a way. “This is my term for self-liberation. The devil is a metaphor for the liberation of humanity from an authoritarian god. When you see me as an atheist within your framework, you know that is the worst possible thing.” I’m going to take that on. Here’s what I mean.”If people get past the first reaction, it’s a way to continue the conversation more healthily.

OlivevilO: I guess it’s a “yes, and.”

Jacobsen: Yes, it is. So, it’s the improv comedy principle. What did you learn from those calls from people? When they expose their cognitive biases, as you’re saying? What comes up? What are those biases? And how do you notice them grappling with those pointed out now? That’s an uncomfortable place to be.

OlivevilO: Yes. And it should be an uncomfortable place to be. When callers recognize that they’ve got a contradiction, the people I’ve noticed recognizing that will say, “Oh, I’ll think about that, and I’ll call back about that after I’ve had a chance.” Resistant people tend to have calls that drag on for a long time. The hosts try to bring the person back to the beginning, using several approaches to get them to acknowledge that they have inconsistent ideas. But then, that cognitive dissonance doesn’t even get a chance to kick in as other assumptions the person has prevent them from analyzing their own beliefs. Fundamental attribution error—that’s a pretty common one.

Special pleading. Those are the most common ones. So, fundamental attribution error—well, there are multiple ways it can show up. I saw that one thing happened, another happened, and I assumed that this caused that rather than them being coincidental. This happened, and that happened. Things are only sometimes connected. This thing is only sometimes caused by that thing. So, diversity of plant, animal, and bacterial life—yes. Your book says that a god did that, but all the other information also says this is how things happen. There’s so much more evidence supporting this second explanation.

Jacobsen: Have you had anyone change their mind on one of those calls?

OlivevilO: Well, I want to be clear: this hasn’t been me. This is me consuming things. Yes, I was referring to shows that the atheist community of Austin puts on. They do a great job cultivating an open community interested in these conversations and bringing in religious people to share their ideas.

And that’s great. That cross-pollination of ideas is necessary. We’re people. We’re a social species. We trade ideas. We bounce things off each other. One of the positive ways humans use that is through the scientific revolution—starting to examine these things and figure out why. We build up that base of knowledge through reason and evidence and examine it with one another to average out those cognitive biases that contribute to things. By checking with many people, I see that some have certain biases, and others have different ones.

And where there’s consensus and evidence, you can start to build and look into the next set of things. We know this now. Then what does that mean? What else can we find out? What else can we learn? That scientific approach, that openness to investigate ideas that we think are true and trying to verify whether they are or not. There’s much overlap between science and these sorts of inquiries into people’s beliefs. They are two sides of the same coin of inquiry, and we enjoy that. We engage in that exchange within this congregation, primarily through coalition building.

So, we work with a couple of coalitions. One of them is the Arizona Faith Network. It’s an interfaith group. There are folks from Christian churches, Hindu individuals, a couple of different Buddhist traditions, and UU people. It’s everybody. They do much good stuff. One of their organization’s projects is with heat relief.

Heat relief is a major cause of death in houseless communities or houseless populations in Arizona. That’s one of their big projects. They also do volunteer work, such as poll watching and other activities. But that organization and our participation with them give us a chance to hang out with these other faith leaders, get to know one another, and help our congregations interact with other people—whether they’re congregating with us or vice versa—in a way that’s positive for the entire community of Tucson, Arizona, or wherever the specific projects may be at the time.

Then another coalition that we’re in is a secular one, the Secular Coalition for Arizona. That is a multi-faith group, but many are non-theistic. There are some religious groups within the coalition now. That was only sometimes the case, but some religious groups have joined the coalition in the last couple of years. You know, once, their focus—because they’re a chapter or I don’t know their structure specifically—but I believe they were the first local branch of the Secular Coalition for America.

They do a lot of legislative work. They’ve had a lobbyist at the Arizona Capitol for years and advocate heavily in education. They stream a weekly education presentation, frequently on church-state separation and sometimes on education and other scientific topics that may not have a political bent. Lawmakers always find a way to put undisputed things into the legislature and turn them into political issues. It happens. 

Jacobsen: What do you believe?

OlivevilO: Science is the best method for learning things. We should have compassion for other people, animals, and living things. It doesn’t have to be limited to the animal kingdom.

The whole world is a web; we should have compassion and understanding of how things affect the real world and try to minimize the negative effects—large scale, small scale, interpersonal scale, everything. I’ll suppose that things flow from that. I deeply identify with the tenets covering many aspects of my worldview. They’re always subject to change; they can be updated. So it’s not that I need to say, “I believe this thing and its tenets over here.” I currently identify with them. My positions align with them. They cover many of my philosophy but can’t possibly cover all of a person’s philosophical views.

And let’s see. You asked the classic ACA question, “Why?” Yes. First, science has been shown to work consistently and reliably to advance and expand our knowledge. So, why? Because it works. It shows evidence that it does work.

Why compassion? How did we reword the Golden Rule? It was—he might have called it the Silver Rule or the Platinum Rule. “Don’t do to others as you would like done to you,” but don’t do as they want you to do unto them.

Jacobsen: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Consent, bodily autonomy, all these things. Non-harm.  So, someone may be a masochist, and they may want you to harm them. Still, the harm principle would say, “Well, at that point, that’s a limit where those two principles meet together, and you don’t engage in what they would.” Unless it’s some BDSM or something like that.

OlivevilO: If somebody wants to be harmed, I don’t have to harm them. I can withdraw myself from that. I don’t have to participate in that. But I can ask them, “Hey, what do you want?”

Jacobsen: And that’s a subtle point because when people critique it, they’ll assume, “Well, if that’s what they want, then you have to harm them.” Oh, no. But the thing is, it’s not only the harm principle and the platinum rule in terms of “Do what they would want done to you,” but also bidirectional consent. You can also say, “I don’t want this either,” and then not do it. So, it’s a bolt in the critique. You only sometimes know once you play with the words, see how they work, and determine objections.

OlivevilO: We talked about before with the unitarian and universalist principles and the humanist principles. The core ideas embedded in the tenets and these other principles have overlapped. There are multiple ways of saying the same idea. I’m saying a lot of the same ideas. They’re not necessarily in all those or entirely representative of those other principles. 

Jacobsen: Based on their principles since their start, what is the big takeaway for The Satanic Temple or The Satanic Temple Arizona?

OlivevilO: The big message, to boil it down to a single thing, is the resistance to arbitrary authority. You see that in the character of Satan, written in “Revolt of the Angels” and “Parse Lost.”

So, in “Paradise Lost,” Lucifer wages a big war against Heaven to try and take down this literal theocratic dictator who’s giving all these commands and making all these demands of the world, including humans. Satan sympathizes with humanity and stands up for them. That’s even in the Bible, with Satan saying, “No, you won’t die if you eat from this tree.” He’s providing accurate information to humanity, inspiring some of the fifth tenets of scientific understanding.

The struggle for ice comes from that Satanic spirit of being willing to fight in whatever fashion that fight takes. On that sidebar, the Satans undergo two different ways in their fight against God in the two books I mentioned. There’s the frontal assault in “Paradise Lost,” but in “Revolt,” Whisper decides not to take that frontal assault, not to overthrow because he recognizes that there’s a long game. Providing enlightenment and inspiring enlightenment in humanity is the long-game victory plan in that book. So, the struggle for ice, the second tenet, that’s in there too.

All the tenets come from various facets of Satan’s character. God tells humans various things—various sexual structures. “You can’t do that. You have to circumcise. You have to do all these things.” I see opposition to all these arbitrary rules. Each of them is Lucifer standing up to those rules and saying, “No, we don’t have to do that. You’ll be fine if you don’t.”

Jacobsen: Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Yes. I hope to get more interviews, and we can spread the good news.

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