by crafty

Billing it as the "most controversial and politically charged contemporary work of art in the world" in a press release, the Temple kept the location of the unveiling a closely guarded secret in an effort to keep religious protesters away.

Seems like some hyperbolic marketing to me. There's plenty of truly offensive art in the world, and making art that twists the panties of good Christians is a pretty easy target to hit. I remember seeing Christians protest Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when it was playing in my town. Seems like the protests were fairly mild anyways, with the exception of a Angel-toting, holy water spritzing U-Haul:

In the wake of numerous threats, organizers devised an elaborate scheme involving multiple security checkpoints. Hours before the event, ticket holders were emailed an address, which served not only as the first checkpoint but also a decoy location. Here, they were patted down and given another address where someone would meet them and guide them to the secret venue if they recited a password. Ticket holders were also required to sell their souls to the devil before being allowed into the venue. "We were thinking that having them sell their souls over to Satan would keep away some of the more radical superstitious people who would try to undermine the event," Mesner said.


Despite the online threats, the protesters who did show up at the decoy location were by and large well behaved. A U-Haul pickup circled the block, towing a sword-wielding statue of an angel. One woman sprinkled holy water on people while they waited in line. A couple busloads of people got out to sing hymns in front of the building. At one point, a woman attempted to block the entrance with a large sign; police later arrived to escort her off of the private property.

There was a group get together to pray for all the lost souls, tied in with promoting a reality cable TV show, of course:

The tension between the Temple and Detroit's Christian community has been escalating since June, when the group announced the monument would be unveiled in the city. Mesner says he has repeatedly called on Saturday's protest organizer—Pastor David Bullock of Oxygen's reality TV show Preachers of Detroit fame—to publicly condemn the threats of violence against the Temple. Instead, Bullock posted a video on his Facebook page that featured a gunshot and blood-splatter graphical motif, calling on local Christians to meet at Bert's to pray for Detroit.

Overall, I'd say their message isn't that damning (heh), but can't be the only one to see the irony in using a tradition-based superstition as symbolism of rejecting tradition-based superstition:

The Satanic Temple has maintained that their Satan is a metaphorical one and not a deity, stating on their website "to embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. "The whole idea of the reconciliation of the opposites is that they don't have war with one another, but that they can coexist in some kind of state of understanding," Mesner said. "That's really the message behind putting it with the Ten Commandments. I think it's a message worth hearing."