There are many kinds of Satanists.
For most of the past forty years, the most public Satanist spokespeople have been atheistic symbolic Satanists, who do not believe in or worship Satan as a literal entity, but who regard Satan as a symbol of independence, pride, individual ambition, etc. The best-known symbolic Satanist organization is the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey.
There is now a growing movement of theistic Satanists, who do believe in and revere Satan as a deity.
There are many kinds of theistic Satanists. The vast majority do NOT simply accept Christian beliefs except for siding with the Other Guy. The beliefs of most theistic Satanists are based on sources other than just Christianity.
Some theistic Satanists regard Satan as the Christian-era image of a more ancient deity such as the Egyptian god Set, the Greek Titan Prometheus, or the Sumerian god Enki. The Temple of Set is the best-known organization holding such a belief.
Others base their ideas on ancient Ophidian Gnosticism, which venerated the serpent of the Garden of Eden myth. Ophidian Gnostics saw the Biblical God as the Demiurge (an evil god who created the physical world for the purpose of trapping human souls) and the serpent as Sophia, the bringer of wisdom. This theology isn’t popular among today’s Satanists, most of whom have a more favorable opinion of the material world and their own bodies than the ancient Gnostics did.
Some see Satan as “God of this world” in a deistic or pantheistic sense, thereby giving a decidedly non-Christian interpretation to a phrase used in the Bible to refer to Satan (2 Corinthians 4:4).
Many theistic Satanists are polytheistic and regard both Satan and the Christian "God" as just two of the many gods. Some believe that all the gods, including both Satan and the Christian “God,” are really just very advanced extraterrestrial humanoids. Others are polytheistic in a more traditional spiritual sense.
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