Why America Fell for the Satanic Panic

Mike Cosper, creator of “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” has a new podcast from Christianity Today about the Satanic Panic: “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” In the 1980s and 90s, the FBI investigated 11,000 reports of satanic ritual abuse, but did not uncover a single credible story. So, why were parents throughout the country worried that heavy metal music, board games, and the Smurfs would lead their kids into devil-worshipping cults? How did hucksters leverage fears over cultural change to create mass hysteria, and why are those lessons still relevant today? ((From Holy Post Podcast 666: Lessons from the Satanic Panic with Mike Cosper)

Skye:  What's your basic definition to explain to somebody when they ask what the Satanic Panic is? How would you summarize it? 

Mike: I would summarize it as the belief that there was a cabal of Satanists that was international, underground, and deeply networked and connected with one another that were conspiring together to abuse children, get them hooked on drugs and use them for pornographic purposes.

There's lots of these stories of impregnating them and then taking their children or their fetuses and sacrificing them. The stories get really wild and crazy. But all of that, that core idea of an international network of Satanists that are doing these things and working in schools and daycares and churches and different places, took hold in a profound way and it was taken very seriously. And you can go back and you can look at the news. I mean, lots of daytime talk shows were covering this stuff, but so was CNN, so was 60 Minutes, so was PBS, the New York Times, and Washington Post.

Skye: It was, as I recall, just kind of assumed that yeah, there are satanists and they are up to no good and they're doing awful things. The scale might be debated, but nobody was really questioning whether or not it was real. 

Mike: The other thing I always say is that if you were a child of the 80’s, if you were an evangelical child of the 80’s in particular, your mom was nervous about everything from The Smurfs to the Magic Eight Ball, to Dungeons and Dragons to the Gummy Bears TV show on Saturday mornings. Anything that had anything to do with magic, there was this anxiety, there was this paranoia that this stuff was going to seep in, get under your subconscious, and essentially the entertainment itself was going to groom you. So, when the cabal came knocking at the door, you were ready to sign up or whatever. 

Skye: Mike Warnke is one of the guys that you highlight. People you would label as hucksters utilize this trend to scare a lot of people and make a lot of money. 

Mike: Yeah. So Warnke first arrives on the scene in 1970. I think his first real ministry experience was around 1971 or 1972 and culturally he comes out of the Jesus People Movement. He's attached to some charismatic, revivalist, evangelist types in Southern California, and he's got this wild testimony about how he was involved in the Church of Satan and he had a radical conversion. 

I believe it was 1973, he publishes his memoir, which is called The Satan-seller, in which he talks about how significant it was. You know, he was a high priest in the Church of Satan, he had sex slaves, he was a drug dealer. He was involved in all this conspiratorial stuff and involved in child sacrifice and witnessing all this horrible stuff. He puts the book out and the book does okay. 

But when he really explodes is actually 1976. In 1976, he puts out his first comedy album and the thing you gotta understand about Warnke, he looks kinda like Gallagher, he's got this goofy look about him. He wears these Coke bottle glasses, he's got the mullet, he dresses funky, and you know he shares this crazy testimony, and he's not a great standup comedian, but he is a compelling character and he gets a crowd going. What he does, if you listen to the albums, is this interesting thing where he oscillates between this very vulnerable testimony of, “Man, Jesus can love me,” and this radical testimony of the horrible things he saw and did as a Satanist, then the comedy, the jokes, the funny stories, the things about his parents, the things about growing up. He knew how to work the angles. 

So he sold, he was the bestselling spoken word artist for Word Records in the period that he was out there, sold millions of records, and an unbelievable number of tickets. And then, outside of the Christian subculture, he was a guy who would show up on Larry King whenever Satanism was in the news. He would show up on talk shows. Oprah had him on, Donahue had him on, he was a prominent cultural figure and treated as an expert on Satanism in the United States.

Skye: So he's kind of an evangelist for warning people about the reality and dangers of Satanism. 

Mike: Exactly. Then in 1993, two journalists, Mike Hertenstein and John Trott, got a note from their editor at Cornerstone Magazine that said, “Hey, maybe it's time to look into the Warnke story,” because there had been rumors for years.

Skye: After 20 years, they're finally looking into the story. 

Mike: Yeah. There had been rumors for a long time about his relationships with women, things happening on the road, alcohol consumption, all these things that were just like, “What's really going on?”

He was raising all this money for this center for recovering Satanists in Wilmore, Kentucky and they look into it. The story they published basically goes, “When it comes to evidence for him ever having been involved in Satanism whatsoever, we think maybe he played with a Ouija board once his freshman year of college. And that's about as much as we've got.” I mean, I'm not exaggerating, aside from that there's basically no one who knew him at the time that would have ever said he was a Satanist. 

Skye: That leads me to another level of this whole thing that we need to talk about. Someone like that comes along with this crazy story that, for whatever reason, took 20 years for anybody to really investigate and look into. I have to think it's because as he went about telling this story, there were thousands, millions of people who simply wanted it to be true.

There was something about these stories, not just his, about all the Satanism, about the child abduction stories, the abuse, the cultic kind of stuff. Why do you think so many people in the church wanted these stories to be true? To the point where they never even really investigated whether they were. What was it offering to people or supplying to people that they were just ready to gobble up? 

Mike: What I think it actually boils down to is that what a moral panic actually does is provide a pressure release for our anxieties. So, a parallel story to all of this is that there was, there was a faux pas on talking about child abuse for most of western history until the 1960s. And then, in the 1960s, 1970s, there became this awareness of, “Oh, there's this thing where kids are abused in homes and they're abused by their parents.” 

And then in the 1980s you start to find that because it becomes acceptable to talk about domestic abuse, and to talk about child abuse the discussions about sexual abuse really start to begin then for the first time. There's not a lot of discussion of child sexual abuse before then as a prominent phenomenon. And now, these days we know that this happens a lot. So, if you put yourself in the place of people in positions of power and influence, Christian leaders in positions of power and influence, and you start hearing the zeitgeist is changing and you're hearing more about child sexual abuse than you've ever heard before in your life, what's easier to believe with your own conscience? Is it easier to believe that one in eight of the people in your pews or families in your pews are experiencing some or have experienced some kind of sexual abuse in the home? Or is it easier to believe, “No, it's an externalized problem. There's a cabal of Satanists. It's happening out there, and they are out to get your kids, and we have to figure out how to declare war on them and protect our kids.” 

I think it's actually comforting in a very weird, convoluted way to be able to say that the problems and the predatory behavior that's coming after our children is this evil cabal of Satanists that want to sacrifice cats and drink their blood, and torture our children while they're at it. Rather than the much more uncomfortable thing, which is, most sexual abuse in the home happens because of stepfathers and stepbrothers and it's often somebody whose neighbors would've said, “Oh, I never would've suspected it, he was a nice guy.” 

Skye: I mean, you open the whole series with an examination of Josh Duggar from the famous Duggar Family in Arkansas and you look at Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson and the SBC, and in all these stories we discover later there was sexual abuse going on. These are communities or churches or families that made a big deal out of presenting the big bad culture. The evil that's out there is out to get us, all the while the real evil was inside their own tent, but they weren't able to see it, or wouldn't acknowledge it because they had an us versus them framing.