Religion Dispatches
…ews, Gilmore and Greaves dismissed Barbour’s claims, diffusing some of the Satanic Panic. MARCH Fred Phelps died on March 19. Amid rumors that the anti-gay pastor was on his deathbed, Greaves announced plans to hold a ritual over his gravesite that would posthumously make Phelps gay. Last year, Greaves travelled to Mississippi and performed a similar “pink mass” over the grave of Phelps’s mother. Local police vowed to charge Greaves with grave des…
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…. RD recently spoke with La Carmina about the connection between QAnon and Satanic Panic, Satanists’ support for LGBTQ rights, and the Devil’s ever-deepening hoofprint on pop culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Satanism appears to be having a moment right now, not only in terms of religion, but also in pop culture and politics. Why do you think this is? I’d point to the rise of social media and the Internet, which facil…
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…nly go back to the 1980s in America and the U.K. Although the last popular panic about Satanic ritual abuse died down in the 1990s, the mythical image of children abducted, abused, and ceremonially sacrificed still has the power to inflame audiences. In 2016 one North Carolina believer was so enraged by the idea—spread on the internet—that children were being “ritually” abused and sacrificed beneath a popular Washington D.C. pizza parlor that he d…
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…disorder), repressed memories, and hypnosis. These theories were key to a panic in the 1980s over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” in which numerous people underwent therapy and became convinced that they had suffered abuse at the hands of Satanic cults. Some even came to believe that their minds harbored repressed “cult programming” and that they could be a danger to their own children when this programming was triggered. In 1995, a former patient sued Be…
Read More…democratic and religiously plural society. Greaves came of age during the Satanic Panic when a coalition of talk-show hosts, dubious psychotherapists, “cult cops,” and Christians interested in spiritual warfare sent America into hysteria over Satanic conspiracies that resulted in innocent people being prosecuted and imprisoned. Greaves initially assumed stories of criminal Satanists must have some basis in fact. He sought out self-identified Sata…
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…became a vector through which rumors of Satanic cults spread, fueling the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. As described in my book The Exorcist Effect, filming a live exorcism was a goal of network news media for two decades. Beginning in the 1960s, the secularization narrative—the belief that science will soon render religion obsolete—coincided with surging interest in the occult. In 1966, Time ran its famous “Is God Dead?” cover, which can be spotte…
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…ust erected comes from the fact that their replacement for the 80s and 90s Satanic Panic is transphobia (and CRT but we’ll leave that for another panic session). It’s almost as though these people, most of whom identify strongly as Christian, are unfamiliar with the numerous commands to love their neighbors as themselves. The world—science, art, humanity—is evolving (again let’s leave that word for another panic session too), but it’s changing at…
Read More…ically resulted in moral panic and the persecution of innocent people. The Satanic Panic that peaked in the 1980s and 1990s is constantly threatening to return. This week’s Time magazine recounted the story (headline: “New Jersey Police Suspect Cult Activity in Grave Robbing”) of a body taken from a mausoleum in Pleasantville, New Jersey. As police sometimes do when no motive is apparent, it suggested the crime might have been committed by a “cult…
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…us Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) laws must provide abortion on demand for Satanic women. Mandatory waiting periods or requirements such as reading anti-abortion literature, listening to fetal heartbeats, or viewing sonograms would violate the religious freedom of Satanic women by disrupting their sacred ritual. As Jane Essex, Spokesperson for TST’s Religious Reproductive Rights Campaign puts it, “It would be unconstitutional to require a waiting…
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…read phenomenon (like an outsider religious movement). The result is moral panic. We’re seeing evidence of this exact link in English-language news coverage of these murders. In court, Meraz claimed she had only been a follower of Santa Muerte for about two years; the beliefs of her group were not rooted in a larger tradition of devotion to Santa Muerte. Furthermore, everyone implicated in the murders is a member of the same family (one suspect is…
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