Search for "satanic panic"

Hail Santa! War-on-Christmas Outrage Over Satanic Tree Reveals the Self-Serving Ambiguity of ‘Religion’

By Joseph Laycock

…contradictions were always there. What’s significant about groups like The Satanic Temple is that their provocations draw these contradictory claims to the surface. The Satanic tree features an upside-down cross ornament, but it’s largely playful. Any harm caused by the displays at the “Festival of Trees” is subjective. For example, a tree covered in hardware and a Lego tree went unnoticed, while Bill Donohue took offense at an ornament on the “ge…

The Two Mythologies Behind True Detective Come Crashing Down in Finale

By Joseph Laycock

…ligion scholar Philip Jenkins has suggested these two sources—contemporary Satanic Panic and the “weird tales” of pulp horror—are connected. He suggests that it was the weird tales authors of the 1920s, notably Lovecraft and Herbert Gorman, who first introduced the idea of secret, murderous cults into the American consciousness. These authors combined the fascination for “superstitious rural folk” among America’s newly urbanized population with Ma…

Should Satanic Temple Have Threatened Netflix Over Baphomet Statue in ‘Sabrina’ Series?

By Joseph Laycock

…escribe a pattern in which “people think the know enough about others to make decisions about how to treat them, but that familiarity is based in ignorance.” In other words, producers looking for Satanic images online likely assumed the Satanic Temple were “just trolls” or otherwise not a “real” organization with the same rights and concerns as everyone else….

Satanic Temple’s IRS Recognition Rekindles Fierce Debate Over What Is ‘Really Real’ Church

By Joseph Laycock

…it didn’t help that in the 1970s a CoS member named Martin Lamers opened a Satanic “abbey” in Amsterdam’s red-light district where visitors paid to watch “Satanic nuns” perform sex acts. Lamers argued that his abbey was tax-exempt because the sex acts were religious services and the payments were donations. LaVey considered revoking Lamers’s charter over his claim to be tax-exempt. In 1987, after a decade of police raids and legal battles, the abb…

Satanic “Black Mass” at Harvard Excites Conservatives

By Joseph Laycock

…e of propinquity with extraordinary evil. For Christian claims-makers, The Satanic Temple’s educational re-enactment of a black mass is even more useful than Warnke’s witchmobile: It provides physical evidence of the reality of demonic evil and, in turn, affirms their own sense of a divine order. But while the Satanic Temple and the claims-makers may be looking at the same script, there are likely some surprises in store. It will be interesting to…

My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

By Joseph Laycock

…There are two parts to this book. The first part tells the history of the panic from the origins of the fantasy role-playing game in the 1960s until 2001. (The panic never fully died, but 9/11 and the War on Terror gave Americans a much more tangible focus for their fears.) In telling this history I found a lot of information that most gamers never knew about. The full extent of the panic is simultaneously fascinating, frightening, and tragic. Fo…

What the Hail: Satanists Got Busy in 2018

By Joseph Laycock

…a mindless tool for theocratic interests originating outside of Arkansas.” Satanic San Francisco (now Satanic Bay Area)–a group allied with, but separate from, TST–mailed “acceptance letters” to the members of congress who accept the most money from the NRA. The letters were signed by the “Demon of Admissions.” They congratulated the representatives on their misdeeds and granted them admission to the ninth circle of hell. At Central Michigan Unive…

Satanists Take Aim at School Spanking

By Joseph Laycock

…ut this is the first billboard of the Protect Children Project. During the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Satanists were falsely accused of abusing children. Now The Satanic Temple is able to claim the moral high ground over their conservative Christian opponents, some of whom have responded by alluding to Proverbs 13:24, “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Springtown was chosen because of a 2012 incident in which a male assistant principal pa…

Will the US Naval Academy Grant The Satanic Temple Equal Rites?

By Becky Garrison

…th a full Navy color guard in attendance, what was probably the first ever Satanic funeral in San Francisco for a sailor who had joined the Church of Satan. Granted, TST wasn’t founded until 2013, and they’ve posted the differences between the two satanic groups on their website, but it does, nevertheless, point to an instance where the U.S. Navy chose to honor a deceased solider even though they were a practicing satanist. In conducting research…

Satanists Infiltrate a Ritual Abuse Conference in Oakland: Your Guide to What Happened and Why

By Joseph Laycock

…inwashing melded with the language of therapy and recovery, resulting in a panic over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA). SRA was inspired by the 1980 bestseller Michelle Remembers, an account of “repressed memories” that Michelle Smith recovered through hours of hypnosis therapy with her psychiatrist (and eventual husband) Lawrence Padzer. Smith “remembered” that her mother had been a Satanist who had tortured her for months in bizarre Satanic rituals…