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- [00:00]
Advertiser 1
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Advertiser 1
But first, There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [00:32]
Host (Dan Snow)
This episode is brought to you by Perc, the intelligent platform for travel and spend Made to free up time and cut down costs, Perc removes the time sucking friction filled tasks that slow teams down and burn them out so you can focus on the work you were actually hired to do. The projects and decisions that move a business forward, not the endless admin of booking trips, chasing receipts or wrangling travel policies. As someone constantly spinning a bunch of plates on my job, PERC helps me gain back all important time to work on what really matters. Researching American history for you, our listeners. With perc, you can forget about spending time digging up that hotel dinner receipt from last quarter or trying to book a work trip across 100 open tabs. Perc has you covered. No more tedious tasks that eat away your day. Perk powering real work. Discover perc@perc.com AmericanHistoryHit in the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women and children, risking it all to start again in the new world. Every week on American Historytellers, host Lindsey Graham takes you through the moments that shaped America. In our latest episode, they explore the untold story of the Pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving. After landing at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims formed an unlikely alliance with the Wampanoag people. They helped them survive the most brutal winter they had ever known, laying the foundation for a powerful national myth. But behind that story lies another one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who'd helped the Pilgrims survive. Follow American Historytellers on the Wondery app wherever you get your podcasts, you can binge all episodes of American history the Mayflower early and ad free right now on Wonder Plus. Quick note of warning. In this episode, there are several mentions of child abuse and the occult. Oh, it's dark down here, isn't it? No, no, don't light a match. We have to be careful. Quiet here. Come close. Just wait for your eyes to adjust. I know it's dank down here. You get the shivers, huh? Haven't been in this place for years. Just move slowly. Keep your hands on the wall. It's just a short distance down this passageway and.
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Advertiser 3 (Ryan Reynolds)
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Host (Dan Snow)
Yeah, feel it. This is the Turn the hallway. Follow me. Hear the voices, Those sounds And that light. The crack under the door. They've already begun. Just let me open it up a bit and. Hey, who's there? Well, nothing like the dark arts to brighten up your day. A meeting of Satanists. Why not pull up a chair? Everyone's welcome. Good day and blessings. Welcome to American history hit. I'm Don Wildman, and today we speak of the devil. Or rather a time in America not too long ago when, according to so many, the devil had made himself manifest. From the 1960s into the 80s, as cultural and political forces around the country seismically shifted and once trusted norms were challenged, it became evident to millions that this was the work of Satan himself. Triggered by events that we'll discuss in a moment, a panic took hold. A Satanic panic was the term popularized that pinned what was going on with America on He whose name ought not be spoken, but my guest today can and should be spoken of. Dr. Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University and has written several books on new religious movements and religious history. He currently serves on the programming committee for the American Academy of Religion. My word, it's a resume to make Cotton Mather blush. Welcome, Joseph Laycock.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Thanks so much for having me.
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Host (Dan Snow)
This event, this panic we will discuss, happens in the 1980s. But fair to say what this is all about is dated back before then. Yes.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah. And historians always like to debate, you know, when were the first seeds of this panic. So some people have even looked at Pulp fiction in the 1920s and the writings of people like H.P. lovecraft suggesting that their are secret cults hiding in plain sights. But most historians would say this really begins with the film Rosemary's Baby in 1968. And what's significant about the film Rosemary's Baby? Well, first of all, it won an Oscar for best Female Actress in a supporting role. So it showed people horror movies are actually important. But the Satanists in that film do not wear black cloaks. They don't meet in dark forests.
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Host (Dan Snow)
They don't.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
They're literally your neighbors. And they appear like kind of the nicest people that you could ever meet. So I really think that that film did a lot to help people imagine that their neighbor or their doctor, as in the film, could secretly be part of a satanic conspiracy.
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Host (Dan Snow)
Yikes.
- [05:57]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
And then the following year, Roman Polanski, the director, his wife was murdered by the Manson family. And the producer of this film was William Castle. Previous to this, William Castle had been known for doing things like Making corny horror movies where there's a woman dress, a nurse who makes you sign a waiver, you know, and tells you this is so scary, you might have a heart attack. So when the Manson family murders his director's wife, he sees dollar signs and he says, wow, I thought that this was just a movie, but maybe this is all real.
- [06:29]
Host (Dan Snow)
Wow.
- [06:30]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
And now, you know, if you make a horror movie today, you basically have to say, oh yeah, this movie is cursed. And we had accidents on the set and so forth. The other thing that happens in the 60s is Anton Lavey founds the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966, which at the time was pretty popular, was not really scaring people. And folks like Sammy Davis Jr. Were in the Church of Satan because they said, this is where the best parties are, right? There's good booze and naked women on altars. And this is a really fun time. So in my research, I found that by 1970, the John Birch Society had already put the dots together and they said Charles Manson and Roman Polanski and Anton lavey are all part of this massive conspiracy. And other than communism, this is the biggest threat to America today. So that's kind of, I think, kind of a good birth certificate for the satanic panic. And from there it kind of gains momentum until it really hits full blast in the 1980s.
- [07:31]
Host (Dan Snow)
Yeah, I mean, and let's not forget the Rolling Stones were really into it. They used it too, to their own ends and got very satanic with their music in the 60s.
- [07:39]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah, and you had Black Sabbath and you had Coven. And Coven actually did an album called Witchcraft Breaks Minds and Reaps Souls or something like that in the 60s. And then they went on to be kind of more of a mainstream folk band. And they said, well, our record company told us to do something satanic, so there was an idea of Rosemary's Baby did so well, let's pump out more Satanism culture. But eventually it really spooked people.
- [08:03]
Host (Dan Snow)
And I was alive at the time, I was a young kid. But I mean, I remember it was seen as a commercialization Satan, it wasn't taken as seriously as all that, especially with the Exorcist coming out. We all had fun with that and it was all part of this. But it's important to put all of that media against the backdrop of the women's liberation movement, free love, whatever you want to say about the 60s. And not to mention anti war and all the kinds the, like I said, the norms being challenged in very, very explosive fashion. The Nuclear family is being sort of left behind as women go back to work. And all of this was an economic recession time. The 70s, you know, was a fertile ground for people to look for something to blame, you know, other than economic factors and politics. And the devil is there for many to be the source of all of this handiwork. The panic that we're talking about arises in the 1980s. So let's talk about how that happens and what triggers that one.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Sure. So in 1980, we get this term for the first time called satanic ritual abuse. And how that term came to be goes back to a book called Michelle Remembers, which was written by a psychiatrist in Canada named Lawrence Pazder. Lawrence Pazder watched the film Sybil, which came on Television in 1976. Sybil is about this case with this woman who was identified as having 16 split personalities as a result of trauma. And this has kind of been debunked by modern researchers who have said this seems to be more of someone making a kind of performance for their psychiatrist. But it was made into a book and then a movie. And Lawrence Pasner watches this and says, wow, I think I have a patient who is just like this who has had her mind sort of fractured by trauma. And his patient, Michelle, begins to kind of unfold this kind of performance where she is regressing to the age of five. They didn't call it hypnosis. They called it being in the deeps. But she is regressing to the age of five. And she is recalling how her mother was a Satanist who kept her locked in a basement for something like 14 months. And if you actually read Michelle Remembers, the things that they are describing is literally unbelievable. It's things like they grafted horns to my head with surgery, and they grafted a tail to me. And at the end of this, there is literally a portal to hell opens. And at the last second, the Virgin Mary appears and saves Michelle and removes all the scars from all this torture. So there's no physical evidence of any of this. And throughout these hours and hours and hours of therapy, they are sort of forming a romantic bond. And at one point, they figured out, you know, it's easier for her to remember if we get on the floor of my office and cuddle, that helps us remember. And so they end up divorcing their spouses and marrying each other.
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Host (Dan Snow)
Oh, my goodness.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
But the book is a bestseller. It's put out by the same editor who did Jaws. So he really sees the potential of this. And then in 1980, Lawrence Pasur goes to the American Psychiatric association and says, I've coined this new term, ritual abuse. There are these Satanists living among us. They hide in plain sight and they torture children for the purpose of fracturing their minds so that they get a split personality. And then this alternate personality becomes an agent of the cult. And this torture is so terrible that you can't even remember that it happened. So you could be a victim of satanic ritual abuse and not even know it. So now people are taking this very seriously, and lots of people are going to therapy. And within a few years of this term being coined, satanic ritual abuse, you have experts saying, I'm a specialist in satanic ritual abuse, and I can train therapists how to ask the right questions to young children, and I can train police departments about how to detect this and so forth. And so this sets the stage for the McMartin preschool trial, which is one of the kind of watershed moments of the panic.
- [12:04]
Host (Dan Snow)
Exactly. You know, it's amazing to age and become, you know, part of history, but I do. I am old enough to look back and realize that I've lived through a phase of American society when everybody did the same things at the same time. You know, we only had a certain amount, amount of channels to watch. And so when Sybil came on, I remember Sally Field playing that role. The idea of split personality just fascinated us. And so everybody talked about it at the playgrounds or wherever it was, halls of schools. It became a much. It was a lot easier back then to establish these movements growing out of media. There wasn't as much distrust of it at the time. You know, we kind of took it for what it was. I hasten to say I was raised by parents who reminded me that this was, you know, they're making money off of this, don't worry. So there was a certain amount of objectivity involved, but when this happens, Oprah Winfrey even interviews Michelle. And it really gets up there up the chain of big time stuff in media. When did her memories become. I mean, eventually she's questioned, right?
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
So one thing in the book, she says she's an only child. She wasn't an only child. She had two sisters. Her mother had died, but her sisters immediately said none of this happened. Her father had this really heartbreaking statement where he said, it took me two months to get through this book. And I cried through every page because how can anybody say this about their own mother? But the biggest smoking gun is they found Michelle's elementary school yearbook. And she's very explicit about the dates in which she was locked in a basement being tortured by Satanists. And so we have a photo of her at school, you know, not in a basement, looking very, very, very healthy. So this story completely falls apart, and almost nothing from it could be verified. And Lawrence Pazur fell back to this position of, well, it doesn't matter if the story is literally true, because it's important to my patient. And so it's important to my patient's health that we treat this story as true. I might be open to that argument, except that you are literally accusing people of crimes, right? You're literally saying, these crimes have been committed and we need law enforcement to go track these people down. That's very different from subjective claims that really only apply to you.
- [14:18]
Host (Dan Snow)
There were a lot of things that were very important. She said rituals took place in a cemetery in Victoria, Canada, in the 1950s. No residents ever reported anything like that. You would think someone would have said something to the police. She also said that priests in this cult had to cut off a finger. And no one in Victoria remembered anything about people walking around with missing digits. So is she written off at this point? I mean, are we done with Michelle after this scrutiny?
- [14:44]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
It's amazing to me, because when I read the book, I just couldn't believe anybody ever took this seriously. But I think most people purchased the book and maybe read the first 20 pages or so and certainly never made it to this conclusion. So I don't think people take this as seriously as they used to. The publisher, when it was written, said, yeah, I don't know. It's probably not true. You make what you want out of it, right? That's not my job. What struck me was how many tropes in this book seemed derivative of horror movies. So she says, they blocked me in this big statue. Well, that's the Wicker man from 1973. She says they took dead bodies and they stitched them together and they used electricity to make them move. Well, that's Frankenstein. She says the cult brought in this one woman and her head spun around funny, and lots of green stuff came out of her mouth. Well, that's the Exorcist. And what I think is happening is that she is kind of infatuated with her psychiatrist, or she wants to please her psychiatrist. We know Lawrence Pazur was interested in things like witchcraft and Satanism for a long time. And so she's kind of like Scheherazade. She can keep his attention as long as she keeps saying these terrible, terrible things. And she's kind of Watching, you know, horror movies or other kind of pop culture and using that to spin this tale.
- [16:01]
Host (Dan Snow)
Well, lest we write her off, she melds into other social phenomena at the time. And you brought this up. In Manhattan Beach, California, near Los Angeles, there is an event in keeping with this growing movement, or so people believe. 1983, an employee at a preschool in Manhattan beach is accused of abuse of a boy. Take it from there.
- [16:18]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah. So the kind of patient zero in this case, I believe her name was Judy Johnson. Single mother. She needs daycare. And so a part of what's happening during a satanic panic is the country has shifted from being one income being a norm to being two incomes being a norm, which means everybody, like it or not, now needs daycare. She drops her child off at the McMartin Preschool. Child was not enrolled there. And basically just with a note that says, please watch my baby, right? And this is a family owned business. And they figure, okay, well, we can't just leave this child in the street. So the child becomes a pupil at the McMartin preschool trial. He comes home, he has a rash on his butt. Now this is a three year old. So the kind of typical explanation is three year olds are not very hygienic. That's probably why there's a rash. But Judy Johnson believes that her child has been sodomized. And she calls the police. The police take this very seriously, as they should. And there's only one male employee. So suspicion falls on this person, Raymond Buckey. But then they say, well, if he molested one child, he may have molested lots of children. And so their decision is to send a letter to every parent and everyone who's ever had a child at McMartin and say, Ask your child about the following things. And the list includes things like bondage and pornography and all sorts of things that four and five year old children have kind of no capacity to really even understand the question. And of course, the parents have no training with how to talk about this. So they end up arresting the entire McMartin family with something like three hundred and fifty counts of child abuse. And as the case goes on, this was the longest case in American history at the time. It went on for seven years. The claims get more and more outrageous. So pretty soon they're saying, well, the McMartinis are Satanists. There are tunnels underneath the preschool. Some of the kids said that they flush you down the toilet and that's how you get into these subterranean tunnels. That they were taken to cemeteries, that they were taken for rides in Airplanes and hot air balloons and so forth. And what's happening is you now have this specialized group of therapists who say that they have techniques to talk to children about these things. And they're saying things like, you know, here's a stuffed animal. Tell your yucky secrets in the phone to the stuffed animal. And we now think that a lot of the children did not understand that they were testifying about crimes in a criminal case, that they thought this was just sort of a game of make believe, that they were playing with a friendly therapist. So eventually the case completely collapses. After seven years, they have not found any type of physical evidence. The stories are incoherent. They kept hoping, if there is something like a child pornography ring here, we will eventually find a photo, a video, something, and eventually it falls apart. And the. The McMartins. The case is dismissed. The McMartins are free to go. But this completely destroyed them. And a vigilante burned down their preschool while all this was going on. So they never really recovered financially. And then even after this was over, there were lots of people who insisted, well, the Satanists got away with it, right? They managed to trick the court system, but they refused to accept the finding that actually no crime was committed here.
- [19:46]
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- [22:32]
Host (Dan Snow)
So at the time, was the media creating the panic? Were the words Satanic panic being used?
- [22:38]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
The word Satanic panic were not used until there was kind of a realization that none of this was real. Right. This was a moral panic. But in the 80s, they eliminated what was called the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine ruled that if you're going to talk about controversial issues, you have to cover both sides of it. And when that was removed, that set the stage for shows like Geraldo Rivera, which were a major vector through which the panic came out. So in 1988, Geraldo did a special called Satanism Exposing Satan's Underground. And you can go watch this now on YouTube, which was after the McMartin preschool trial was over, but still kind of framed it as this is still a thing. We don't know whether these people were Satanists or not. And kind of mashes together sort of heavy metal music and crimes by figures like David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam and Charles Manson. And it's really a masterclass in kind of editing and using music and collages of images to really make people feel like we are a nation under Siege. And in 2009, I was on Geraldo and I had lunch with the producer who made this special and he said our ratings were so good, we got the best ratings ever and didn't really seem to have any pangs of conscience that he scared the heck out of everybody and made lots of parents think that their kids were being tortured in daycare.
- [23:58]
Host (Dan Snow)
Well, it becomes that phrase, the tail that wags the dog, which is usually applied to politics, but it's a time when. And you're exactly right to tag it to that event because that's really what happens to politics as well, when there's no fairness left in the media, or at least the media isn't required to account for itself. You end up with the public being pulled in various ways, you know, by this stuff they watch at night. It's amazing. And then commercialized efforts in the music industry and so forth to take advantage of these. I mean, love them or leave them. Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne was part of this. They're just making money and they're having fun. You know, it's just an outlet. And yet it all gets sort of melded together and becomes this crazy stuff. May 1985. There's a 2020 news program with Hugh Downs, who couldn't be the more trusted person. I grew up with him on the Today show. Hugh Downs opens this by saying, people have been skeptical when investigating these acts, just as we are in reporting them. But there is no question that something is going on out there and there is sufficient reason for 2020 to look into it. I mean, God, okay, I believe you. It's, you know, you might as well tell me ghosts are real. It's like that kind of thing. And it all becomes part of this media that, frankly, we still live with. That's how it is.
- [25:11]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah, absolutely. And what I recall about the 2020 special was they showed Rosemary's Baby because that's what they had to show. And then they said, but there are real Satanists out there who are just like what you saw in this fictionalized movie.
- [25:24]
Host (Dan Snow)
To be fair, he was probably talking about the fact that there were these organizations and there were people who were practicing these things. There are today still people practicing these worships and so forth, and yet there just weren't lines drawn. And so in comes this panicky feeling. Can we define this more than just a media driven hysteria, or is that really it?
- [25:45]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
The media unquestionably had a huge role in this. But sociologists ask, why did this happen when it did? What was happening in the 80s to fuel this? And there's a number of different answers. And one of the things about sociological theories is you can't really prove or disprove them empirically. They either kind of fit or they don't. But one theory is that this economic change to a two income household meant that you had to rely on daycare providers whether you wanted to or not. And not just daycare providers, but bus drivers and, you know, after school activity instructors. So parents required this whole kind of orchestra of people dealing with their kid. And so it felt like there was this conspiracy to undermine the moral authority of the family. Scholar David Bromley said claims of a satanic conspiracy theory were metaphorically true, even though they were empirically false. Right. This felt real. Another interpretation is that child abuse had kind of only been recently discovered by the 80s, because when they began X raying children, they realized that children had broken bones that had never been reported. And they gradually realized some people are violently hurting their children. And there was an effort to kind of give the government more power to intervene in this and to provide more daycare. Nixon didn't want this to happen. Right. And said, well, we can't give the government authority to go in and break up the family. So one theory is this was kind of a compromise. It was acknowledging that abuse is going on, but attributing the abuse to this totally fictional source. Right. Which is, yes, children are being abused, but they're being abused by sort of the worst people you could ever imagine, you know, not by family members with drinking problems or step parents or coaches or something like this. And then yet another factor is there was a strange alliance where you had conservative Christians who wanted to kind of stamp out the devil and rival religions. And then you had people in the helping professions who said, my goodness, people are being abused. What can I do to help them? And then you had feminists who were saying, you must always believe the victim. Right. You can't poke holes in the victim's story. And so you had kind of an unlikely political coalition advancing this satanic conspiracy theory that maybe you wouldn't see today.
- [28:09]
Host (Dan Snow)
Yeah. Joe, you've written books on religious movements in America. How much did this have to do with the rise of the fundamentalist? Right?
- [28:17]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah, well, this absolutely coincides with the rise of what's sometimes called the new Christian rights and the moral Majority. And so this was a great talking point. Right. And this was a great way to say not only do we have different views on the social order or gender dynamics or family dynamics, but we are actually in a war against the forces of cosmic evil, Right?
- [28:42]
Host (Dan Snow)
Yes, exactly.
- [28:42]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
And so you can disagree, but if you disagree, you are basically siding with the worst thing in the entire universe. So that was pretty compelling for a lot of people.
- [28:52]
Host (Dan Snow)
It's important to acknowledge the fact that this continues to be a fear and a source of anxiety in this country and in the world, and that's because evil is here. You know, we don't know what it is. We don't. Can't define it. You're looking for some source of these confusions. Why are people assassinated? Why are these, you know, social things happening that we don't understand? And. And I. I want to empathize with those who are, you know, perhaps going here to this place in looking for these answers. I understand why people feel this way. The problem is that it becomes so coupled with commercialism and manipulation in the media, and it all becomes of a piece, and that's where we end up talking about it on a podcast.
- [29:35]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah. One of my mentors, David Frankfurter, wrote a book called Evil Incarnate. And one thing he points out is this discourse of evil which you see in the Satanic panic is a kind of intellectual laziness. So our problems are very real, but the causes of those problems are very complicated and require a lot of thinking to figure out a reasonable solution. And so there is a temptation to just say, well, this is just evil. This is just a manifestation of evil with a capital E. And it can make people kind of feel good in the moment. But when you actually try to solve evil with a capital E, the result is usually witch hunting. Right. Let's go find someone and let's string them up or burn them at the stake, and then maybe we can get rid of the evil.
- [30:19]
Host (Dan Snow)
Yeah. And you end up convicting people by practices like dunking. If you didn't, you know, the way they used to dunk the witches in the. And to find out if they were not witches, you had to die. You know, I mean, this kind of thing, it's this backwards way of looking at things in a more convenient fashion. But this goes hand in hand with social unrest and fervor. That is, you know, dates back to the witch trials, like you say. I mean, the Salem witch trials were also a reaction to this new land where people were living in fear and a way of controlling people, challenging the norms. It's always this way. And they're looking for things to blame and to order with fear.
- [30:58]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
That's right. I think there's a misconception about witch hunting that this sort of peaked in the Dark Ages out of sort of scientific ignorance. And you see this in films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And the reality is there wasn't much witch hunting in the true Middle Ages, the golden age of Witch hunting came in the early modern era after the Protestant Reformation. And what sociologists think is that society in Europe at that time was just changing too fast. You had Protestants and Catholics fighting each other. The feudal order was sort of giving way to industrialization and the rise of a merchant class and so on. And the theory is that just when society changes too fast, people start accusing their neighbors of being in some sort of evil conspiracy. And so it's interesting to look at the witch trials in Europe that way and look at the kinds of things that are happening in America.
- [31:50]
Host (Dan Snow)
The ugliest part of this is the child abuse accusations and the fact that that has become such a go to place even today.
- [31:58]
Dr. Joseph Laycock
And this is another constant that David Frankfurter points out. So the Satanists were supposed to murder children. There are dead babies absolutely everywhere. And Michelle remembers I every page. But prior to this, Jews were accused of killing babies for the blood libel. Witches were said to sacrifice babies. And then going back to Roman times, Christians were said to murder babies as part of their initiation rituals to let people in as Christians. So it seems that in some ways we are kind of hardwired to tell the same story over and over again for thousands of years that there are these people walking amongst us. They look like nice people, but actually they're doing the most horrible things that we can imagine, which is always basically incest and killing babies. It's those two things over and over and over again. And David Frankfurter has suggested that this is kind of how we reassure ourselves that we are the good guys and that the way that we have ordered society is the way that society must be ordered. Because otherwise how could we have such nightmarish enemies.
- [33:09]
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- [33:40]
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- [34:02]
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Host (Dan Snow)
Satan himself. The character of Satan is a creation. You know, it's. You could even go so far as to say comic book creation. It's a developed idea that this is an actual being, an entity. When are we going to be able to exercise ourselves from that idea that there is this creature among us with hooves and a tail and all that stuff, when in fact, mankind created that?
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
I don't think ever. Yeah, as a religion scholar, I don't think ever. You know, Baylor did a religion survey. They do a big religion survey. And some of the questions they asked were things like, do you believe in the devil? Do you believe it's possible to be demonically possessed? Do you believe in the Antichrist? And if you said yes, they added all these up and they gave you an evil score. Right. For how much you believe in evil. And unsurprisingly, the correlations indicated that if you were from a low income background and had low education, you were going to have a much higher evil score. Right. So what this suggests is that people who have been kind of left behind by society are the ones who are going to be more likely to see their problems and to see the world in terms of battle against the cosmic forces of evil. So you're asking, when are we going to get rid of the devil? I think when we no longer have such a stratified, unjust society.
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Host (Dan Snow)
And the need for a convenient answer is really always what it's about. Joe, My mind immediately goes to these fantasy role playing games. Dungeons and Dragons, the work of Satan, I suppose, right?
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Yeah. I wrote an entire book about how the panic approached Dungeons and Dragons. This was a game that was invented in 1974, so right in time for the panic. And today Dungeons and Dragons is actually very popular. And you can go on YouTube and you can watch attractive celebrities played Dungeons and Dragons. But in the 1970s, the game was quite different. There was a lot of math and it was kind of incomprehensible. And all people could understand was that first college kids and then increasingly younger kids were sort of sitting in basements for hours with these tables with all these numbers and so forth. And it's a role playing game, so you don't win the game. It just kind of goes on and on forever. And parents could not understand that. But the pictures on these books were very scary. And they showed, you know, big red demons battling heroes and wizards standing in pentagrams and things like this, right? And so very quickly this became a major focus of the Panic. And that's because there were two young men who committed suicide. One in the 70s and then one in the 80s. And various actors said, well, the reason that they committed suicide was because this game destroyed their mind. They got sort of lost in the fantasy. One of these cases was eventually became the subject of a novel called Mazes and Monsters, which was then a made for TV movie starring Tom Hanks, which I'm sure Tom Hanks would like us all to forget about. But you can go on YouTube and you can watch Tom Hanks wandering around the New York subway imagining that he's in a dungeon or something like this. And so the claim was that this game was actually created by Satanists to indoctrinate children into magic and the occult. And that, you know, first you start playing the game and then you start actually casting spells and summoning the devil, and then finally you commit suicide. And there was a national campaign to put a warning on the game, like they do with tobacco products, saying, you know, this game leads to madness and suicide. And eventually people who were actual criminals who had actually committed murder and so forth were using what's called the Dungeons and Dragons defense and say, I didn't know what I was doing, right? I was totally manipulated by this game. A group form called Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons modeling themselves after Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The irony of all of this is that the creators of the game were devout Christians. And so the reason that you could fight demons and succubi and things like that in it was because they were drawing on their own religious backgrounds. You know, that's why there were these sort of weird connections to religion and especially to Christianity. So Stanley Cohen, who wrote a book called Folk Devils and Moral Panic, said, for a really good moral panic, what you need is an opponent who can't fight back. And so partly what was going on here was that the, what I call the moral entrepreneurs, the people selling the Satanic Threat, had realized, I have these books with really scary covers, and the people who are reading them are mostly kids who have zero platform to counter any of the wild claims that I am making. And so we really got into a big panic over Dungeons and Dragons due to those factors. And you see this commemorated in shows like Stranger Things. The most recent episode depicts the Satanic panic targeting the local D and D club, which is pretty realistic for the time period that that show is depicting.
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Host (Dan Snow)
It's real. I mean, it comes and goes, but it's not going Anywhere. And we're going to have another satanic panic soon enough. You know, it's going to come up at some point because ultimately we're dealing with the big mystery of where do we come from and who are we really and where do we sit in this universe? And all the same questions that religion seeks to ask are addressed in an opposite sort of way with where's evil come from? And human beings are only capable of so much, you know, in their. In their thinking. And we only have so much time in our day. So to chalk it up to one simple fact gets us along the way, I suppose. Do we see this diminishing at least? I mean, as science takes over and we seem to be moving the needle towards understanding things more rationally?
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Unfortunately, I don't think so. I mean, what we've seen is police and courts are now much more skeptical of these claims, right? So when the FBI first began hearing reports of satanic panic, they took it very seriously and they did a report and they concluded, we don't think that there's anything here, right, that child pornography rings are a huge problem, child abuse is a huge problem. But to discuss Satanism like this seems to be a distraction, right? We're not interested in the religion of the people committing the crimes. We're interested in the evidence. So you can't just say, my daycare provider is a Satanist and get the same kind of traction that you could in the 80s. But we have lots of studies that show that juries, for example, still completely believe in satanic conspiracy theories. And if you tell a jury that a defendant is a Satanist, they are much more likely to convict. They have even done experiments with mocked juries, and they found that even saying the defendant is rumored to be a Satanist is much more likely to get a conviction. And So I see QAnon as a direct continuation of the satanic panic. The difference is that it is weaponized politically in a way that the 1980s panic was not. So you have operators who have really figured out we can really manipulate this conspiracy theory. We can recruit a digital army and we can affect the outcome of elections with this. Right? We can really do things. And Russia, who's been trying to justify their war in Ukraine, has said, well, why are we invading Ukraine? Well, because they're Satanists, right? We're doing this to combat the Satanists. And they've now started outlawing Satanism in Russia. And there really aren't Satanists in Russia. But they can arrest people for any number of things and say that they are Satanists. So this is still an active force in our world, but I think that politicians with questionable motives have kind of taken the reins of the panic and are trying to see what kind of mileage they can get out of it now.
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Host (Dan Snow)
Gosh, it's all about objectivity, isn't it? And for more objectivity, you can study this good man's work. Dr. Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, has a resume going all the way back, and he currently serves on the programming committee for the American Academy of Religion. Where can people follow your work?
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
Joe I have a pretty unusual name. Joseph Laycock L A Y C O C K. If you type that into Google, you'll find my website right away. And I'm also on Amazon.com and you can find all of my books there. There.
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Host (Dan Snow)
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.
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Dr. Joseph Laycock
It's been a pleasure.
- [42:35]
Host (Dan Snow)
Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts? American History Hit A podcast from History.
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