← Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
BONUS: Deep Dive with Mike Cosper: Q&A + Best of DDBS Live Streams
01:19:04
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- [00:02]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
This episode is brought to you in part by the Apologetics Guy show, the podcast that helps you find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity. Learn to explain your faith with courage and compassion. Join Moody Bible Institute Professor Dr. Michele Del Rosario@ apologeticsguy.com.
- [00:28]
Rebecca Sebastian
This is CT Media. A Note to listeners this story contains sensitive content, including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes. It may not be suitable for all listeners. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea team is on spring break, so we're hitting pause on the story this week to share something a little different. I'm Rebecca Sebastian, a producer on the show, and I sat down with the show creator, host and executive producer Mike Kosper to talk about where the series is headed, dive a little deeper into some specific themes and stories from the show, and to hear the significance behind our series title. You're also going to hear a curated mix of some of our favorite moments from our livestream events, which you can learn more about in the show. Notes Enjoy the conversation. We'll be back next week with episode six. Conspiracies are all you seem to think of Taking hold of me Run, run, run away from the reaper Join me But you spun around and you never hear it coming when you're covering Mike, how's it going today?
- [01:52]
Mike Kosper
Good. How about you?
- [01:54]
Rebecca Sebastian
Doing very well. I'm excited to sit down and kind of take a moment at this point in the season and maybe unpack some things, talk about where we're headed, and a little bit even about setting the stage around the theme of this series, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. There's been some questions like what does that mean? And is it because you're doing a series on the Satanic Panic? So maybe you could talk about where that title came from.
- [02:20]
Mike Kosper
It's a concept for a podcast that has been in my head for many, many years, and at one point I even went so far as to create a pilot for it back in the day. So it's an old sailing expression. On the big ships, the kinds that would make intercontinental journeys, there's a seam that essentially runs around the entire rim of the deck. There's braces above the seam and below the seam that hold the whole ship together. If you're on a long journey, one of the things that has to happen while you're on this journey at sea is that you have to repair this seam. You have to patch it, you have to tar it, you have to put whatever in there to hold it together because it takes a real beating from the ocean. So the seam was known as the devil. And part of the reason that they called it the devil is because if this thing fails, the ship is going to capsize and fall apart. To repair the devil, what a sailor had to do is literally hang upside down off of the deck of the ship with a bucket and a trowel and repair this thing. So getting caught between the devil and the deep blue sea was this experience of being precariously stuck between two dangers. Right. Like, you don't want to die, fall off the ship and fall into, you know, the deep ocean in the middle of nowhere and die. But you also don't want to leave this thing unrepaired and risk the entire ship capsizing as a result of it. So it just became this kind of cliched phrase, this. This reference that. This idea of having sort of twin dangers, and there's nothing to do but sort of face them both. And literally, for the person doing the work, face them both at the same, same time. I think there's a really interesting spiritual metaphor in this because, you know, Tim Keller used to always talk about how the twin temptations of the Christian life or the sort of mirror image temptations of the Christian life are syncretism and sectarianism. With syncretism, it's getting caught up in the narratives, the promises, the idols of the world. Sectarianism is this idea that, you know, because the world is a dangerous place, the Christian ought to withdraw from it, protect themselves from it, insulate themselves from it. And the gospel rejects both of those ideas. It's the whole idea of being in the world and not of the world. It's neither syncretistic or sectarian. So to me, it's a great metaphor for the idea of kind of faithful presence. It's also a great image to me of trying to cut through moments in our story, in the Christian story, you know, like this one that we're talking about on this podcast, where the church did get caught up in those stories. How do we discern what was happening there? And, you know, where were the authentic fears and temptations, and where, in name of doing good, did we do harm?
- [05:00]
Rebecca Sebastian
So it's sort of a more literary, higher stakes metaphor or expression than between a rock and a hard place.
- [05:08]
Mike Kosper
Right? Yeah.
- [05:09]
Rebecca Sebastian
And also it's a little more fluid. Like, I like your analogy. And in terms of the deep blue sea, I think that's where this really can transcend the theme we're talking about this season. Because the deep blue sea, I mean, endless symbolism there. Right. In terms of topics we can explore that Go beyond what we're talking about this season.
- [05:30]
Mike Kosper
Yeah. And I think part of what I like about the image as well is I think this gets at the idea of faithful presence. Right. The sailor that goes and hangs off the side of the ship to do that work. They're trying to maintain something, they're cultivating something, they're sustaining, something they're trying to repair. Even what's there. You know, when you're caught between a rock and the hard place, sometimes you just kind of find yourself there. No one finds themselves accidentally hanging off the side of a ship with a bucket. With a bucket and trowel. You. You go there, and you go there with a purpose. You go there to do good. You go there to preserve life, which is, you know, I think when you look at. Particularly when you look at Jesus, metaphors of the Christian being salt and light, like those metaphors are about being a source of life in dark times.
- [06:11]
Rebecca Sebastian
There's also not a lot of movement between a rock and a hard place. There's no give on either side. And you. You kind of feel or it suggests you're stuck or trapped. They're incredibly different in that way, too. Do you know, this is weird. And going maybe too deep into naval information, you don't have. But would the guy doing that, presumably a man, be, like, low on the tier of the crew? Because it feels like maybe you don't put your top guy doing that.
- [06:38]
Mike Kosper
So from what I understand, the better way to think about it is that it would be like the equivalent of on, like a naval vessel. Today you have the ship's engineer. Right.
- [06:47]
Rebecca Sebastian
Okay.
- [06:47]
Mike Kosper
It's a specialist. It's somebody who. Okay, somebody who's maintaining. And this is probably the guy who can fix everything on the ship because you're going to have to fix everything at sea. You know, sales. Sales tear, things rust, things break, whatever. Probably you need multiple highly skilled people that can do that kind of work. So my. Yeah, my guess is that's. That's probably the better way to think of it.
- [07:09]
Rebecca Sebastian
Okay, that's helpful. Okay. So Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, for people who have been wondering, is not only pertaining to this season on the Satanic Panic, but here we are starting with that theme, and we're taking this moment in the season. We're a little more than halfway done, and we kind of wanted to talk about where we've landed. And, you know, for anyone who maybe hasn't listened to the whole season yet, maybe go back and start at one and come forward, but maybe we could talk about where we left off, which was episode five, which was called Hell's Bells. And a big part of it focused on two men, Pressler and Patterson, Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson. We didn't even talk about the alliteration there. And, like, the strange, similar initials, talk about why they were so important to the episode and to the story at large.
- [07:58]
Mike Kosper
Like I said on the. On the show, like, if you grew up in the Southern Baptist church in the 80s and 90s, these guys were saints, they were icons, because the mythology of it was the Baptists had lost touch with the Bible. And these guys came in and they started a movement and they led a movement to bring the Bible back. Now, what's interesting about that is that by and large, SBC churches had not lost the Bible. And probably, by and large, a lot of the faculty at a lot of the seminaries and institutions, a lot of institutional leaders and all of that, they had not, quote, unquote, lost the Bible. You know, many of them would be sort of what the rest of the evangelical world, certainly what the rest of the sort of biblical scholar world would call, like, theological moderates. And they were moderating on things like gender roles in the church, literal interpretations of, you know, specific passages of the Bible they would say were figurative. There were definitely some liberals among them, because I think what had sort of liberalized was the idea that, you know, the seminary could make room for scholars whose views were outside the bounds of what SBC doctrine and orthodoxy might look like. But again, this movement was about sort of cleaning house on all of that stuff, getting much tighter alignment to a certain vision of orthodoxy and then redirecting the way money was spent and how those institutions ran.
- [09:22]
Rebecca Sebastian
And can you talk a bit about where this overlaps and touches elbows with the conservative resurgence and the political aspect of this time period? I mean, there's.
- [09:33]
Mike Kosper
Right.
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Rebecca Sebastian
They're so interconnected. And why was that important to make sure was included in a story about a moral panic?
- [09:41]
Mike Kosper
So, in particular, what's interesting about the conservative resurgence to me in this story is that I think there's no doubt that the energy around the resurgence benefited from the fact that this moral panic was going on in the background. If you didn't grow up in it, it's hard to even depict it for people just what a fever pitch there was about how dangerous rock music was and, you know, the evils of it and all the rest. I was looking at footage of some more recent stuff from pop culture, because pop culture always has a fascination with the devil. And so you you look at, like, what Lil Nas X has done recently or what some of Lady Gaga's stuff where she plays with this occult imagery. You can go down some Reddit rabbit holes about Taylor Swift and her stage designs and playing with pagan imagery and, you know, and some of the things that she does. I don't know how much of that's real, how much of that's just Reddit paranoia, but let's not get the Swifties upset.
- [10:40]
Rebecca Sebastian
This.
- [10:41]
Mike Kosper
Listen, I've, I've. I've always got the Swifties upset over on the bulletin, so. But I think that what was different about the 80s and 90s is there was such a reactivity around it. And I think that the reason you had that reactivity, it was a confluence of factors. You had these emergent ideas in psychology, emergent ideas about repressed memories and recovered memories. You had a heightened awareness around the very notion of child abuse. It was just something that wasn't discussed much before the 1970s. Child sexual abuse comes later. Right. Like a few years after that consciousness arises, you get the child sexual abuse consciousness that arises. And then you get to the rise of the Moral Majority and these efforts from, you know, the Jerry Falwells of the world to align evangelicals with Republican politics in a very, very strict way. I don't believe in monocausal explanations for anything, but I think that all of those things kind of worked together to help create the panic, to benefit the panic. And as we'll, as we'll see in an upcoming episode, to demonstrate how people who were more directly grifters really took advantage of the panic to enrich themselves.
- [11:59]
Rebecca Sebastian
Well, fear is a big motivator. Right. People respond out of fear and to fear. So that was leveraged big time. Let's talk about where we are going, because a lot of where we've been can be heard on the podcast and on the episodes. Tell us where we're headed in terms of these people being exposed. And, you know, without giving anything completely away, where do we end up? And also, can you talk a little bit about some of the earliest parts of the show, criminal justice and some trials, you know, the West Memphis Three. Are we going to be revisiting any of this? I mean, I'm asking.
- [12:40]
Mike Kosper
Yeah.
- [12:40]
Rebecca Sebastian
For the audience.
- [12:41]
Mike Kosper
Right, right, right. Yeah. Because I know, you know, we're really at kind of a tipping point in the whole story here. You know, the McMartin story really kicks off a lot of similar stories that erupt around the country. Famous trials. There's one in East Washington that Lawrence Wright wrote about. There's the one we mentioned in Austin, and there were dozens more that took place around the country, and a lot of those resulted in convictions until they didn't. There came a point where a different kind of scrutiny, a different kind of defense strategy. The psychological community had been crying foul all along, saying these techniques don't make any sense. Like, you're not doing what you think you're doing. You're actually coercing things out of these kids. And so part of what is to come in the storytelling is to look at, how did the fever break and what were the various factors that led to that? And then, of course, like, one of the biggest factors in the fever breaking was the story starting to unravel around some of the more famous figures.
- [13:46]
Rebecca Sebastian
I want to just pause on that. Stories around victims and recovered memory and, you know, did you have any fear or concern around approaching those stories when in a lot of these cases, things were discredited and proven not to be true in terms of messaging around believing victims, especially ones of sexual assault, women, children, any victims, like, how did you approach that? What were your concerns? And I think we'll probably tackle this again because it's so important. But is there anything you can talk about in terms of the way you approach that?
- [14:19]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, let me say up front, we're talking about doing a bonus episode where we really get into how do we think about allegations of abuse? How do we. How do we navigate that? I mean, this SBC story that we just told, you know, a big part of this SBC story was that victims were dismissed, you know, when they were making credible allegations, when they were making allegations where everybody knew what was happening, even, and people in positions of power were really believed. What we tried to get across when we covered McMartin is there are multiple reasons in that story to question its veracity, really, especially starting from the very beginning with the person who made the primary accusation, you know, what her motivation was and all of that. We don't know. There's some journalists out there who've done some work to kind of speculate what was going on there. We didn't want to get into all of that here. But then when you. When you get into the transcripts of what was going on in the interviews with those children, they're so coercive. I mean, it's. It's horrific to read. And that was part of what we wanted to try to get across, was the idea that these children were abused, but they weren't abused by Satanists in the basement of this church. They were abused by a psychological methodology that convince them things happened that never happened. Yeah, I mean, I think we're beneficiaries of that to a certain extent now in that those techniques aren't common anymore. People aren't doing that stuff anymore. Hypnotherapy is largely debunked anymore. I think that's a good thing. And there's a massive gap between what happened there and the normal pattern that we see in cases of abuse and assault with children. There's almost always physical evidence. You don't have to coerce claims. Children are clearly traumatized. There's just often a lot more going on than was taking place in these cases. And so, yeah, it's really complicated. Like I said, we want to do a bonus episode around some of this because the message is certainly not don't believe someone when they say abuse happened.
- [16:27]
Rebecca Sebastian
Exactly.
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Mike Kosper
The message is, in this case, in this story, understand where these accusations actually came from. Like, again, go back to McMartin. The children weren't the ones making the accusations. The parent made an accusation. The police then panicked. All the rest of the parents involved in the school, and then they hired a psychologist who came in and coerced stories out of children when children were not wanting to give stories like this. Yeah, that's the thing that's the most disturbing to me about all of this.
- [16:57]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, I think it's such an important thing to emphasize the introduction of these horrific ideas to children where they didn't previously exist is, like, should be criminal. I mean, it really is just so disturbing. But that's really helpful. And yes, we will address that at length in a future bonus episode. I have some questions for you, like, some specific. They're not rapid fire, but I just. Some things I actually would like to know. You've thought a lot about this topic, which is so clear in the production process of working with you and comes out in the scripts. But has anything surprised you? Have you been shocked? Have you been surprised to learn something or discover something that you hadn't previously known? And if. Yes, tell us.
- [17:42]
Mike Kosper
Every time I encounter Michelle remembers, I'm shocked. Like, every time I read it, every time I listen to her in interviews, her tapes, the rest of it.
- [17:50]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah.
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Mike Kosper
And I'll be honest, like, even after spending hours and hours on it, I really don't quite know what to make of her. There's an extent to which I don't know what to make of him, except that I do think that there was something in him that craved being someone's savior, in a sense. And I think his Catholic devotion was legit, you know, and. And so all of that comes through. Like her story makes him into a certain kind of hero and makes her into a true believer in him and in his Catholicism and. And everything else. So he's a little easier to peg for me. But her I don't quite know what to do with, especially because she went the rest of her life and basically never talked about it again. And I also just think, like, the ethical breach of him leaving his wife, her leaving her husband, you know, marrying each other and not disclosing that, like, it's just shocking to me. Like, even now, it's shocking to me.
- [18:51]
Rebecca Sebastian
And the. He is Dr. Lawrence Pazder.
- [18:53]
Mike Kosper
Right.
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Rebecca Sebastian
For anybody listening who doesn't know, and we cover a lot of that story in four, which is remembering what never happened. It is hard to believe. So there is, like, an end in everything we've covered. There's an element of which I hadn't previously known that is always just amazing to be revealed and to look at. I'm curious if you feel. And this comes out definitely throughout the episodes, but, like, right now, what would you say, do you think the American church or the evangelical church has or hasn't reckoned with its role in the panic?
- [19:26]
Mike Kosper
I don't think it has at all. And I don't think it's learned its lessons from it either. If you want to look at who's getting excited about phenomena like QAnon, like Pizzagate, all of this kind of stuff, it's the same communities that bought into this stuff hook, line and sinker, you know, at one point, and I think this is still true. But the fastest growing segment of evangelicalism in the United States is the Pentecostal movement. And it's why we talked a bit about that in the last episode is because those really were. We'll come back to the West Memphis three in a little bit. For. For example, and in West Memphis, there was a large Pentecostal church that was deeply into the panic, very excited about it, really invested in it. And when these kids died, like, they were. They were kind of at the forefront of saying, well, this was a satanic ritual sacrifice. And so I don't think they've learned the lessons from it because I think if you take an honest assessment of what the church is doing now in relation to all kinds of conspiracy theories, they're still buying into them, they're still feeding it. And then you look at, like, you know, part of what we'll come to in future episodes is looking at the way law enforcement and government officials kind of stoked the panic and literally the FBI training people on how to look for satanic ritual abuse and phenomena like that, like, it's, it's pretty intense. And I think that we happen to be living in a moment when a lot of government officials are behaving very irresponsibly around conspiracy theories. Everything from Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Jewish space lasers to officials in the administration, the current administration, spreading lies and conspiracies about Ukraine and all of that. Like there's this political pragmatism that says, well, it might be a lie, but if it moves people in my direction, I'm okay with it. And that is so poisonous on so many levels. So, yeah, I, I'm quite concerned that we haven't learned a thing.
- [21:22]
Rebecca Sebastian
So in light of that, your belief that we haven't learned and these rather dark topics that we find ourselves spending hours upon hours on week after week for your work, you know, how do you remain hopeful? Honestly, like not asking for a friend.
- [21:42]
Mike Kosper
Look, I, I, for me, hope is easy in all of this because I don't have just to get theological for a second because I don't have an over realized eschatology, right? Like I don't expect this world to be anything but fallen and a mess until Christ returns. Now I think when Christians and people of goodwill by common grace invest themselves in the world for the sake of the good, you see these sort of explosions of flourishing, you see good things happening, right? And so it's not that I'm like purely pessimistic about culture, purely cynical about whatever. I believe in the idea of faithful presence and I believe in the idea that Christians can be salt and light in a dark world. But I also expect that to function like a remnant, to function like a city on the hill, which means that it's a light in a very dark place. So I don't despair over this stuff because, you know, in the traditional liturgy around the Eucharist or communion or whatever tradition you call it in the traditional liturgy for that, as they serve communion, one of the things that the pastor or priest will say is Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. And it's that past, present, future sense of what the cross and resurrection means. If you don't have that future element in your head all the time, then absolutely you can despair because you're going to sit here going, well, gee, like Jesus raised from the dead, why isn't the world any better yet? It's because, well, we're still creation, still groans. So I'm, you know, so I'm okay with that. Yeah, I guess.
- [23:26]
Rebecca Sebastian
Thank you for that. I like that. Is there anything you want to make sure is heard or noted about where we've been or where we're going before I kind of queue up what's to come?
- [23:36]
Mike Kosper
I think the only thing that I would say is that I think we've heard a lot of questions from people about, hey, are you going to deal with this? Are you going to deal with that? And there's kind of two answers to it. One is we're trying to cover a lot of ground in a shorter series. We're aiming at eight episodes here and then we're going to have some bonus episodes where we do some follow up on a few things. So we're not going to get to everything, but there's a lot of stuff people have asked about that I've had to just keep saying, it's coming, it's coming. But right now we do want the listener to kind of be sitting as though it were like 1989 and they're sitting in the middle of the panic and they're watching it all sort of unfold around them with a broader perspective going, dude, how does this, like, I know how we got here, but I don't understand how everyone is here. Right.
- [24:21]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah.
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Mike Kosper
That's kind of where there's a journey left for those folks.
- [24:25]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. And that's going to be a little uncomfy potentially.
- [24:29]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, for sure.
- [24:30]
Rebecca Sebastian
Okay, well, good. Well, I want to make sure that everybody knows we have this amazing group over on Facebook where listeners of the podcast are engaging with one another, with us asking questions. And every other Monday, when we don't have a new episode, Mike and I are doing a live stream and we're bringing in guests from the show and different people. So we would love for you to join us there. Just go to Facebook and look for the group Devil and the Deep Blue Sea podcast and we'd love to have you join over there and join the live streams, which we're about to segue into some really fun kind of best of moments from the first three that we've done. Stick around for that. That's coming now and we will be back next week with episode six. Thanks, Mike.
- [25:13]
Mike Kosper
Thanks for hosting today.
- [25:18]
Rebecca Sebastian
And now enjoy some of our favorite moments from our first livestream events. You can watch the full versions on the Christianity Today YouTube channel or on the Devil in the Deep Blue Sea Facebook page. We'd love for you to join us at future live streams. They happen every other Monday on the weeks we don't drop new episodes. And if you're part of our Facebook group, you can send your questions directly to Mike and the team for a chance to have them featured in an upcoming livestream. Let's begin with our very first livestream from February 17th. I think we're live. Hey, Mike.
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Mike Kosper
Hey. How's it going?
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Rebecca Sebastian
It's going well. Why are stories of good and evil where there is kind of a fantastical world that is Chronicles of Narnia? Why do we accept those but other ones. Maybe there's more of a fear. Why do you think we've embraced one set of those stories and not another?
- [26:11]
Mike Kosper
Well, it's almost as if. And, you know, it would be interesting to talk to somebody who really knew C.S. lewis about this. I mean, maybe. Maybe we should even try to do that on one of these nights, like, bring somebody in for this conversation. I imagine somebody like an Alan Noble would be really interesting to talk to about this. But it's like, because Lewis wrote Mere Christianity and the Great Divorce and these other very straightforward stories and books and essays that were about his faith, it gave people an assurance that there wasn't a demon hiding behind the curtain. I don't know. Like, even as a kid, I don't know that Tolkien quite had that pass in the 1980s. I think in the 80s, when people were nervous about everything else, Tolkien was a little sort of. Well, you know, we're not going to accuse him of the same things we're accusing Dungeons and Dragons of in terms of people sort of losing their identity and going off to kill people. But I think there was a little more suspicion around Tolkien than there was Louis, because Lewis had sort of given you this. He had sort of paid it forward with it in terms of his canon. Anyway. I think that ultimately what people were really nervous about is, like, if you're going to tell a fictional story that involves things like magic and good and evil and conflict, it needs to be very, very frankly. It needs to be allegorical. It needs to be very black and white.
- [27:32]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah.
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Mike Kosper
And writers like Tolkien, who literally says in the introduction to his second edition of the Lord of the Rings, I really hate allegory. I think people are more suspicious of that sort of thing.
- [27:43]
Rebecca Sebastian
Rachel Stanton is in our Facebook group, and she says, will you cover back masking in music?
- [27:50]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, it'll come up. I don't think we'll spend much time with it, but it definitely deserves a mention because it was one of these things where in the 1960s and 70s there's this great book, I think it's called Here, There and Everywhere. And it's the Beatles engineer who worked on most of the Beatles records with them, kind of telling his story. One of the things that he talks about, I promise this is an answer to your question. When the Beatles made their early records to be a recording engineer, these were literally people with electrical engineering degrees. You couldn't touch the microphones in the Abbey Road studios unless you had the engineering degree and the credential to do it. And of course, like you fast forward to today audio recording techniques, like it's, you know, half of it's like stoners going, what happens if we stick a mic here? Right, right. Which is really sort of what happened. Like where recording technique goes in the 1970s with people just trying all kinds of wild and crazy stuff. So back masking was one of these techniques that emerged just because people started to figure out, well, what happens if we reverse the leads on the tape machine and the thing plays backwards? What does that sound like? And you know, everybody from, from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix to Led Zeppelin, they were, they were experimenting with it. Not because they were trying to do something particularly subversive, but just because you did it. And it goes, oh wow, that sounds cool, that sounds interesting. So then you fast forward to the 80s when people can, you know, the technology allows the home user to then play the back mask stuff forward in, in new ways. Then all of a sudden they're listening to what was said on those things. And again you got a bunch of 20 something year old musicians sitting around a studio going, wouldn't it be funny if we did this? And they say wild and obscene and crazy things because from where they're sitting they're going, well, this is all be back mask. It'll just be gibberish and noise. And you know, the home listener, you know, a decade later listens to it and goes, oh my gosh, can you believe they said Paul is dead? Do you think Paul is dead? Or of course it gets much worse from there. It's a really interesting sort of story. What it actually is like the factual story is goofy stoner musicians who have been given permission to play around in the studio with equipment that is rapidly evolving and expanding so they can try and experiment with new things. That story is behind the scenes so the average consumer doesn't see any of it. The average consumer just gets the sound of this thing and it sounds weird and otherworldly. And then when the Opportunity to reverse it comes around and they hear the crazy stuff that said on the tape. What do you do? You tell a story that makes sense of it for you and that story ends up being oh well, actually what they're doing is they're trying to get inside your subconscious with these backmask messages about murder, sex, suicide, whatever, you know, whatever it might be.
- [30:55]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, it's like as plausible as the. The needle in the candy. Dan has a question that I think follows this beautifully. He talks about watching a video at church in the 90s about satanic music. And they mentioned Huey Lewis's Jacob Flatter in the video. And he remembers in the discussion afterward that a kid in the youth group said their parents behavior changed significantly after listening to Devil Inside by Inix S. His question is why are Christians so susceptible to conspiracy groupthink?
- [31:23]
Mike Kosper
Oh, that's interesting, isn't it? I am skeptical that Christians are more susceptible to this stuff than non Christians or nominal Christians. I think it's human nature. Again, like back to what we were just talking about. I think human nature is in the face of complexity, we want to be able to narrate a story that makes sense of complexity, that makes sense of suffering. And I think that to a certain extent, I don't know that Christians are more susceptible to it than anybody else is. I also think that if you happen to sort of be inside that world, it's a little more obvious when those.
- [31:57]
Rebecca Sebastian
Things happen because there's people around you in agreement.
- [32:01]
Mike Kosper
It's like when your uncle goes off the rails at Thanksgiving dinner, you feel it much more intensely. It's like, okay, here he goes, right? Because you sort of know the normal rhythms of conversation than the sort of normal life of the family. And so when the family member kind of goes a little hog wild, you end up going, okay, buckle up. Here he goes again. I think there's something of that in all this where when it's easier for us to spot when somebody that's close to us goes off the rails, in contrast to whatever the conspiracy theory that we're buying into might be. I mean that where the second episode ends is exactly on this point. The reason we bring up this Billy Graham story, where Billy Graham echoes these what would have been very common anti Semitic themes in his day, stuff that he would have heard a thousand times in every sort of WASPy cultural situation that he was in. The reason we tell that story right there is just to sort of try to remind the listener like, dude, if Billy Graham can get sucked up into this stuff, Casually, in a conversation with the President of the United States. It can happen to almost any of us.
- [33:17]
Rebecca Sebastian
Right.
- [33:18]
Mike Kosper
I want it to be kind of a warning to the listener that what's coming gets pretty wild and woolly. Recognize that there's an element of this that's situational. And if you were in it at the time, the odds are that you would have been buying into it at the time. With everybody else there but for the.
- [33:37]
Rebecca Sebastian
Grace of God go. I like, never say never. Oh, this is from. You'll know who this is from. Matt Pierce. I don't know if he's with us tonight.
- [33:46]
Mike Kosper
Matthew Pierce. Great. Matthew Pierce.
- [33:48]
Rebecca Sebastian
Matthew Pierce. He wants to know about the theme song, and I'm excited for you to share a little bit about the amazing theme song we chose. And it was quite a journey. And music is so important to you and to the story. So tell us about the theme song.
- [34:06]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, so the theme song is by a band called Dirt Poor Robbins. And Dirt Poor Robbins is essentially a husband and wife couple named Neil and Kate Robbins. I've known Neil and Kate for a very, very long time. When we started this project, we had a different vision for the music. And Neil and Kate know this. You know, they're not going to be offended by this. We had a different vision for the music. We were trying to do something that was very period correct, let's put it that way. And as well as being very subject. Correct. And you know, licensing music is very hard and very tricky, especially in this current economy where people don't even necessarily know who owns the masters to certain projects anymore.
- [34:47]
Rebecca Sebastian
Allegedly.
- [34:48]
Mike Kosper
Exactly. And so that led us to this place where after a long time of kind of feeling like we knew what we wanted to do, we thought, what are some of our options? And it was actually my wife Sarah, who when I said, yeah, we should look at some of what Neil and Kate do, because a lot of what Neil and Kate are writing about, you know, if you look at the lyrics of their music across their records, they're writing about these kind of cultural undercurrents. And, you know, what are the idolatries? What are the ideas? What are the ways that people sort of get caught up in things that they don't even realize they're caught up in and trapped in. And so it was actually my wife who, you know, once I mentioned Neil and Kate and the project, the next thing I knew, she said, this is the song. You should absolutely use this song. And that's so cool.
- [35:32]
Rebecca Sebastian
I didn't know that.
- [35:33]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, she. She didn't and and and frankly, like Sarah deserves a ton of credit for for some of the music on Mars Hill as well. Like every week on the Mars Hill podcast we would end with a different song and you know many of those were were her suggestions, probably lion's share.
- [35:52]
Rebecca Sebastian
Were her Very cool.
- [35:54]
Mike Kosper
She probably deserves the credit.
- [35:56]
Rebecca Sebastian
We were thrilled to have author Rick Emerson join us at our March 3 livestream. You may remember Rick from previous episodes. He's the author of Unmask lsd, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries, and he brings a wealth of knowledge about all of the above.
- [36:17]
D
This message comes from the Enneagram and Marriage Podcast have you wanted to improve your relationship but you're running out of ideas, time or even interest? I'm Krista Hardin, the host of the Enneagram and Marriage Podcast and I've dedicated the last two decades of my life and career on couples research integrating healthy faith practices with the best of marriage research and nuanced personality typing, couples from all over the world are finding more value centered joy and bringing healthy desire, love and fun back into their bond together again or for the very first time as they work strategically and intentionally on repatterning their love in healthy ways. Join us on Mondays or Wednesdays to listen and learn more about how your life and relationship can truly thrive together.
- [37:06]
Mike Kosper
Hey, we hope you are enjoying the show. Just so you know, the best way to contribute to the production of this podcast is actually by subscribing to Christianity Today using our special link orderct.com deepbluesea Listeners like you get 25% off your subscription and unlimited access to the platform that elevates the stories and ideas of the Kingdom of God. That's orderct.com deepblue sea all one word we look forward to having you join us.
- [37:39]
Rebecca Sebastian
Rick. We're so glad you could come and join us.
- [37:41]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
I'm glad to be here. Apologies in advance if my dogs begin bellowing in the background. They every time I'm doing anything like this they think there's like pizza on the way or something. So yes, glad to be here.
- [37:53]
Rebecca Sebastian
Good, good. We're really glad to have you. This one comes from Jonathan Crump, so he was really interested in the drug conversation that we've gotten into over several episodes. He wants to know, would you say America's relationship with drugs? The general public's acceptance and widespread legalization of marijuana and mushrooms and other drugs as a return to the relationship America had in the 1960s and the period before the war on Drugs.
- [38:20]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
That's an interesting question because it's a thing that is. Sometimes it's sort of hard to believe how quickly the drugs and you know, in the response to drugs and legality, drugs change. Because I think up in the most of the early 20th century, you know, there was no such thing as an illegal drug. Most drugs were just not because there weren't people who, you know, abused them just because it was, the government hadn't taken. It wasn't considered a big enough issue at the time for them to, for them to make these things illegal. And even, you know, lsd, which sort of became kind of public enemy number one perceptually for a lot of people. Even that was legal in most places until the late 60s. It's sort of been this bell curve of our attitude with that. I think the biggest difference now, at least from my perspective, I am old enough, I'm now old enough that I can kind of see some of these societal changes. And it is always a little bizarre. I don't think I will ever get used to the fact, so I live in Portland and I will never get used to the fact that if I drive down the road there's just giant billboards being like, come buy your weed. And it's just like, it's weird. Regardless of how one feels about it, it's a strange cultural shift. I think the biggest difference now is that partially because of the Internet, partially because there has, you know, because you can never really stop drug use. You can try to sort of minimize it and suppress it, but there's always going to be people who do that. And also the rest of the world does not necessarily follow the United States in terms of prohibitions. I think maybe the biggest difference now is there is a wider recognition a of some of the damage that drugs can do. Sometimes that even drugs that are pushed as being sort of benign, you know, that with the wrong person, the wrong environment or just in and of themselves can be dangerous in some cases, with some people in the right conditions can be beneficial. There have been a lot of studies about certain kinds of drugs, even at the Veterans Administration where they are taking small steps into trying to help people with long term PTSD and trauma. You know, there's this saying that the difference between medicine and poison is just the dose. And that's not always true. But in some cases there are indications that there might be some benefits to some things. And I think that is maybe the biggest shift is this recognition that there is sort of a spectrum of how these things can impact us as opposed to making it this hard binary of it should all be legal. There's no such thing as a bad drug, and there's no benefit to any of this. These should all be Schedule 1 drugs. There is sort of a gray area sometimes, I think maybe that has changed the most.
- [40:46]
Mike Kosper
One of my favorite thinkers, somebody that I have talked about a lot on the bulletin over the years, is Hannah Arendt. She has this concept that she talks about where she talks about the danger of. She calls it acting into nature. What she means when she says that is the things we do that transform the natural world. And there's a whole spectrum of things that do that. Drugs are one of those things. And you know, her idea with acting into nature, like her warning about acting into nature, is we don't really know the downstream consequences of any of this stuff. I actually think drugs is a great example of this. Having opioids for people who have been shot at war, having morphine that you can inject into their bloodstream and calm their central nervous system, get them out of harm's way and get them to where you can do triage and hopefully help them heal. That's a really great thing. Having opioids where you can say, oh, I was in a fender bender the other day and I'm having back spasms. Give me some opioids. The downstream consequences of that have proven to be much, much more difficult. And so that's the thing that I always think about with sort of the culture of drugs. It's like, sure, let's legalize this one or that one or whatever. The recreational use is one thing. And there are problems with recreational use of drugs. Of course, it's the downstream consequen that come two, three, four steps away that I don't even think we even know how to calculate for a lot of those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:30]
Rebecca Sebastian
I'm thinking about the normalization of ketamine as a therapeutic treatment right now and how kind of widely accepted that became relatively quickly. I'm sure there was a lot happening quietly behind the scenes, but I've seen Housewives do it on Bravo. But then I'm thinking about, I mean, just to keep this, you know, super high brow, but I'm thinking about Matthew Perry and his death and talk about downstream consequences, right? We have a dealer, and we have a team of kind of people who enabled that to get beyond the prescribed amount. So even when something is sort of regulated and could be having positive effects, there's still that. The consequences, the potential unforeseen Risks. But it's a big. It's a big topic. So Sarah asks, do readers of your book, which, to be clear as Unmask Alice, ever reach out to you as former readers of Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal, how surprised are they to learn that the stories were exaggerated or fabricated? And do any hold out and insist that the stories really happened as Sparks purported?
- [43:31]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
I. There's been a whole range of responses. And I. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, you hear a lot of people saying, well, that always sort of seemed like something. I think a lot of it actually, frankly, has to do at what age you first encounter these books. A lot of times you will hear people say, well, you know, if kids reading this today would never possibly believe this. I think it's less about the era in which you read it and more about the age you were. I talk about a young woman named Morgan who read it in red. Go ask Alice in 2000 2010, I believe. And I think, you know, she was in high school at the time, and so. And she, you know, and it really resonated with her and struck her as genuine. I think there's a whole range of responses. There are people who read it and, you know, a lot of red flags suggest themselves or people saying, like, well, you know, at the time. But then when I thought back on it, it seemed, whatever. If you go on Amazon, you will and look at the reviews for Go Ask Alice, It's. It is sort of amazing to see how it is almost evenly divided still, though, down the middle. There's basically three reactions that people will have. If you canvas online reviews, especially for Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal is similar, you'll see, well, this is obviously a fraud, and it's something I either knew or I have concluded that it's a fraud and this confirmed my views, or this is absolutely true. And anybody who says differently has never really known anybody who's been an addict or has never gone through addiction themselves, because what seems outlandish to you is not outlandish to somebody who has fallen into this hole of addiction. And then there's a middle ground. This may be wildly embellished or possibly made up, but even if this specific story did not happen, stories like this do happen to people. This specific story may have been fabricated or exaggerated, but it's true for somebody out there, and therefore it's valuable. And if you read it for the first time as an adult, it will almost certainly ring false to you. But a lot of that also has to do with the fact that when you are a teenager, you are just kind of this live wire bundle of emotions. Every day is either the best day of your life or the worst day of your life. And Go Ask Alice really captures that kind of, you know, you're, as a teenager, sort of constantly just going back and forth between these two extremes. And the book sort of captures that. So anyway, that is a long way of saying that. I feel like it shakes out to be about 40, 40 within 20% in the middle. Saying if it helps kids, we can accept the fact that it may have been fudged a little bit.
- [45:58]
Mike Kosper
I wanted to ask you, actually, I read your book a while back and we talked for the show as we were producing the episodes. The thing I kept thinking about over and over again and really kind of fell down the rabbit hole on as I was supposed to be producing the episodes was Twin Peaks. I kept thinking about the Diary of Laura Palmer. I'm just curious, when you were working on the book, did that come up at all? Are you familiar with that story? Was there any intersection with any of that? It feels to me like Mark Frost must have read Go Ask Alice when he wrote the Diary of Laura Palmer.
- [46:33]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
To the deep and ongoing disappointment of many of my peers and to my eternal shame. I'm actually not much of a Twin Peaks fan. And here I should say David lynch is one of those. He is a person that I, you know, I certainly recognize, you know, that he's. He was a genius. And I certainly recognize why he matters and why he is so influential. That being said, I do think that is not unlike Coast Gallas. I feel like Twin Peaks specifically is one of those things that I did not watch at the time because I was just. I was kind of just an obnoxious jerk as a teenager. And I had a real low tolerance for anything that was even vaguely surreal. And so anything that was not just straightforward, like anything that had even a hint of artiness to it, I sort of was like. So I was kind of like a weird reverse hipster in that way.
- [47:21]
Mike Kosper
Right.
- [47:22]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
So by the time I watched Twin Peaks, I had sort of longer seemed all that groundbreaking. What's that?
- [47:28]
Mike Kosper
You were an anti hipster?
- [47:30]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
I was just obnoxious. But that I should. I should skip ahead to say that it would not surprise me because later in life I did read this is when I was working at an oldies radio station years ago when I was busy just playing Four Tops records and introducing the Archies playing Sugar Sugar. I would have three minutes to Read, which is all I did. So I would just be playing these, you know, 60 songs and reading. And I actually read the diary of Laura Palmer and then I read the diary of Agent Cooper's diary. I don't know if Mark Frost is the author of both of those.
- [48:01]
Mike Kosper
I believe.
- [48:01]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
I never really thought about that. That is an interesting sort of connection to make. The thing about Go West Galaxy is that it has such a far reaching impact. I mean, it has. I mean, that book will outlive us all. I mean, there's just no. I mean that book is. Casts such a massive shadow in so many directions and on so many people. And that book really shaped the culture in a way that is, it's almost. It casts such a big shadow that you almost can't see where it begins and ends. I'm doing that thing of aggressively over answering again, but I think that it is, it is, it is probably, it is probably a safe bet that, that, that had some sort of low grade influence. Yeah.
- [48:42]
Mike Kosper
Well, I think part of the reason that I made the connection was watching the go Ask Alice TV movie is on YouTube. It is wonderfully awful, horrendously entertaining and awful. When you watch the first couple of seasons of Twin Peaks, lynch leans into this campy TV movie slash soap opera mood. This ethos that's so syrupy and thick and overdone. Unfortunately we can't ask him, but I'm kind of obsessed with the idea now. Like I just, I desperately want to talk to Mark Frost and find out like, hey, well.
- [49:18]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
And lynch also leaned into that the dark side of suburbia thing to amplify the dark side. He would lay the groundwork by painting this exaggerated, Almost this hyper 1950s version, you know, of Siberia Woods. Like the, you know, the, you know, comic clock with the square jawed guy with, you know, and the hard part in the hair and all of that and everything is a little bit hyper real, which then he kind of like rips it away and underneath is this bottomless Chas horror. That's a good connection. That's. I'm going to be thinking about that all night now.
- [49:51]
Rebecca Sebastian
All right, I'm going to put that on Mike's future project to do list.
- [49:54]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, like season three for the Twin Peaks season of the Devil in Deep Blue Sea. Okay, I'll stop talking about David lynch now because that's for another night.
- [50:02]
Rebecca Sebastian
Rachel from Oregon asks, and I think this is like the burning question, do you have any theories about what was really going on with all those people who alleged they were victims of sexual satanic ritual abuse and genuinely believed it was true. Like, what was actually going on? If it wasn't that, then what?
- [50:22]
Mike Kosper
Man, that's a. That's a heartbreaking question, right? I don't know that there's one answer. In fact, if you kind of look at the. Look at the research, look at the reporting of people who've gone back and looked at everything, there's. It seems to be that there's multiple answers to what was going on there in. In the FBI data where they looked at all of these instances where there were accusations of. Of sra. The FBI essentially comes back and says, look, there's a big chunk of this stuff that seems to not have any basis in reality at all. It came about because of sort of a coercive thing that was going on with the. With the investigations, the questioning, the role of psychologists, et cetera. But then with a lot of these people, what you end up getting, and I feel the heartbreak in my chest just saying this out loud, is that these victims were not victims of ritualistic abuse. They were victims of everyday abuse. They were victims of the kind of abuse that you hear about all the time now. And spoiler alert for the series, this is part of what we're talking about and going towards. There's a weird kind of comfort. In the last episode, I talked about Mike Warnke as a gargoyle that keeps evil spirits away. He gives us a way of grasping the presence of evil, understanding it, and compartmentalizing it. It's way easier to think of the Satanist down the road as the monster that we're afraid of, as opposed to the babysitter next door who's actually the one that is abusing children, you know, sexually abusing children. So, yeah, so last thing I'll say on this is that there is a fair bit of reporting that's been done, work that's been done. I think more could be done. Something we're working on as well. Kind of going back to these victims and inviting them to tell their story. Like, what do they think? What do they know? A lot of them feel sort of manipulated and duped by the process of interrogation as well.
- [52:27]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
And I would just follow by saying that. And first of all, I should give the caveat that I am not a psychologist, I'm not a psychiatrist. I, you know, I'm very much a layperson in all of this. This is based on people much smarter than myself to whom I've spoken. When somebody goes to talk to a therapist, when somebody goes to talk to A counselor. I mean, as a general rule, I. This is. There are obviously exceptions to this, but when somebody seeks out therapy, it is usually not because everything in their life is fantastic. Usually you go to the doctor, you go to a mechanic, because there's. There's something, you know, can you take a look at this? My car is making this weird noise. Or when you go to a therapist, you've got some unresolved issue, and sometimes you're unhappy and you don't know why, or you feel like you are more unhappy than you ought to be, given the circumstances in your life. And you're like, well, I'm still sad, I'm still depressed. I can't figure out what that's about. I feel like I shouldn't be unhappy, but I am. So you are looking for an answer. You are looking for someone to explain this to you and put a name and a face on it and an explanation. And if all goes well, then maybe you help to resolve or at least identify what it is. I think the issue comes when the human brain is far more malleable than you know, and I'm certainly no exception to this. We can be pushed and nudged in all kinds of different directions, especially if you are actively seeking to explain something that you yourself don't have an explanation for. And to follow on to Mike's point, I do think it has some of the same dynamics as conspiracy theories around things like the JFK assassination, in that the idea that one guy can order a rifle and fire off a couple of lucky shots and change the entire trajectory of the world is terrifying, because how are you going to guard against that in the future? In a strange way, it is comforting to think there was this vast conspiracy between the CIA, the Cubans, the Mafia, and whoever else to kill jfk, because that at least lets you know that somebody is in control, even if it's someone evil or horrible, as opposed to the idea that things are just random. I think we are always trying to impose a pattern on things and we are always looking for someone to lead us to the truth. And if those things go awry, that replicates pretty quickly.
- [54:37]
Rebecca Sebastian
This is very much what we'll be getting into in the very next episode on like a very personal micro level. It's like an unresolved trauma. And you said something you can't define. It's like the unanswerable. And in one story we're looking at, it was a miscarriage, a sadly common experience. But given other factors and circumstances, somebody could be incredibly vulnerable to a suggestion that it wasn't a simple miscarriage, it was something far darker. So it's this unresolved trauma as well.
- [55:06]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
The last thing I will say about this, and again, this is just my speculation, I can't speak to anything specific about this, but I will say if, as Mike said, a lot of these, you know, in Utah, they did, I think, a two year half million dollar investigation into a lot of SRA allegations. And, and you know, they came up and, and what they came back was they said, well, as you said, we found out, we found a lot of, you know, found a lot of non satanic abuse, non ritual abuse. And I think, again, this is just my speculation, but I do think that to some degree the idea that this person that you trust and love and perhaps on some level still love or just frankly do still love the idea that you may have trusted this person who then did this awful thing to you, maybe there is some kind of mental self defense of trying to distance them from the act and saying, well, they may have done this, but they were in turn part of this larger satanic conspiracy. And that in some way diminishes what they call cognitive dissonance. The disparity between what you want to be true and what the world is telling you. If you can put a little distance between those things and you can say, yes, this person I love did this thing to me, but here's why they did this. And you know, and that the human brain, you know, we crave. We crave comfort and explanation and we'll get it wherever we can.
- [56:30]
Rebecca Sebastian
It's really well said.
- [56:31]
Mike Kosper
Well, first of all, I just want to ask Rick, Rick, are you familiar with Carmen, the Christian artist?
- [56:37]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
Yeah, I feel like this is another Twin Peaks thing where I'm going to walk into trouble by saying, who?
- [56:43]
Mike Kosper
Listen, I don't know you well, Rick, but if you start down the Carmen rabbit hole, you're gonna find it incredibly interesting and entertaining. There's some magic to whatever Carmen was up to. So is this. I don't wanna say more.
- [56:58]
Rebecca Sebastian
He's a singer, songwriter, performing artist of the 80s in the evangelical church circuit.
- [57:04]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
And is this a group? Is this a person? Oh, it's a person.
- [57:07]
Rebecca Sebastian
Carmen is one of one.
- [57:09]
Mike Kosper
A friend of mine actually visited a church in Nashville where Carmen attended. They made an announcement during the service to let single women in the congregation know it was inappropriate for them to approach Carmen and tell them that God had told them to marry him because Carmen was single. Okay, so that's an unverified report. What alleged music like Whatever. I need to say journalistically to exonerate myself from that. There's a charisma to Carmen that's pretty darn unique. I would encourage you to go look at the video for Carmen the Champion, because it's kind of the best of the best.
- [57:47]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
If we were to compare Carmen's music to a contemporary or whatever artist that I might know. Is there any form of. I mean, my brain is trying to come up with an image or a sound right now, and I'm just. I got nothing.
- [57:58]
Mike Kosper
There's going to be an amalgam. So there's going to be like.
- [58:01]
Rebecca Sebastian
It's a little Bon Jovi.
- [58:03]
Mike Kosper
Yeah. Maybe like Engelbert Humberdink, plus something like a bog.
- [58:09]
Rebecca Sebastian
He didn't have long hair, but he was like a leather clad, you know, male rock star.
- [58:14]
Mike Kosper
There's nothing like this guy. There's no comparison. He's one of one. He's truly one of one. Everything he did was extremely theatrical and, you know, wildly entertaining. On a certain level.
- [58:26]
Rebecca Sebastian
I think he's found an image.
- [58:28]
Mike Kosper
Found him. Okay.
- [58:29]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
Okay. Well, I'm getting real strong, like, Wayne Newton vibes here.
- [58:32]
Mike Kosper
Yeah. But it's its own thing because there's this earnestness and urgency. It's like. It's eschatological urgency to Carmen, which is what makes it wonderful and fun.
- [58:43]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
This is like one third Wayne Newton, one third Julio Iglesias, one third Wheel Diamond. I mean, I'm just. Visually speaking, I can't really. You know, that's good. It is kind of strange, actually, that I'm not familiar with Kermit growing up. My poor mother. I'm so glad that my mother and I both lived long enough for me to be like, hey, sorry I was such an obnoxious teenager. Thanks for not just putting me out on a corner and being like, free kid. Who wants him? When I was a teenager, I really did kind of go out of my way to antagonize my mother with my music selections and choices. And I would sometimes carefully stack my vinyl records in a way that. So she would walk in and see the most offensive thing just sitting there in the front. And, you know, so let me just put this Kiss album right in front so you can just. But. But my mom, bless her, she. She would. She tried to sort of. Tried to sort of, you know, steer me towards something more wholesome. So I would occasionally come home and I find, like, a Christian rock cassette just, like, on my bed, on the bedspread. She's like, well, I was at the Christian bookstore And I bought this for you and you know, be like a Petra cassette. And I'd be like, oh, okay. So I basically have my knowledge of Christian. You know, it's basically like one Striper album, one Petra album, and then one Don Francisco album. That's it. That's all I've got. So anything outside of that, it's like I'm sort of. I'm wandering in the woods.
- [60:00]
Rebecca Sebastian
Okay. We're excited to add to your repertoire.
- [60:02]
Mike Kosper
So to answer, though, back to the original question.
- [60:06]
Rebecca Sebastian
Oh, yeah, we didn't even do that.
- [60:08]
Mike Kosper
We'll definitely get into a lot of this stuff, and I think a lot of it is really fascinating. And I think that. I mean, I actually think that, like, part of Carmen's success really did ride on this sense that the world was. Was that that American culture was pitched on a cosmic battle between good and evil. We'll definitely get to it. I don't know how much we'll get into Carmen. I am wildly entertained by Carmen. Not in the way he intended, Right?
- [60:38]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
- [60:41]
Mike Kosper
Yeah. But it's definitely a subject that I have a lot of thoughts on and a lot of curiosity about. Kind of want to just like, honestly, having read Rick's books and talked to him a few times, I kind of just want to lock him in a room for like two hours and make him do nothing but watch all the Carbon videos and then get his take when he comes out. That would be really fun.
- [61:04]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
On another screen, I have this 90 minute tribute to Carmen video playing. That's just a collage, a montage of performance pieces. There's really a lot to unpack here.
- [61:15]
Rebecca Sebastian
That's an understatement.
- [61:16]
Mike Kosper
I just want to put you in a room. I want you to absorb the whole thing, and then I want to see what comes out the other side. It could be great.
- [61:23]
Rebecca Sebastian
All right, one last one for Rick. If Sparks were active and alive today, what kind of stories do you think she would tell? And how would she be tapping into modern fears?
- [61:35]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
That's an interesting question. Whatever one wants to say about Beatrice Sparks, you can't question her perseverance and her work ethic. I think almost literally until the day she died, she was. I mean, she did not ever. She was like a shark. She never stopped. She just kept going. When she died, she had three or four different books either in progress or that she was writing proposals. I do know that a book that never really got past the proposal stage, but that I've seen. I've seen some early chapters, is called Caught in the Web, which is about the dangers of the Internet. And again, leaving aside everything else about her and the impact of her books, the one thing I will say is that she did have this sense. I mean, her execution was, you know, especially she got older, was a little scattershot, but she did have this sense for what she felt was a danger to young people. And so, you know, so it went drugs to Satanism to, you know, later to, you know, homelessness, and then to teenage pregnancy, anorexia, eating disorders, being preyed upon by teachers. One of her books was about that. And then she was working on something about the dangers of Internet predators. And so I do have a sneaking suspicion. This is just my suspicion. I do have a sneaking suspicion that if she were writing today, there probably would be a gender identity book in the works, if not already out. I can easily imagine there being a title by Anonymous, the Diary of a Teenager who Transitioned and Then Regretted it or whatever. I can absolutely see that. Because again, she did seem to home in on whatever seemed to be on the radar for a lot of people as a menace to American youth. And that, you know, she had a real good sense for that, even as she was farther and farther away from that demographic herself.
- [63:16]
Rebecca Sebastian
Is it weird? I want to go on ChatGPT and ask them to write a book by Beatrice sparks out in 2025, and it could even be about A.I. i don't know. This could be a fun thought experiment.
- [63:27]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
That's really good. Why didn't I think of that?
- [63:29]
Mike Kosper
I think that's spot on. Like the idea of the teenager who fell in love with their chatbot and by.
- [63:35]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
By AI Anonymous.
- [63:38]
Rebecca Sebastian
Well, the New York Times just did an episode about this, about someone who actually fell in love with their chat virtual. Virtual friend.
- [63:45]
Mike Kosper
But, like, it's been a thing where teens have struck up a relationship with chatbots, and it's ended in the chatbot telling them, yeah, you probably should commit suicide. So feels very Beatrice Sparks as well now.
- [64:01]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
That's really good. I'm kind of embarrassed that I did not come up with Rick.
- [64:05]
Rebecca Sebastian
We can partner on this. I really would love to work on this together. I didn't want to end on something that got a little dark, but we are out of time.
- [64:13]
Mike Kosper
Pretty grim.
- [64:14]
Rebecca Sebastian
I do want to say thank you so much to everybody who sent in questions who's listening to the show. Don't forget to join our Facebook group, Devil in the Deep Blue Sea and Rick Emerson. We're just so grateful for your time and your contribution to this conversation. It's Always so exciting and great to talk to you.
- [64:28]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
I'm happy to be here. I only wish that I knew a Carmen song that I could belt out to sort of lift the mood here at the end.
- [64:33]
Mike Kosper
But I'll just listen if you commence it to working your way through the Carmen catalog. We will have you back for that.
- [64:40]
Rebecca Sebastian
We could do Carmen karaoke.
- [64:43]
Dr. Michele Del Rosario
Okay.
- [64:44]
Rebecca Sebastian
On a live stream. Okay. And finally, a few moments from our March 17th live stream. Yeah, it's good to be here. Starting the week off with this live stream. Thank you so much for joining us. This first question from Sandy, who's part of our Facebook group, said, what happened to Michelle Smith and did she or Lawrence ever recant their story?
- [65:09]
Mike Kosper
You know, what's interesting is that they never recanted the story. Lawrence Pastor died in 2004. As as far as my research has found, I think Michelle Smith's still alive somewhere. She would be in her late 70s and, you know, did I think like in the mid late 90s, did kind of move away from public life. And this was around the time, as we described in the episode, that the whole story came under scrutiny. There was a long season sort of continuing the story, maintaining a place in pop culture, selling a lot of books. And then at a certain point, I think it's probably a tipping point in the early 90s where skepticism of the book outweighed belief in the story. Around that time, she largely withdrew from public life. Lauren's pastor continued his own psychological practice up through to this day.
- [66:05]
Rebecca Sebastian
Do you remember we watched a documentary in addition to some of the reading we did around that story. There's an Amazon prime doc for people who want to know a lot more about that story. I think it's called Satan wants you.
- [66:16]
Mike Kosper
It's a really well done doc.
- [66:18]
Rebecca Sebastian
It is really well done. A lot of her family members are interviewed. They talked about how her life unraveled after that book came out when it was all debunked. And like Mike said, she kind of went into a very reclusive state and things didn't go well for her. But Lawrence, I don't think he ever recanted either. There is this interesting quote in the doc where he's like, someone interviewed him on it about, do you still believe Michelle's story?
- [66:40]
Mike Kosper
Yeah.
- [66:40]
Rebecca Sebastian
And he basically is like, you know, it's not my job to believe or not believe my patients. And it was like this very much more wishy washy response. And he's like, my job is to guide it out, which is a super.
- [66:51]
Mike Kosper
Weird thing to say. About your wife. Right.
- [66:54]
Rebecca Sebastian
Because at that point. Yes.
- [66:55]
Mike Kosper
Yeah. Because they're married. Married at that point. And, you know, they were married until his death. If I'm remembering correctly. I wondered. I hope this came across in the show. There's a degree to which my heart goes out to her, just like my heart goes out to the children in the McMartin story. If you're put in a position by a person in authority who then leads you into a story and says, this happened to you, I don't know that it's fair of us to say, well, she should have recanted. She should have gone public, she should have done whatever. Because as far as she knows, it did happen to her. That's why the ethical issues around this kind of counseling, the role of hypnosis, regression therapy, like all this stuff is so important and why we should care about it. Not just because of the damage that came after Michelle remembers, but the damage to her as well. She lives the rest of her life thinking her mom put her in the care of Satanists to torture and steal her soul.
- [67:52]
Rebecca Sebastian
Right. And let's not forget why she started seeing him. The second time was after a miscarriage, which is a traumatic event. So just the vulnerable state she even showed up in. But that's a perfect segue to this question, which I think is a really complicated one and really worth talking about. And I know we have talked about it as a team. Mark from our Facebook group says, how can we be sure the kids were lying about the daycare? And this is about McMartin. My first listen through, I felt sorry for the kids. They seemed to be led to their confessions and years later still believed it was true. Could there be no evidence but the kids were still abused or molested? Billy Graham went to visit concentration camps in 1978. Do you think there's a connection between that journey and his point of view on Jews, antisemitism and maybe things he had said in the past?
- [68:41]
Mike Kosper
Right. To refresh everybody's memory, in an earlier episode, we included this conversation in which Graham and Nixon were talking in the Oval Office. Billy Graham makes a bunch of comments that are openly, overtly anti Semitic. My take on this is that if you listen to what he's saying in that conversation, the language around that was fairly common. If you were a white Anglo Saxon Protestant in the 1970s, 1960s especially, this sort of conspiratorial language around Jews was really common. I don't say that to excuse anything that Graham said or did, just to simply say he was a Person of his time around this, and it seems very clear from the tape, this was a blind spot for him. Now, Nixon said this kind of crap constantly and was pretty vile around this stuff. What's interesting about the Graham story is you don't really see that from Graham anywhere else in his biography. Later in Graham's life, he becomes a staunch advocate for the state of Israel for the Jewish people, makes himself kind of an ally for the Jewish people. He gets in trouble at one point for some statements that he takes about salvation and the Jews, do they need to convert to Christianity? It's all really interesting, the story we mentioned in this last episode. I do think there's a shift for Graham when he goes to Auschwitz in 1978. He spoke about the effect it had on him. As somebody who has also been to Auschwitz, I can tell you, you don't walk out of that place the same as you walked in. There's nothing like it. And there's nothing like the horror you feel, especially at Auschwitz, too, which was really this. This massive camp. Hannah Arendt called it a factory that produced corpses. That's the best description I know. It was a factory of mass death. I think he walked out of there a changed man in a number of ways. And I think it changed not just his rhetoric, but his thinking about the Jewish people. Graham is like any of us. He's prone to blind spots, human weakness, and change. I think you see that in his biography.
- [70:49]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. And that's the good news for all of us, right?
- [70:52]
Mike Kosper
Right.
- [70:53]
Rebecca Sebastian
You do the best you can until you know better, and then you do better, says Maya Angelou.
- [70:57]
Mike Kosper
I really do think there's a significant cultural change, broadly, that happens after Poland kind of opens up in the late.
- [71:05]
Rebecca Sebastian
70S because of what people were able to understand.
- [71:09]
Mike Kosper
And it just shifts your imagination once it becomes part of the popular consciousness. What took place there? Everything from the gassing rooms, the Mengele experiments, the mass graves, the mass crematoria. Once that starts to kind of lodge into your conscience, you can imagine a different level of evil than you could before. That's my belief.
- [71:31]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. Jonathan just asked if Frank Peretti's novels, this Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, will factor into the podcast at all, or did they come later, after it all died down?
- [71:43]
Mike Kosper
We will be diving into it starting next week, and I'm fascinated by the Peretti story. Peretti definitely was. Was not seeking to create a movement, write a theology, change the way people thought about the world or anything like that. He was trying to tell a good story. If he had a spiritual motivation. He was trying to get people to pray. It just so happened that the story he told in the moment that he told it had different. Had a real significant. On the panel.
- [72:10]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. Lori from the Facebook group asks will deliverance ministries be explored?
- [72:15]
Mike Kosper
So for folks who aren't aware of what deliverance ministries are, this is, you know, a very specific thing. It comes out of the Pentecostal charismatic kind of tradition, but it even at that is kind of inaccurate because the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition, they sort of adapt their deliverance ministry stuff out of, like, the exorcism ministries of much older traditions, the Catholic tradition. The Anglican Church has an exorcism tradition as well. Most of them probably do. Demon possession is a thing in the New Testament. And, you know, most churches have tried to figure out, like, what do we do with this? So deliverance ministry, that's something that emerges in this window of time, late 70s, early 80s. This is a big part of what we're going to get into in the next episode. Like, there's a lot of theological exploration and innovation taking place in this window of time. Some of it's because of, like, the advent of the church growth movement. This is when that really is taking off. But there's just a lot of weird stuff happening in Southern California. And it's like that gave us these weird religious traditions up a little further north. It gives us Jim Jones, gives the world Saddleback and the Crystal Cathedral. So it's all happening at once.
- [73:29]
Rebecca Sebastian
California, man. It's such a Christian state.
- [73:32]
Mike Kosper
What's the joke that, like, the, you know, North America tilts leftward and all the loose screws and nuts roll to the West Coast.
- [73:42]
Rebecca Sebastian
It's also a really nice place to live.
- [73:43]
Mike Kosper
So, yeah, it's beautiful down there. Shout out to Derek Rishmawi and Rick Warren.
- [73:48]
Rebecca Sebastian
Well, here's a name that I only know in a very cursory way, and I'm sure you know more, but someone wants to know, could this be your next long form podcast topic? Lonnie Frisbee, Yay or nay. He's like a Jesus people movement guy. Yes.
- [74:04]
Mike Kosper
Lonnie was a hippie, as I understand Lonnie's story. Lonnie. Lonnie's story actually kind of begins in, like, the San Francisco Haight Ashbury scene. And he gets saved. He has this radical conversion and he ends up being kind of this, like, itinerant preacher, quasi homeless, drifter, wanderer, preacher, street preacher guy. And when Chuck Smith in 1968, or maybe it's 1969 says, you know, says to his kid, I want to. I want to meet a hippie. I want to talk to a hippie. They bring him Lonnie Frisbee. The partnership between Chuck Smith and Lonnie gives birth to the Orange County Jesus People movement. He is also the guy who then about a decade later, shows up at John Wimber's Vineyard Church. Wimber's been on this journey where he's saying, I think the gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today, and we just haven't figured out how to tap into them. Let's get Lonnie. Lonnie seems to be tied into the Holy Spirit. Let's get Lonnie over here to preach. One day, Lonnie comes to preach and he preaches on the Holy Spirit and he says, let's pray. There's tape of Wimber telling the story, and it's absolutely hilarious because Wimber's a great storyteller. But here he says, Lonnie finishes preaching and he says, all right, well, let's pray. Let's pray. The Holy Spirit comes and he prays and he says, holy Spirit. And the whole place goes nuts. And people are speaking in tongues and getting laid out in the Spirit. And like the third wave charismatic movement kind of erupts out of all of that. That's Lonnie Frisbee. You get the church growth phenomenon, the Jesus people phenomenon, the third wave charismatic phenomenon. Lonnie also had. He was a deeply troubled guy. He was troubled by his own sexuality. I won't go into the details of that. He. For this. That's. That would be again, like a whole podcast. And then he died of AIDS in the late 80s, maybe around 1990, I believe is when he died. Chuck Smith preached his funeral at the Crystal Cathedral, which just again, like it all Southern California, man. Like, a lot was happening and Lonnie really was in a part of all of it. All that said, I'm fascinated by Lonnie. I think he's a story worth telling. I don't know that that's my next podcast, but somebody should do it. It's a great story. It's an interesting story. It's a complicated story, I think.
- [76:22]
Rebecca Sebastian
All right, Jonathan, maybe it's you. Maybe sometimes we have to write the story we want to read or make the podcast we want to hear. So consider that. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode. Don't forget, you can join the conversation and get involved by following us on Facebook. We're sharing updates, behind the scenes content, and hosting live streams you don't want to miss. Details are in the show notes. We'll be back next week with episode six.