Joke's On Us

Summary

Podcast Summary: Devil and the Deep Blue Sea – Episode: "Joke's On Us"

Introduction

In the episode titled "Joke's On Us," hosted by Mike Kosper under the banner of Christianity Today, the podcast delves deep into the Satanic Panic that plagued America during the 1980s and 90s. This episode examines how figures like Lauren Stratford and Mike Warnke exploited societal fears, contributing to widespread hysteria and diverting attention from genuine moral issues within religious communities.

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The McMartin Daycare Scandal and Its Aftermath

The episode begins by revisiting the McMartin Daycare scandal, a pivotal event that ignited the Satanic Panic. As Mike Kosper narrates at [00:48], the scandal originated from a single accusation by a parent grappling with addiction and mental illness. This accusation spiraled into a nationwide panic, with authorities sending panic-inducing letters to hundreds of parents and employing coercive social workers. The media's voracious appetite for sensational stories exacerbated the situation, allowing misinformation to spread unchecked:

"There's that old cliche, the lie that gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. And the satanic panic is certainly that kind of story." ([00:48])

Kosper explains how the McMartin case served as a catalyst for numerous similar cases fueled by fear and paranoia, laying the groundwork for opportunists like Lauren Stratford to emerge.

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Lauren Stratford: Rise and Fall

Lauren Stratford, originally born Laurel Rose Wilson, becomes a central figure in the Satanic Panic. Introduced at [02:25], Stratford's claims of witnessing satanic ritual abuse resonated with the heightened fears of the time. She appeared on Christian media outlets, including the variety show Fire by Night, where her disturbing accounts captivated audiences. In a clip from the show at [02:25], Stratford describes grotesque acts of animal cruelty purportedly committed by Satanists:

"We're talking about animals that have been skinned while they're alive... tortured in the name of Satan." ([02:25])

Kosper references a Cornerstone magazine report from 1990, which uncovers Stratford's fabricated background. Initially connecting to the McMartin case in 1986, Stratford's stories intensified after she published her memoir, "Satan's Underground" in 1988. Despite her widespread influence, as highlighted at [04:57], her narratives were ultimately proven false:

"She never fooled the McMartin parents... Why did she fool the rest of us?" ([04:57])

Laura Robinson, a New Testament scholar, provides insight at [08:18], emphasizing Stratford's manipulative strategies and the lack of credible evidence supporting her claims. Stratford's elaborate tales of abuse and satanic rituals were later scrutinized, revealing inconsistencies and the absence of corroborative evidence. Her demise came after exposing her fabricated stories, leading to the withdrawal of her successful memoir.

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Mike Warnke: Fabricated Stories and Exposure

Parallel to Stratford's story is that of Mike Warnke, a Christian comedian who positioned himself as an expert on Satanism in America. Introduced through a clip at [07:14], Warnke's claims of former Satanic affiliations and personal experiences mirrored Stratford's fabricated narratives. A detailed investigation by Cornerstone magazine revealed the truth behind Warnke's deceit:

At [21:25], Warnke recounts his fake Satanic past:

"I was a $125 a day heroin addict in 1964... a Satanist." ([21:25])

However, as Kosper details, Cornerstone unearthed discrepancies in Warnke's stories. For instance, Warnke claimed to have met Charles Manson at a Church of Satan meeting in 1965, despite Manson being incarcerated at the time. Additionally, testimonies from Warnke’s college girlfriend contradicted his claims of Satanic involvement:

"If he says he was a Satanist between September of 1965 to June of 1966, he's lying." ([22:41])

Further exposure revealed financial mismanagement within Warnke's ministry and a history of abusive relationships, tarnishing his credibility. Warnke's attempts at restitution, including claims of exaggeration and financial reforms, did little to salvage his reputation.

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Cultural Analysis: Roots of the Satanic Panic

Laura Robinson offers a profound analysis of the societal factors contributing to the Satanic Panic at [30:46]. She connects the phenomenon to broader anxieties about child abuse, gender roles, and the rise of daycare culture. Robinson explains:

"A lot of where the satanic panic came from... we know abuse of children is common, but we don't want to face the fact that it's mostly done by parents." ([32:44])

She argues that the panic served as a means to externalize fears about domestic abuse and the evolving role of women in the workforce. The alignment of satanic myths with contemporary issues, such as the abortion debate highlighted at [16:40]-[19:00], further cemented the panic's foothold in public consciousness.

Robinson also critiques the evangelical culture's superlative bias, which seeks out grandiose narratives and perfect dichotomies between good and evil. This cultural inclination made exaggerated and fabricated stories, like those of Stratford and Warnke, highly appealing and readily accepted by the audience.

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Conclusion: Legacy and Lessons

The episode concludes by reflecting on the lasting impact of the Satanic Panic and the lessons learned from figures like Lauren Stratford and Mike Warnke. Kosper underscores the dangers of credulity and the exploitation of societal fears by charismatic individuals. The legacy of the Satanic Panic serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of critical thinking and the perils of sensationalism.

Robinson's final thoughts encapsulate the episode's core message:

"What I think we can see in cases like these... they have a certain kind of antenna to the world around them." ([30:46])

The episode emphasizes the need to address genuine moral issues without succumbing to fear-driven narratives, urging listeners to remain vigilant against those who would manipulate societal anxieties for personal gain.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "The lie that gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on." – Mike Kosper [00:48]
• "I will probably have nightmares tonight about it..." – Lauren Stratford [04:57]
• "She seemed to be telling us exactly what we wanted to hear." – McMartin Parent [04:57]
• "Have you read the book Sybil?" – Source on Stratford's fabricated stories [12:21]
• "Right now I am the Messiah." – Lauren Stratford [38:32]
• "Most sexual abuse of children is done by stepfathers or boyfriends or fathers." – Laura Robinson [32:48]
• "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." – Mike Kosper [33:49]

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Final Thoughts

"Joke's On Us" offers a comprehensive examination of the Satanic Panic, highlighting how fabricated narratives by individuals like Lauren Stratford and Mike Warnke capitalized on societal fears. Through meticulous investigation and cultural analysis, the episode underscores the importance of discerning truth from sensationalism and the enduring need for vigilance against manipulative forces within society.

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Produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian, "Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" is a production of Christianity Today, exploring the dark chapters of American history with depth and clarity.

Transcript

[Mike Kosper]

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 this is CT.

[Laura Robinson]

A.

[Krista Hardin]

Note to listeners this story contains sensitive content, including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes, and may not be suitable for all listeners.

[Mike Kosper]

For the next phase of our story, we have to go back just for a moment, to the McMartin Daycare scandal. We told that story in episode four, remembering what never happened, how an accusation from one parent who was struggling with addiction and mental illness caused the police to send a letter to hundreds of parents, panicking all of them and sending them into the arms of a social worker whose methods related to recovered memory were coercive, manipulative and terrifying. Add a media to that that's all too eager for a story as salacious and scandalous as this one, and you have the recipe for a panic. There's that old cliche, the lie that gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. And the satanic panic is certainly that kind of story. A story that's too good to check, goes straight to the front page and does immense harm before someone can say, wait, is that true? In this case, with this story, there came a time when the press did show up and ask that question, but it took a while. We'll talk about that on today's episode, actually. But first, there's another thread to follow from McMartin, because, as we've also discussed, McMartin was a catalyst. It was followed by dozens of similar cases which seem, in hindsight, the product of fear and paranoia and overly ambitious investigators. But it also inspired others, people less terrified by the panic and more inspired by opportunity. People like Lauren Stratford. Here she is on a clip from a Christian variety show called Fire by Night.

[Lauren Stratford]

I'll go into a city and I'll ask somebody if it's there, and they'll say no. And then I'll produce a whole stack of newspaper articles that will tell about the ritualistic abuse of children or the teenagers who have committed suicide because they couldn't get out of their satanic coven. In my city alone, and I do not live in a large city. The animal controllers have told me that the number of ritualistic killings and mutilation and torture of animals done at satanic rituals has increased between 7 and 900% just in the last two years. Now we're talking about animals that have been skinned while they're alive. We're talking about animals that have had their hearts cut out. We're talking about animals whose blood has been drained. We're talking about animals who have been tortured in the name of Satan.

[Mike Kosper]

According to an exhaustive report published in Cornerstone magazine in 1990, written by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and John Trott, Lauren Stratford was born Laurel Rose Wilson. She was living by that name when she first pops up in discussions around the satanic panic. It was actually during the McMartin scandal. She showed up in 1986 and through a friend was connected to Bob Curry, one of the McMartin parents. She claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the abuse at McMartin as well as being a victim of satanic ritual abuse in Bakersfield. Nearby. Curry taped an interview with her, but he never used it as part of the case. As another McMartin parent told Cornerstone, quote, she seemed to be telling us exactly what we wanted to hear. Whatever we thought was happening, she said she'd witnessed it, end quote. That same parent went on to suggest that anyone who'd seen a recent CNN special report about the case could have given the exact same testimony. Her failure to become part of the McMartin story didn't stop her. By 1988, she had changed her name to Lauren Stratford and had published a memoir called Satan's Underground. The book was a roaring success and Stratford became a go to source for news organizations and talk shows covering the panic. She was in that famous Geraldo special that we've played many clips from. Still, the greatest toll seems to be on the women who say that they have bred babies, babies that were sacrificed for Satan. This was really the bread and butter of her story.

[Lauren Stratford]

I will probably have nightmares tonight about it, as I have about my Joey that I have been talking about. I wake up screaming for him now in the middle of the night. I dream that he's lost and I'm trying to find him.

[Mike Kosper]

Sickening. So incredibly outrageous. So incredibly unbelievable. Perhaps her biggest television success came alongside Michelle Smith, the co author of Michelle Remembers on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Okay, we don't actually have a clip of this. It's one of those rare things that's been utterly disappeared, not just from the Internet, perhaps never even hit the Internet really, but it's also been disappeared from many, many public library VHS collections. Believe me, I looked. In any case, Stratford's story of abuse went to the stratosphere and she joined Mike Warnke, the world's number one Christian comedian, as he was so often introduced as one of the go to experts on the subject of Satanism in America. But unfortunately, just like his stories, hers were as fake as a $3 bill. Now, she never fooled the McMartin parents, people who had every reason to want to believe her. In fact, when reporters from Cornerstone interviewed Leslie Floberg, one of the McMartin parents, she told them, put this in your magazine. I feel raped by the so called Christians who promoted Laurence Stratford as a victim, just like our children. So she didn't fool them. Why did she fool the rest of us? From Christianity Today, I'm Mike Kosper and you're listening to Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. This season we're looking at the Satanic panic and how chasing phantoms distracted us from real devils in our midst. Today's episode, the Joke's on Us.

[Mike Warnke]

Seem.

[Krista Hardin]

To think of taking hold of me.

[Mike Kosper]

Said run, run, run away from the reaper drawing near but you spun around and you never hear it coming when you're covering up your. Lauren Stratford became the phenomenon she did because of her memoir, Satan's Underground.

[Laura Robinson]

Satan's Underground was supposedly her memoir about the story of how she was sold into a ring of cannibalistic pornography making Satanists who forced her to breed for the church to be to the Satanist church to be a sex slave, to perform all kinds of horrifying grisly acts and to and to be raised to bring on the next generation of Satanists.

[Mike Kosper]

That's Laura Robinson. She's a New Testament scholar at Butler University and writes a newsletter on substack called not peer Reviewed where she's written about Stratford.

[Laura Robinson]

She claimed this was an incredibly well organized national movement of people who were trafficking drugs, pornography, sex slaves, human flesh throughout the entire country. And this is where she spent her childhood. She was abused by her mother and this man who was in charge of this massive satanic empire, his name was Victor and said that she spent years trying to escape from them and finally fled. And now she has been able to tell her story even though the Satanists she claims are continuously after her.

[Mike Kosper]

While the McMartin families didn't validate Stratford, as Robinson sees it, in a weird way, their story legitimized hers.

[Laura Robinson]

You know, now we had this true story of a woman who said that she was in fact a victim of this massive organized crime syndicate, the reality was much different.

[Mike Kosper]

Stratford was a woman with a long history of mental health issues and she'd left an enormous amount of harm in her wake.

[Laura Robinson]

She would kind of go from family to family and Attach herself to usually the mother of the family, sort of demanding constant attention and, you know, having all kinds of mental health crises and legitimizing her need for this kind of care with a series of increasingly elaborate stories about her own victimization.

[Mike Kosper]

One early example, it's 1962. Laurel Wilson is about 21 years old. This is before the name change. And she befriends a Pentecostal evangelist couple named Norman and Billy Gordon. And she really becomes enmeshed with them, practically living with them. She tells them she's living with her father and stepmother, that her natural mother has died and her stepmother was physically and sexually abusing her. She latches onto Billy in particular. And Billie told Cornerstone it was so stressful, she went from weighing 140 to 100 pounds. At one point, Laurel loses her sight and the couple begins praying regularly and fervently for God to restore it. Though there are hints she can see, like when she points out landmarks as they drive down the road. Laurel eventually confesses that she made it up. On another occasion, she locks herself in a bathroom, breaks a vase and begins cutting her face with it. When she comes out of the bathroom, armed with a glass shard, she charges at Billy. Billy's son wrestles the glass away. Throughout the reporting in the Cornerstone story, there's a pattern of her making up stories in which she's the victim of sexual abuse, of being seduced by people of influence and power, of physical abuse. And in many of these early cases, she eventually admits that she made them up.

[Laura Robinson]

I think that the thing that brings people in is just unfortunately there's some really kind people in the world, and there's also some people who really want to take advantage of those kind people, right? Like a lot of the things that people did for Lauren Stratford and who have done for other scam artists in these kinds of stories. A lot of times, just the starting point is when you dig into their specific stories, these are people who have extended hospitality to people who need it before, right? Whether it's a woman who's been being abused by her husband or, you know, a lot of them. Times, like they'll find that they're foster parents, right? Like a lot of times, the issue is just that the person who is doing the scam is very good at finding the empathetic person who is easy to take advantage of. And then once that has happened, they keep them in such a state of panic and exhaustion that they can't really think critically about what's happening. That's what I saw. So Much in so many of the stories about Lawrence Dratford was just the sense that she was really good at keeping people so fixated on taking care of her that they didn't really have a chance to think critically about what they were doing.

[Mike Kosper]

As the years go by, the stories become more and more elaborate and horrific, including accusations that her mother had been involved in and facilitated the abuse. One source in the Cornerstone article told reporters she believes there was a source for these more fantastical stories. She said, have you read the book Sybil? I didn't read it until I started taking my psychology classes. I realized that most of the stories Laurel had told me about her mom's abuse were taken literally from Sybil. You know, the torture with enemas, the piano, the whole bit. Even the part about the mom's abuse with small, sharp objects that rendered her incapable of ever having children. Laurel took that directly out of the book. Laurel would attach herself to a friend, push that friendship to the brink, and then drift on to new people and new relationships. Each time. The stories she told evolved, often influenced by whatever was in the news or whatever she'd just read. After reading Stormy L. Martin's memoir, Laurel started a support group for child abuse survivors and began sharing her stories on the radio. None of these stories were anything like the satanic ritual abuse in the memoir that came later, though, which centered around a character named Victor. In these stories, she was a victim of two men named Elliot Jonathan. By the time of the McMartin case, she was telling people she was terminally ill and in great pain. People who met her during this time, including one of the McMartin investigators, found her in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, drinking big swigs of a white liquid that she told them was morphine, though the medicine seemed to have no effect on her ability to think, speak, or interact. According to six people who viewed the taped interview that she gave about the McMartin case, Laurel claimed to have been in a lesbian relationship with Virginia McMartin, one of the central defendants in that case, and claimed to have been present when the ritual abuse of children occurred. But when you align the timelines of what Cornerstone uncovered about her backstory and the stories she told in the book, nothing about any of this makes any sense at all. For example, Stratford's book alleges that she was brutally raped and impregnated three times times as a teenager, and that each time the child was sacrificed to Satan. Yet during the years she alleges this happened, she was regularly singing with a Pentecostal church group all around Southern California or attending Christian schools and Bible colleges, studying church music and living with family members. Cornerstone found 10 different people who knew her during this period of time and said emphatically she was never pregnant. One of the most interesting moments in the Cornerstone story is when they described confronting Stratford with their reporting. She told them that the counsel she'd been given was not to give them any evidence at all, though she had plenty. But she said the trail's been cold for over 25 years. You can't hope to find any confirmation now. One person she mentioned to them who supposedly gave her that counsel was John Raybon, an official with the national center for Missing and Exploited Children. He told them he actually didn't find her story credible at all. She had called him asking whether she should provide reporters with documentation. The problem, she said, was that she didn't have names or dates or places. Well, Raven told her, you can't very well give it to them, can you? We'll be right back.

[Krista Hardin]

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[Mike Kosper]

The targeting of children is a consistent theme in these stories. Obviously the allegations of abuse at daycares are about the abuse of children, but even with adults there's almost always an angle to the stories that involves children. With Laurence Stratford, it was her own.

[Lauren Stratford]

Child There is nothing that can break the powers of Satan more than prayer can. Sometimes at rituals, and usually at least what I have seen when babies are about to be sacrificed or when there is a sacrifice to be made, sometimes a light has shone, just miraculously has shone in the middle of the ritual. The rituals are always performed in darkness and when the Satanists have seen the light, they automatically have said, then recognized it as the light of God and they close up shop.

[Mike Kosper]

Christian comedian Mike Warnke often told similar stories about things he'd witnessed and I'll warn you this one is particularly gruesome.

[Mike Warnke]

So we go in and we teach them what occult crime is all about, what they're seeing. When they see crimes committed by people who are practicing Satanism, they see evidence in these cases that they can't put together. We had a case in Louisiana last year. It sticks in my mind. It's a little girl, six months old, who was murdered by having her sexual organs cut out, by having her heart cut out. And then they took the flesh off of her skull and stole her skull to be used in satanic rituals, then put her mutilated body in a garbage sack and threw her in the dump. Now, she was only six months old.

[Laura Robinson]

That stuff is so real. If we could just get people to understand this stuff is really going on in America.

[Mike Warnke]

Absolutely. And the thing about it is, it's gotten to be such a problem that there is actually a nationwide task force to deal with these kind of crimes that involves law enforcement officers from most of the states. In the United States, it is a phenomenon that is happening more and more. And the thing that's very scary about it is we see kids getting involved at a younger and younger age. What we saw people doing when they were kids are now doing when they're 13, 14 years old.

[Mike Kosper]

One thing to keep in mind with these stories is the milieu they're showing up in. The clip you just heard is from 1988, the same year Lauren Stratford released her book. It's also the same year that Jerry Falwell would work with the Turner Network to air the recording of a sonogram of an abortion on cable television for the first time, scandalizing viewers with the images of the procedure. A few years later, 1992, a number of conservative Republican candidates for Congress would show images of mutilated, aborted fetuses in their campaign ads. Abortion was newly weighing on American consciences, especially those of evangelicals, with a sense of both the brutality of the procedure and the innocence of the victims. And as it happens, stories of aborted babies sacrificed to Satan begin to emerge as well. They were plausible because of the abortion debate in a way that they might not have been before. It reveals a temptation which I think is common to all of humanity and maybe gives us some insight into how someone like Stratford gained success. An appetite to say, if they're capable of this, they must be capable of that. A desire on some part to embellish, to take an evil that's real and make it even more profoundly and undeniably evil. To heighten the contrasts, to convince other people and of course, the problem is, because it's a lie, it ends up whatever cause it's being told in service of. As a result of the Cornerstone magazine article about Lauren Stratford, her book, which had already sold more than 130,000 copies, was pulled from shelves. She republished it later with others who, if they weren't willing to believe her account, were at least willing to profit from it. One of the most interesting parts of the Cornerstone article is the sense of urgency the writers seem to have, as though they're concerned about how this story might do harm to those who were actually fighting satanic ritual abuse across the country. Remember that at this point in time, people still largely believe the McMartin Daycare story. It would be a while before the details of the coerced interrogation of children would become common knowledge. Two years later, in 1992, Cornerstone would publish another story. This time the authors were John Trott, who contributed to the Stratford story, and Mike Hertenstein. And the subject was Mike Warnke.

[Mike Warnke]

Mike, you've been all over America, around the world. I was talking with Dr. Carl Strader recently. You had been in his church in Florida with some 11,000 people. Carl said that the church was absolutely jammed to the rafters to hear you minister, share a little bit about your background and how you got from where you were to where you are. Because in the natural, it's impossible. In. In the 60s, I was very heavily involved in drugs and the occult. I have a 3 1/2 inch scar on my wrist where my friends used to cut my arm four times a year and bleed my blood into a cup and mix it with wine and urine and drink it for communion to Satan. I was a $125 a day heroin addict in 1964. Severe drinking problem, hepatitis four times from shooting up with dirty needles, bleeding abscesses under the tongue, my hair falling out in fistfuls, my teeth rotting out of my head because of the drugs that I was on. Completely wrapped up in Satan and his works. A Satanist. Yeah.

[Mike Kosper]

Turns out that was not exactly the case. By 1992, Warnke had established himself well beyond the Christian subculture. In 1985, he was featured on an episode of ABC's 2020 titled The Devil Worshipers, where he shared his story. He was also featured as an expert on Oprah Winfrey and Larry King's shows. But for years inside Christian circles, there'd been rumors about him. Questions about his relationships with women, his ex wives, his finances inside the ministry and the veracity of his stories. Where Lauren Stratford Appeared to be a deeply troubled woman with a pattern of taking advantage of people's sympathies. Warnke appeared to be much more straightforwardly a fabulist taking advantage of people's pocketbooks. In his books and on his recordings, he describes becoming a Satanist in College in 1965. He said he had hair down to his waist and long nails. He got involved in organized crime at one point, he said. He also described attending a meeting of the Church of Satan in late 1965 where he met a shaggy haired hippie named Charles Manson. And while that's just the tip of the iceberg of his outrageous claims, the whole thing fell apart when Trott and Hertenstein began talking to people who knew him in 1965 and 1966, for instance, they tracked down his college girlfriend who'd been with him throughout this entire period where he claimed to have been a satanic priest. And she told them very straightforwardly, well, let me just read this section from the article because it kind of speaks for itself. If he says he was a Satanist between September of 1965 to June of 1966, he's lying. How could I not know my boyfriend was into Satanism? I don't remember there ever being a time when we didn't see or talk to each other every day. Every day they ask her. Yes, says Lois. We went to the movies together. I went to the country club with him in the mountains. We went to the beach. We used to go to Jay's coffee Shop. And San Bernardino, that was the big thing. He introduced me to hot fudge sundaes. I spent the majority of that year with him. Lois says she and Mike went to play pool over on Highland Avenue in San Bernardino. We read her a story from Warnke's book Hitchhiking on Hope Street. In it, Mike writes that he got into a gunfight with Ray, a local pimp, at the pool hall. And this is an excerpt from the book. I was drunk as a skunk when I shot at him with the.44 because I missed him by a country mile and blew off the corner of the pool table. The two of us went roaring down the street, screaming and shooting. He got off a lucky shot. It hit me in the leg and knocked me down. Now here's Lois's reaction to reading that from the article. It just says, oh, my goodness, you've got to be kidding me. And Lois dissolves into laughter. Photos from that period of time don't reveal a haggard, strung out satanic priests with long hairs and sharp nails. They show a normal, actually a square looking college kid. And that meeting of the Church of Satan in late 1965 when he met Charles Manson would have been tough for Manson to be there because he was in McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary at the time. Also subsequently, Anton Lavey, founder of the Church of Satan, said he'd never heard of Warnke either. Warnke's fabrications didn't end with Satanism, though. His 1978 album hey document was a collection of war stories from his time serving in Vietnam and recounting combat experiences, treating gruesome injuries and engaging in firefights. Trott and Hertenstein discovered that his military record told a very different story. He did serve in the Navy, but he never saw combat and spent much of his enlistment in California and later in a medical unit in San Diego. In one example, he told the harrowing and traumatic story of treating a soldier whose face had been blown off. That story, it turned out, was true, but it belonged to a fellow serviceman named Darryl Church who had been stationed with Warnke in San Francisco. He recalled Detroit and Hertenstein telling that story almost verbatim. While he and Warnke were stationed together, his ministry also came under fire for serious financial mismanagement, particularly regarding a proposed drug and alcohol treatment center in Kentucky that never materialized. He and his then wife Rose Hall Warnke had publicly announced plans to open a large scale Christian rehabilitation facility which was supposed to be funded through donations and operated under the banner of Warnke Ministries. Despite raising significant funds for the project, no treatment center was ever built and there was little to no transparency about where the money went. The Cornerstone investigation and follow up reporting revealed that Warnke and Rose were living lavishly, owning luxury vehicles, designer clothes and expensive properties. While ministry finances were opaque and often funneled through various personal accounts, former staff members reported being pressured to raise funds aggressively, often without clear accounting. Finally, there was Warnke's relationship with women. He married his first wife, Sue Studer, in 1967 and they were together as he launched his ministry. Around 1975, when Warnke was attending and working at Trinity Bible College, he met Carolyn Alberty and began having an affair with her. His marriage to Stewarter ended that year and he married Alberty the next year. That relationship was tumultuous and Trott and Hertenstein reported Warnke being physically abusive to Alberty. That marriage subsequently ended in 1979, and on January 2, 1980, he married Rose hall, who was by his side through his most successful years. They divorced in September 1991. Not long before the Cornerstone expose was published. Six weeks later, in November 1991, Warnke married Susan Patton, a woman he'd known from his high school days. They're still married to this day. But later reporting would unearth allegations that Warnke had a pattern of serial adultery. A woman in every port, one employee said. Another source said he had a habit of sexually pursuing young women who worked for him in the ministry. The original Cornerstone report ends with an appeal to him. Trott and Hertenstein write, it's not too late for Mike to change if he wants to. The secular press may scoff, and those who consider themselves real Satanists may snicker, but the Jesus of the Bible is still the God of truth. The Lord, who makes room, ruins, lives whole and restores purity to harlots and liars, offers each of us forgiveness and acceptance, not on our terms, but his. We'll be right back. 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 deepbluec all one word. We look forward to having you join us. These characters fascinate me. In their book Selling Satan, Trott and Hurtenstein go even deeper into the Warnke backstory, and it's a tumultuous tale of an unstable childhood, not unlike Lauren Stratford's. Her story is similarly one of childhood interrupted, a broken home, and I'm sure untold trauma and grief. There's a truth to the old hurt people, hurt people. But it's also true that no one gets out of this world unscarred. And wounds may be an explanation, but never an excuse for someone's actions, including their grift. What I think we can see in cases like these, and really this is true in the case of many religious grifters, is that they have a certain kind of antenna to the world around them. They intuit something and they know how to latch onto and get what they're craving out of it. Here's Laura Robinson.

[Laura Robinson]

Again, the broader phenomenon is the credulity around the problem of wanting to believe in the Satanists, right? And there's a lot of different cultural streams, I think, that converge in the Satanic panic. One of the big ones is the growing awareness of sexual abuse among children. That was a movement that had largely kind of come out of the 40s and 50s. Freud, when he was doing his original interviews with all of his different patients and sort of like developing his original theories of psychology, he was very startled to see how many of his patients recalled sexual abuse from their fathers or brothers. And when he started to write on this, he got a bunch of pushback from people saying, that can't possibly be true. These, like, upstanding German men would never do that. Of course, they wouldn't incestuously abuse their daughters. So then he sort of rearranged all that and went back and sort of decided that, you know, oh, actually this is. This is fantasy. This is a kind of a sublimation of desire. But anyways, when the feminist movement got a hold of this and started doing psychology research of their own, it turns out actually that sexual abuse of children in the home is incredibly common. So people started to look back at those stories and try to figure out, okay, where is this coming from? Where is this happening? And I think a lot of where the satanic panic came from and to some extent, where the anti trafficking, the more moral panic form of that, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we know abuse of children is common, but we don't want to face the fact that it's mostly done by parents. Right. Most physical violence against children is done by mothers. Most sexual abuse of children is done by stepfathers or boyfriends or fathers. Right. That tends to be how it breaks down. And the reality is that a lot of homes are not safe for children. So I think the way that we culturally grapple with that phenomenon is that we externalize it.

[Mike Kosper]

Right.

[Laura Robinson]

Or we put it onto something we're more comfortable being afraid of.

[Mike Kosper]

Along with this cultural evolution, you have a kind of culture war going on in the background.

[Laura Robinson]

One thing I think you see a lot with stuff like the McMartin trial in all of the cases that came up around that, is the fact that this was kind of the rise of daycare culture. In the 1980s, we suddenly had a lot more women entering the workforce during their children's young childhood, right. And were dropping their kids off at daycares. And there was, you know, Phyllis Schlafly in the Moral Majority, there was a ton of anxiety about women being in the workforce. There was a lot of contempt for women who would drop their kids off at daycare. And I think that part of the way this manifested was this need to justify the contempt we had for working women. So why should we think that women who work and send their kids to daycares are bad mothers. Well, because the daycares are all run by satanists, right? It can't be that we're sexist. It can't be that we actually don't want women to be financially independent. It can't be that we're uncomfortable with women in the C. SU it's because the daycares are run by satanists, right? Like it's. I think that's where a lot of this comes from.

[Mike Kosper]

Seen this way, we can understand the satanic panic, at least in part as a way we as a society dealt with our anxieties about social change and transition. It brings us back to that Joan Didion line again. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. And there's something appealing about a story in which we get to be on the good side of such a stark contrast between good and evil.

[Laura Robinson]

It was very appealing because of the extent to which the narratives of those moral panics are perfect victims versus perfect villains. You know, Lauren Stratford was able to sort of market herself as this virginal, demure woman who never did anything wrong and never, you know, had any desires of her own, never had any agency. All she wanted to do was take care of children. All she wanted to do was protect kids. I think the thing that was very appealing to her and then by extension the victims of Big Martin, because who's more innocent than a three year old? I think that it was very appealing to go to bathroom people who seem to be completely morally uncomplicated, right? You could argue that this is a lot of the appeal of the pro life movement, right, Is that there's this sort of perfect innocence and perfect purity of the fetal victim, right? And the anti trafficking stuff, you see the same thing, right? It's the images that are often used or the narratives they're often told are of very, very small children, right? Like three year olds, four year olds and people who, you know, we can code as being utterly non sexual in any capacity, as being like without agency of any kind. And those are victims that are appealing to go to bat for. Those are people who I think if you have a very black and white sense of morality and if you have a really high bar of what you think acceptable behavior is, it's hard to be moved and empathetic for people you perceive as more complicated, right? And I guess that's what I've often found really fascinating about the anti trafficking movement is that you never hear stories told or you never see fundraising around Stories of people who are 15 years old and they're being trafficked because they're addicted to meth or because they got kicked out of their home because they're gay. Right. And so why don't these stories get told? Well, because they're not perfect victims. Right. It's a harder sell to get people with really rigid moral standards to want to fight for those people. So I think that where, you know, like the tendency towards fabulism in evangelicalism, I think it comes from the fact that the perfect victim who is utterly innocent against the person who is perfectly evil, not human at all, just evil incarnate. That is itself a fabulous narrative. But it's also the narrative that I think a lot of evangelicals want to hear. Those are the kinds of causes they want to get involved with. But then people who are real humans with the moral complications of normal humans aren't as interesting to them.

[Mike Kosper]

This also aligns with evangelical culture's tendency towards grandiosity. Here's how Robinson describes that.

[Laura Robinson]

I kind of privately refer to this as the evangelical superlative bias, which is just like a thing I started to look back at in my own childhood and teen years, is the extent to which, like, everything always had to be the most with evangelicals, right. It always, like, it's not about rejecting the cultural, like the sexual revolution and the, you know, rightly criticized excesses and destructive patterns and that. So we had like the absolute be. Like, we don't even date, we don't even kiss before marriage. Like, it's not enough to have like a good marriage. You got the best marriage. The marriage is going to be sexy forever. You're going to be so in love with, like, everything was always the most.

[Lauren Stratford]

Right.

[Laura Robinson]

There was sort of this, like hunger for drama in extremity. And I think in that case, then for people who have a tendency to take themselves very seriously, I think the idea of being caught up in a grand cosmic battle between God and the devil is really appealing. Right. I think it fits with the sort of internal hero narratives that a lot of American evangelical culture depends on.

[Mike Kosper]

When I think about this kind of grandiosity, I think about Monty Python's Life of Brian, a movie some people mistakenly think of as profane. Actually, it's a movie about how people miss the point of Christianity constantly. The whole film. Jesus is sort of in the periphery, but people keep mistaking Brian for the Messiah, leading to all manner of trouble for him and all manner of disappointment for them.

[Lauren Stratford]

Hail Messiah.

[Mike Kosper]

I'm not the Messiah. I say you are Lord.

[Lauren Stratford]

And I should know.

[Mike Kosper]

I followed a few Hail Messiah.

[Lauren Stratford]

I'm not the Messiah.

[Mike Kosper]

Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah. Do you understand? Honestly, only the true Messiah denies his divinity.

[Lauren Stratford]

What.

[Mike Kosper]

What sort of just does that give me?

[Lauren Stratford]

Alright, I am the Messiah.

[Mike Kosper]

He is. He is the Messiah. Now off. The point of the film is how we miss the point of Christianity wanting something else, something more immediate, more grandiose, or more made in our image. And it always, always disappoints. Christians do live in a story that places them inside a cosmic battle between good and evil. It just might not mean that that evil force is sacrificing cats in the graveyard next door or torturing children in the daycare down the street. It might look much more mundane and from the perspective of Lauren Stratford, Mike Warnke, whose stories became these fabulous encounters with evil that made them matter. It got them noticed, made them feel seen, as the kids say, the God of the universe numbered the hairs on their head. They didn't need to embellish anything. In each case, they both moved on to other acts. My Mike Warnke went through a restoration process. He described his stories as exaggerated and embellished, and he said that his ministry needed better financial controls. You can read the report of a restoration committee on his website and judge for yourself how much he absorbed responsibility. He's still in ministry to this day. He didn't respond to requests for an interview for the show. Laurel Rose Wilson went from Lauren Stratford to Laurel Grabowski, reinventing herself as a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and carrying out a whole new season of grift. She died in 2002. Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Casper, produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian, with production assistance from Dawn Adams, sound design and mix engineering by TJ Hester sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Rubin, Eric Petrick and Mike Kosper are executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior producer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review. Wherever you listen, it'll help more people find the show. Thanks for listening.