← The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
Episode 4: Bad Times, Good TV
00:47:57
<p>How did the Satanic Panic take hold? Whitney Phillips, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, guides us through the labyrinth of media and motifs that laid the groundwork for the Satanic Panic in politics and pop culture… and laid down the roots of our current day political landscape.</p>
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A
Who was Elon Musk before he was so loved and so hated? He saved free speech. He created so many different great things. Before the billions, before the rockets, before the never ending headlines. I'm Jacob Silverman and my new podcast explores the prequel to the Elon Musk era. Let me tell you what you don't know about the world's most notorious billionaire understood the Making of Musk. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.
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B
May the black powers of our forefathers make us strong.
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Hail, hail the Lords of darkness.
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Remember this. This is from an episode of the X Files that first aired in 1995.
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It's called Die Die Hand, Die Verletz.
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It's German and it means the hand that wounds. And this X Files episode made a very big impression on our guest today.
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Hi, my name is Whitney Phillips. I am an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. And I am the co author of the Shadow How Anti Liberal Demonology Possessed Us Religion, Media and Politics. If you were to draw a line between what I do now as a researcher and a teacher, I suspect that the X Files is the answer for a lot of it.
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B
After the title credits, we watch a gaggle of teens heading into the forest at night, where one leads the rest in a ritual. We hear chanting from demonic voices somewhere in the distance. The teenagers flee, but one of them is caught by something unseen and dies a gruesome death. And so of course, our heroes, Agents Scully and Mulder, come to investigate on a dark rainy day.
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They say this area is used for witches ceremonies. They well, everybody and anybody who lives around here knows about the things going on in this town. They say there are people who control things.
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Agent Scully insists it's just a murderer taking advantage of local folklore. Classic Scully. But she begins to doubt herself when toads rain down from the sky.
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But that one is scary. And it is the actual, you know, evil incarnate Satan comes to this town.
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And my apologies for spoiling a 30 year old episode of the X Files. But looking back, this really ticks all the boxes of the Satanic panic. Small town teens messing around with alcohol, listening to heavy metal music. Cops giving credence to conspiracy theories. And parents concerned about nefarious influences on their children.
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They've reached into our area from the outside. They again, those three kids are obviously under occult influence.
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They reach into our children in music, television, books.
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They prey on children's innocence.
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At one point, there is a satanic Ritual abuse survival narrative that is recounted by a girl who probably was about maybe a couple of years older than I was at the time, but it was, you know, it was describing all of the tropes of satanic ritual abuse.
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B
This episode of the X Files tells a tale of repressed memories. Child sacrifice and chanting cultists concealed in robes. All themes that we were very familiar with in 1995, thanks to the book. Michelle remembers the McMartin trials and everything that followed. The kicker is that the cult members in this town are the parents, but they've only been lukewarm Satanists, literally just going through the motions.
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C
And then the devil comes and exacts her revenge. She's a very scary substitute teacher and that one's atmospheric. And there's a snake that eats a guy, as I recall.
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It's a dark episode and not just because it was filmed in British Columbia, but it's mostly the fun kind of scary, the suspenseful, creepy, ever so slightly low budget, cheesy kind that you want out of a show like the X Files. And that made it a hit for kids in the 90s who liked to be scared. But this was the episode that really stuck with Whitney.
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Those are sense memories I recalled. I mean they, I internalized them as a young person because the stories were so resonant and especially the idea of adults, you know, conspiracy. All of the stuff that makes those stories so compelling. Oh, to my 10 year old self, totally fascinating. But I didn't know that it was a part of this much broader, much older conversation.
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Ancient stories of gods and devils, medieval tales of demons and bargains, modern allegories where monsters stood in for men. All of these fed the North American imagination for centuries. And when mass media came along in full force by the middle of the 20th century, these stories fed it too. And mass media in turn repackaged these stories and fed them right back to us in the form of Hollywood movies, pulpy paperbacks and nighttime news. In other words, the call was coming from inside the house. I'm Sarah Marshall. This is the devil you know, in the North American cultural imagination, there is no bigger bad than Satan. We've come a long way from the 13th century Codex Gigas, aka the Devil's Bible, which depicted Satan as a squatting little goblin with a green face, stuck out tongue, curly red nails and what appears to be polka dot underwear. Since then he's been portrayed as everything from a fast talking courtroom lawyer to a seductive heartthrob, to a really talented musician.
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The Devil went down to Georgia. He was Looking for a soul to steal. He was in a bind because he was way behind and he was willing to make a deal when he came across this young man sewing on a fiddle and playing it hot. And the devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said, boy, let me.
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Tell you what pop culture in the late 60s and 70s helped us see Satan as something more frightening and more personal because he'd always had demons. But now it seemed like he could recruit anyone. Your friend, your neighbor, even your loving husband.
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Rosemary. Guy. The Bramford. The girl, the dead girl, the neighbors.
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Rosemary's baby premiered in 1968. It follows a couple, Rosemary and Guy Wodehouse, who move into a too good to be true apartment in New York City. In this case, the catch is the satanic cult next door. The horror of the film comes from the audience slowly realizing at about the same time Rosemary does that the cult has drugged her and allowed her to be raped by Satan himself so that she can birth the Antichrist. And that they have done so with the help of her husband.
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They probably made some sort of deal with Guy. They gave him success and he promised them our baby to use in their rituals.
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I was afraid you wouldn't believe me. The movie is, among other things, an apt metaphor for bodily and relationship autonomy in the 1960s, or lack thereof. After all, the movie's director, Roman Polanski, would later flee the country after drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Life really does imitate art. Rosemary's Baby was the first hit in what was to become a triple crown of devilish box office success. The horror Trend continued in 1973 with the Exorcist, adapted from the best selling novel. And in 1976 with the Omen, both of which depicted satanic forces finding their way into the family through the body and soul of a child.
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I'm Damien Carras. I'd like to help you. Where's Regan? In here with us.
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The Exorcist in particular struck a nerve with the public. In Los Angeles, reporters with KNXT spoke with moviegoers who couldn't stomach the entire film. It just scared me to death. Things just like this just really scared me to death. I'm just nervous.
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Are you gonna go back in and see more of the movie now?
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Probably, yeah.
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What are you gonna do?
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Right now I don't wanna see it, but my curiosity's killing me. I have to see it. For a young Whitney Phillips, the Exorcist hit close to home.
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And so, I mean, I remember my mom telling me stories of when she watched the Exorcist, and she had been raised a Catholic, and, and she was so afraid of that movie because she had really internalized the idea of Satan incarnate.
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These movies also provided the public with imagery that they could use to try and spot Satanists in the modern day. Black candles, covens, chants, robes. Everybody saw Rosemary's Baby, or at least heard about it. Everybody saw the Omen, everybody saw the Exorcist. Everybody now had a reference point for these movies and the fears they contained. According to Whitney, it wasn't that stories like Rosemary's Baby, the Omen, and the Exorcist helped to whet an appetite the public previously didn't have. In fact, it was the other way around.
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I mean, Hollywood is the driver of a lot of culture, but Hollywood is also the regurgitator of a lot of culture. And so it is never the case usually that, you know, these large media or entertainment institutions create a top down world in which suddenly that's now what people are interested in. People are interested in stuff. And then Hollywood notices, oh, you like superheroes, do you? All right, I will. You know, let's make 100,000 superhero movies.
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It's not that there's a straight line, per se, from grassroots occult interests to Hollywood blockbusters, But what is fascinating here is the process of cultural osmosis. It's a cycle where you can't really see where it began, but nevertheless, the fiction gets into the bloodstream and it finds its way into nonfiction media, reinforcing its place in the culture. And eventually all these tropes just flow from fiction to reality and back again seamlessly.
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In the 1960s and into the 70s, you start to see this really very strong interest, growing interest in New age religion and in the occult more broadly. So much so that in 1972, Time magazine had a magazine cover with the title the occult revival.
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In 1978, CBS Chicago reported on local witches and Wiccans. We see them chanting in black robes, of course, but also doing healing sessions, reading tarot and working, quote, white magic for good only.
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Shirley Clark is the high priestess of.
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The Calumet Pagan Temple in Calumet City.
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Her specialty is healing, and here she's performing. So people were really interested in the occult, in sort of witchy stuff, in tarot, in astrology, and a lot of the things we would recognize now as being like witches of TikTok kind of stuff. But people were really interested in that and also were playing with occultism as a kind of identity, that there was a sexy fad of suburban witches. And it wasn't so much an actual kind of religious expression, although some people did engage in neo pagan religious tradition. But it also was just like a way to get invited to parties, though.
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It wasn't all party talk and mystic crystals.
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Then you had the rise of this category that seemed to come out of nowhere, of the serial killer. And a lot of those early 1970s serial killers, they either reference Satan or they flashed the pentagram.
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In August 1969, members of the Manson family brutally murdered seven people in Los Angeles. Among those killed was Sharon Tate, the young wife of an up and coming director, Roman Polanski, who, if you'll remember, directed RoseMary's baby. The AP covered the ensuing trials in.
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1971, when the jury of 12 delivered verdicts of guilty on 27 counts of first degree murder against Charles Manson and three members of his family.
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And of course, the Manson family represented an extreme manifestation of fears about the counterculture hippie movement. Suburban girls who ran away and wound up on a California movie ranch painting misspelled Beatles lyrics on the walls with their victims blood. From a distance, the Manson girls looked like teen victims of sex, drugs and rock and roll, even if their story was really a tale as old as time. A story about vulnerable young women whose lives were controlled and eventually destroyed by one dangerous, yet surprisingly boring man. Meanwhile, the growing presence of occult themes in mainstream media, especially alarmed people of faith, particularly in the evangelical Christian movement. Hal Lindsay's 1972 book, Satan is Alive and well on Planet Earth encapsulated those fears. Here's Lindsay himself, speaking in a program he released in 1991, Apocalypse Planet Earth.
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So they destroyed faith in the Bible in the general public. And after that job was done, Satan came in with these ace plants. And now we have the most amazing resurgence of Satanism and the occult that's ever been seen in the world.
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In short, the book argued, occult movements of all kinds were paving the way for the Antichrist.
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All of these things are in relation with each other. So. And then at the same time, during the 1970s, you start seeing weird news stories crop up. Stories about cattle or alleged cattle mutilations where the cattle were allegedly exsanguinated. And other kinds of worries about UFOs that were also somehow thought to be Satanic.
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There actually was a spate of so called cattle mutilations in the US in the 1970s in which ranchers reported finding corpses with their eyes, mouths and genitalia removed with what was often called surgical precision. The obvious answer, aliens. But eventually, a New culprit was identified.
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On the night of April 30. The cattle belonging to the Rose Allen family near Ponchatoula are restless. In a matter of days, eight of them will fall victim to a cult of Satan worshippers. And what is left behind is perhaps the most visible sign yet of what is becoming an expanding phenomena, especially in south Louisiana and nearby Mississippi.
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That's from New Orleans station WWL TV in 1988. It turns out that maggots and scavenging animals are also capable of this kind of surgical precision. But never mind that in the 1980s, the obvious answer became satanic animal sacrifice. And when it came to satanic ritual abuse stories, the local news was almost always the first source to break them. As you'd expect. But given the ghastly details, such stories rarely stayed only local for long. As media outlets invested in the satanic panic, more and more American towns saw their own accusations of satanic ritual abuse. And these quickly cycled into the growing numbers of sensational reports, even when the story seemed, shall we say, flimsy.
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You know, a lot of sort of teen crime had occult elements, either because these young people were disturbed or because Satan was like how you scared the olds. And so, of course, they would draw pentagrams and stuff when they were doing mischief.
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Take this report about Satanism in Baltimore, produced by WJZ TV in 1990.
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You know, heavy metal music is an.
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Important part of teenage satanic rituals. Groups like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Slayer, however, are considered black metal, not.
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Only because of the messages in the.
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Music, but because of the messages on.
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The COVID As a matter of fact, the youth tell me that Slayer, the word Slayer stands for Satan laughs as you eternally rot.
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You're kidding.
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This is what the youth have relayed to me.
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I would argue that the spread of these kinds of news stories would not have been possible without Ronald Wilson Reagan. Yep, we're going there. Throughout the 70s and 80s, local news increasingly had to compete with large national networks. From primetime news to documentary programs to nationally syndicated talk shows.
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They need to find more content to fill the space on the air. And then they also knew that they had to make sure that they packaged it in the most compelling way possible. And so you start to see increasingly the rise of a kind of combat television or television that is really centered on sensationalism. I mean, during the 1970s, this increase.
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In TV sensationalism was thanks in large part to the death of the Fairness Doctrine. This was a rule in the United States that required broadcasters to present controversial issues Fairly, essentially by giving equal time to opposing viewpoints. But in 1987, the FCC, under a Reagan appointee, decided it was time for the Fairness Doctrine to go. The FCC then released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. All very much on brand for the Reagan era. RIP to the Fairness Doctrine. We hardly knew her.
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But it's actually really important because that doctrine, when it goes away in correspondence with these other regulatory shifts, it basically means that the satanic media had more places to go, more places to travel, and was able to do more as a result. So, I mean, back when TV first emerges in the 1950s, the whole purpose was to be non controversial. That was the goal. He wanted to appeal to as many people as possible. And so a lot of the media coming out of Hollywood at that time, and television as well, were. It was bland. Now, heading into the 80s, television needed to appeal in this niche way and had to be maximally interesting and engaging. So then, what is more interesting than Satan?
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So by the 1980s, it's kind of no wonder that we increasingly see news media simply giving the public what it wants. It's good for ratings, it's good for profits, and in return, the public gets to feel informed and entertained. Infotained. Win, win, right.
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It isn't surprising that when you start to see a lot of these daytime talk shows really latching onto the idea of the satanic panic and all of the, all of these teens and all of these risks and dangers and threats to the family, that it is, the fact that that happened is not some weird anomaly that is a function of the media landscape as it had evolved up until that moment.
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The live talk show was reaching its zenith in the 1980s. Through interviews with real people, they explored intensely private aspects of people's lives and discussed not just sex and relationships, but violence and trauma. Sometimes it feels like they reveled in it. These were an important part of the media ecosystem because the stories were often recycled into Hollywood films and made for TV movies and picked up by national network news shows. And they turned their hosts into household names like Sally Jesse Raphael, come face.
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To face with the man that she says sexually tortured her in satanic rituals for 17 years. A show you don't want to miss.
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But I want to take a moment to acknowledge that while this was an absolute disaster, journalistically, ethically, legally, really across the board, what a great time to be a kid, home with the cold, watching daytime tv. I want you now to listen to an episode from the Queen of daytime TV herself, Oprah Winfrey. Well, my next guests say that most satanic cults in this country are extremely dangerous indeed and should be stopped. My first guest says she was used as a young child in a satanic cult. This is from an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show that aired in 1988. Eventually forced to witness the sacrifice of her own children. She's written a very courageous book about her life in a satanic cult entitled Satan's Underground. Please welcome Lauren Stratford. A lot of people at the time said that they had sacrificed or eaten babies. Remember all the dead babies in Michelle Remembers. This got thrown around so much after the book's publication and as the story spread that eventually the question did arise. Where were they getting all these babies? One 1990 video reportedly produced to help train police had this story.
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The National Clearinghouse on Satanic crime In America estimates 50% of the cases of missing children and bizarre murders may be linked directly to satanic and other occult organizations.
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But Lauren Stratford, author of a book called Satan's Underground, offered a somehow more plausible answer. Satanist cults were breeding babies specifically for sacrifice. And she knew because that was the job she used to have.
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And I was used as a breeder to have children. And the last one, Joey, was six months old when his life was taken in a satanic ritual.
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And so what happened to your other two children? They were used in snuff films.
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They were used in snuff films, which means that they were used for pornographic purposes where they are tortured, abused, and finally their lives are taken for filming. Yes.
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And how old were they?
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They were six weeks old.
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Stratford's book was a hit within Christian media. It earned endorsements from prominent evangelicals like Hal Lindsay. And of course, Lauren Stratford got an enormous platform in mainstream media when she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. By then, her outrageous claims didn't seem so outrageous. North Americans had been primed for them by decades of media centered on occultists and satanists, harming primarily women and young children. And if the detail seemed extreme, wasn't that more reason to believe it? Who would make up something like that? Spoiler alert. Lauren Stratford would make up something like that. Journalists at Cornerstone, a Christian magazine, eventually did the investigative work to prove that her story and her book were fabrications. Stratford then took the logical step of withdrawing from the spotlight, changing her name, and moving on to pretending to be a Holocaust survivor. It's hard to know if stories like Michelle Remembers and Satan's Underground would have made as much of a splash if they were marketed as fiction. But it's easy to see that they wouldn't have had such an impact on the culture if people with platforms like Oprah didn't present them to a national audience so uncritically as bare fact. No hard questions, no asking for specifics, just softball after softball to extract every obscene detail. The Satanic panic was an integral part of the success of tabloid TV and infotainment. And that makes it an undeniable piece of our current media ecosystem. We may be through with imaginary Satanists, but imaginary Satanists aren't through with us.
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Foreign. Hi, I'm Xing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack.
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And together we host Good Bad Billionaire.
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The podcast exploring how some of the world's richest people made their fortunes. And we are back with a brand.
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New season of billionaires.
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Yes, movie megastar Arnold Schwarzenegger, America's richest.
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Self made businesswoman, Diane Hendricks and co.
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Founder of Sarah Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, to name just a few.
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And we're asking you to decide if.
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They'Re good, bad or just another billionaire. Good, bad billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Satan is in the news a lot. He's in a lot of films.
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Satan is having a moment.
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Satan was having a moment. The sensationalist heartthrob of our time. Right, but then you've got this other backdrop, this other political backdrop, where all of those same ideas, good versus evil, is just playing out in a more subtle and a much more political and cultural kind of way, especially within conservative spaces. You're not necessarily talking about the devil, but you're talking about liberals which sort of have this stand in for everything that's said to threaten the family and America and conservatism and God.
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Whitney's getting at one of my enduring questions for this project. How does a pretty much secular institution like mainstream media, full of people whose job is literally to parse reality, end up becoming the purveyor of panic? The profit motive goes a long way in answering the why, but not the how.
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C
Then that leads us to evangelicalism. So in the 1970s or 1960s and 70s, you have the rise of Pentecostalism and Pentecostalism had a very strong media game, but these media were grassroots media.
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B
And is that because of changes in technology and just like Hectograph or whatever?
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Changes in technology. That's right. I mean, so you have the introduction of things like audio cassettes and suddenly people could exchange a lot of like taped recordings. Of things. And so within these circles of, you know, people who were really sort of centering a lot of their discourse around the presence of Satan, fear about Satan, there was just an enormous. There was an explosion of these media that could circulate. So what do you do if you don't trust or you don't think that you ever are going to have a place within mainstream media? Well, you create your own.
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Cross America. Starting it.
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A little ballerina in me thinks the tank steals the sh.
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Okay, Jonathan, we're sending you back in. Will you help ESP Ministries in their battle against Satan? ESP Ministries depends on the regular financial support and prayers of Christians like you and churches like your church. Thank you.
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C
You then start to see the professionalization of what we now could start to recognize as the early articulations of the satanic panic.
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Alongside the Greater accessibility of TV in the 70s, preachers and teachers began to shift their focus to the wider world, offering commentary on current events, news and politics from their platforms, or in their view, perhaps responding to what they saw as obvious occult influences in mainstream culture. Nationally syndicated shows like the 700 Club helped beam these messages across the US and eventually the world.
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The media bombards kids today with messages, many with satanic overtones. Satan's not stupid. He understands that kids today are visual. And so his making a play for excitement, for total involvement.
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Evangelicalism ends up doing something really unique and interesting with the figure of the devil. So there's a subtle but important difference between the devil of evangelicalism and the devil of fundamentalism. So within fundamentalism, the devil lived in hell, like the devil was far away in another zip code, and you would go there and you would meet the devil when you died if you were a sinner. For evangelicals, the devil becomes a here and now threat that is embedded in all of the secular things that people happen to really like in life, Any kind of secular education, entertainment. That the secular world, the humanist world, was where the devil lived. And so the devil was simultaneously a theological figure, but also, maybe more importantly, the devil was here.
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This theology of the devil as an active participant in world affairs and culture no doubt helped motivate evangelical media production. It also coincided with a marriage between evangelicals and conservative politicians.
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The nomination and subsequent election of Ronald Reagan and the election of a conservative Congress brought the new Christian right into the forefront of the American political scene.
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During the 1970s, a Baptist radio and TV preacher named Jerry Falwell rallied conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants to political activism.
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Moral majority endorses the flag. The family and the freedom of speech.
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According to KT in Tulsa, targets of their ire, the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, gay rights, racially integrated public schools.
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And the Panama Canal Treaty, all of which they oppose.
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To them, these markers of social progress were evidence of the devil's work on earth, Though what the devil wanted with the Panama Canal Treaty remains unclear.
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Culture was where the devil was. And so then you have to find a way to exercise America's demons. The focus then was on stuff that runs counter to, quote, unquote, real America. Stuff that would be regarded now as being, quote, unquote, liberal. Those were all the things that the devil lived inside. And so that becomes really strongly wrapped up in discourses around family values. You have these very religious evangelical people making at the time very religious arguments, but the language they were using and the things they were targeting basically sounds like today's fights over school board stuff, like, you know, liberal indoctrination in textbooks. So it was like an apocalypse you can take a bite out of now because it wasn't. You weren't waiting for revelation before there needed to be this ultimate fight between good and evil. It was already happening. And it was your job to stand up and fight against the forces of darkness. That ultimately is the backdrop that the satanic panic emerges out of.
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B
How does that make the leap into people who don't even necessarily identify as religious, kind of bringing that language and that logic into their maybe defense of something, like, as you said, the kind of family values discourse, Something that you could argue is not a religious debate, but that has the logic of one at a certain point.
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Yeah. A perfect example of this is the fight over the allegations of Satanism in rock music. So the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource center, is formed in the 1980s and it is composed of a number of wives of politicians and other prominent figures. It was bipartisan. That's important to note. You had people like Tipper Gore, Al Gore at the time, Senator Al Gore's wife, they were both Democrats, so advocating for. Well, we have to protect the children from these filthy influences in rock music.
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Thank you, Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Gore.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are asking the recording industry to voluntarily assist parents who are concerned by placing a warning label on music products inappropriate for younger children due to explicit.
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Sexual or violent lyrics.
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That's Tipper Gore herself in a Senate hearing in 1985. Fun fact about Tipper Gore, the former second lady was in an all girl band in high school. She played the drums. Years later, in 2009, she even played on stage with The Grateful Dead. But you never would have guessed that if you saw her on TV in 1985, because she and the PMRC were essentially able to put metal, rock and pop music on trial.
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Within that discourse, you heard a lot of fear over kids and drugs and kids and sex and kids and disobedience. They're rude to their parents because of this terrible rock music.
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On an episode of CBS News Night Watch, one member of the PMRC named Candy Stroud put it this way with a totally straight face. In the 50s, Elvis Presley sang, I.
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Want you, I need you, I love.
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You, or come along and be my teddy bear. Now Morris Day in the Time sings, if the kid can't make you come, nobody can.
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I want to get you off, Baby, what does it take to get you off? In the 50s, Little Richard sang Good golly Miss Molly, you sure know how to ball.
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B
Now Prince sings I met a girl named Nikki. I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. Very Ben Shapiro coded, wouldn't you say?
- [36:25]
C
There's some whores in this house. Hold up. I said certified freak seven days a week. Wet ass. P word. And then there also was this concern over Satanism. But it wasn't framed as Satan is actually going to come get your soul. It was Satanism is just a. It's like a cultural kind of activity and it encourages all these bad deviant behaviors and it pushes teens to suicide. And so the PMRC would send out packets, they were called Satanism research packets, among other materials, to concerned parents. And they eventually were able to get congressional hearings that were just a circus and you know, really good TV at the time.
- [37:08]
B
In the beginning, the PMRC wanted a full on rating system like what we have for movies and for the music industry to pressure stations not to run explicit songs and to reassess the contracts of artists who put on performances deemed too violent or sexual. Sex and rock music, imagine. Eventually the PMRC settled for those blocky black and white labels that say parental advisory explicit content, which you still see around today and probably most of us grew up seeing as a mark of quality. But scratch the surface of this mind numbing display of bureaucratic posturing and you will find a quite conservative and importantly a very religious message.
- [37:58]
C
If you actually look at the evidence, and I'm scare quoting right now, the evidence supporting these, these dangers, the dangers of porn, rock and Satan and rock, they were all evangelical sources. These evangelical sources were making these very explicit religious arguments that Satan incarnate, like evil is actually working through rock music. But when that Information gets fed into the PMRC filter, all of the religious edges get sanded off. And so what you're left with is just, well, we've got to. We're worried about the children. And those same arguments essentially secularized and reframed so that the threat is not evil incarnate, but it's deviance.
- [38:46]
B
I think that this idea of sanding the religious edges off is really key to understanding the media's role in the Satanic Panic. What coverage, like daytime talk shows and tabloid documentaries did was redefine a religious label for a secular audience. Sinners became deviants. This label of deviant could be applied to almost any of the pressing social issues of the era, like the racist war on drugs and the criminal queerphobic treatment of the AIDS epidemic. And that allowed the underlying messages of the Satanic Panic to spread without the secular world seeing it for quite what it was, a religious crusade.
- [39:32]
A
The Investigative News Group presents the Geraldo Rivera special. Whether a Satan exists is a matter of belief, but we are certain that Satanism exists. To some it's a religion. To others, it's the practice of evil in the devil's name. It exists and it's flourishing.
- [39:53]
B
That is from Geraldo Rivera's special two Parter Devil Worship. This alleged expose of widespread satanic violence was seen by one third of the American households that were watching TV that night in 1989. There's a lot I could say about Geraldo's work here, but I bring up this clip because it alludes to an aspect of the panic that's rarely discussed.
- [40:20]
A
How could this happen here to a nice boy from a good Catholic school in a fine middle class family?
- [40:26]
B
The Satanic Panic's proponents and alleged victims were largely white and middle class, in part because so many of its cases cropped up in rural and suburban areas that remained fairly racially segregated. So as you might expect, the targets of these fears and accusations were often queer people, people of color, or both. And you'll actually meet a few of them later on in this series. And when audiences saw news coverage of these quaint small towns or tree lined suburban streets rocked by satanic accusations, they saw them in the context of news coverage about so called urban decay and inner city crime. Especially as the war on drugs progressed and mass incarceration accelerated. The unspoken sentiment running through so much of this coverage was that people of color were supposed to be both dangerous and endangered. But white children could expect to be virtuous and safe unless they were corrupted by the devil. The Satanic Panic in other Words was so shocking because it was a story of ritual abuse happening in a white neighborhood.
- [41:40]
C
By the time you get to the 1990s, you know, after the satanic panics had sort of run its course, all of the underlying dynamics of pointing to particular groups of people and saying, either literally or metaphorically, they're evil, they're bad, they're destroying the country that had just become part of family values discourse. Maybe you could even more radically argue the bigger backdrop of this sort of idea of the liberal devil, that that actually is the overarching discourse. And the satanic panic was just the most extreme articulation of it for this certain period of time.
- [42:18]
B
I find the logic that you're outlining here really interesting because it feels like the language of religiosity has been taken away, but the sort of superstition is still there. And this certainly feels very relevant at this very moment. What kind of logic is being sold to people, I guess, or what kind of worldview do you see replicating in these panics in terms of the way people are maybe taught to see or reinforce what they deem their right to to see as some kind of an existential threat? Whether they describe it as satanic or not.
- [42:59]
C
It's all those things that undermine the family or that threaten American values, which just so happen to be associated with quote, unquote, liberal politics. The underlying belief, you know, that that persists through this day. And one of the things that was really striking during the final months of the 2024 election, where you are seeing explosions explicitly satanic language being used to describe Kamala Harris and used to describe the Democrats.
- [43:29]
B
What's an example of that?
- [43:31]
C
Well, Trump calling Kamala Harris evil, or various right wing politicians specifically using the language of Satan, Satanism to describe the Democrats, the circulation of the idea that liberals are the devil. This language was really explicit. It was just this generalized kind of sense that this liberal leftist woke, slash Marxist, whatever. All these different words that got used to describe the same basic idea that there is a group of people in the country who are a threat to America, they're a threat to God, they're a threat to conservatives, and they are a threat to the family. I mean, all of the discourse around trans stuff ultimately comes back to that same argument. So people may not be using the word Satan or the devil, and they may not even be saying the word evil, but it's still this cosmic drama frame where you've got ultimate good pit against ultimate evil, and revelation is already here. We are currently fighting that battle of Armageddon right now. So if you imagine this back and forth between people who are guided by demonology and then people who feel targeted by demonology, it becomes really clear really quickly there is a fundamental disconnect between people who live on. On different sides of that world. And so much of it has to do with this persistent continuation of the satanic panics, and it is what is currently trapping us in our political hell.
- [44:53]
B
Right. Well, and also, I mean, the way you talk about this, it does make me reframe things a bit for myself. And this idea of, you know, to live in America today is to wake up in the morning and it is very tempting, especially lately, to feel like 70 million people don't want me to be alive, basically. And, you know, and I wouldn't disagree with anybody who. Who takes that away from how things are, because it has been quite explicit in many ways. But. But also this. I don't know, the way you describe it as like, people are going around scared and are being encouraged to see the devil everywhere, including in me and in, you know, my friends and community. And that's extremely scary for my community. But it's also. You have to. I guess I feel like you have to be pretty scared before you're. You're ready to believe that the devil is behind everything too.
- [45:46]
C
I mean, pretty scared, or you just consume a lot of media.
- [45:49]
B
Well, you know, those seem to go hand in hand sometimes. And also, I mean, it occurs to me that, like, the idea of exorcising evil from America, exorcism is such an appealing concept because it's how. I think in the 70s, we also dreamed therapy could work, like with EST or whatever, where it's like, yeah, you just got a guy and he just yells at you for a few hours, and then you're better. It's like, oh, that was easy. And this fantasy of doing it once and being done, and I think this feeling of frustration that maybe we feel as Americans who are sold on, like, yeah, your country was created during the age of Enlightenment, and it's just been getting better ever since. And it's like, no, I think actually things just keep happening and you have to just show up and work on it every day.
- [46:30]
C
Yeah. No, I mean, the phrase the arc of the history bends towards justice. I think that the arc of history bends towards weirdness. And it therefore is even more important to show up and try to make sense of the weirdness as best as you can and then keep doing it. Because again, this is a very important time to at least try to get things right.
- [46:51]
B
In the Satanic Panic, the public wanted to tell a story and the media wanted to sell a story, and everybody won and everybody lost. If I were to succumb to my human desire for a nice little complete story with a bow on it, I could wrap this all up by saying something like the Satanic Panic is yet another iteration of the Faustian bargain. People sold their souls for ratings, for a sense of moral certainty, for a headline, and we are still reading, reaping the consequences of that bargain in our ever more fractured democracy. And all of that would be true. But for now, I'll resist the urge. Thank you for listening to the Double youe Know. Our producer is Mary Stephan Hagan. Fact checking by Katherine Barner Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. Thanks to Jay Cowett for voice coaching. Your voice actors in this episode were Alex Steed and Chelsea Weber Smith. In previous episodes you've heard the vocal talents of River Butcher, Aubrey Gordon, Michael Hobbs, Jamie Loftus and Janet Varney. I've been your host Sarah Marshall. Our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Rookhni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is Manager of Growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is Director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad free listening subscribers subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium Channel on Apple Podcasts.
- [48:55]
A
For more CBC Podcasts go to CBC CA Podcasts.