The origins and lessons of ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s

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Moral panics are just one of those things that free societies seem to go through on a regular basis. The "satanic panic" was the big one from the 1980s and it lasted until well into the 1990s. The 2023 documentary Satan Wants You! explains how a single supposed "true story" book, 1980's since-debunked "Michelle Remembers," was the patient zero in causing the panic.

Satan Wants You! tells the sad story of a Michelle Smith, a troubled woman who suffered from depression. After a miscarriage, she got a psychiatrist who was also lay Catholic leader. The psychiatrist decided his patients' rambling, confused recollections were in fact repressed memories of tribal rituals similar to those he witnessed as an African missionary. Together, they documented her memories, twisting them in the process and coming to the conclusion that the mother had willingly offered her daughter to Satanic cult for its practices.

The resulting book, presented as non-fiction, became a media sensation. Far too many people were willing to accept its claims at face value and many of those had media platforms. It helped to solidify the notion of repressed memories as valid science. It was a decade before Michelle Remembers and other similar claims got properly skeptical scrutiny. Satan Wants You! is a sobering reminder of how long this process can take and how much damage can be done in the meantime.

As good as this documentary is, it still leaves out some context. It's a bit too easy look back on these events with the benefit of hindsight and say, "People were really dumb back then!" The reality is that panics take place because they are reactions to real-life concerns people had at the time. If the documentary tonight has any message, it is that level-headed, intelligent people with the ability to influence public opinion need to recognize and debunk these things early.

What made the satanic panic so dangerous was it had buy-in from the authorities, one of the things the documentary does an especially good job at exposing. The psychiatric profession initially endorsed the idea of recovered memories. The FBI and local law enforcement agencies sent their officers to for-real seminars on satanic crimes and set up special investigative units. Innocent people running daycare centers ended up in jail as alleged child molesters.

One the biggest factors in the panic was the fear of religious cults. The 1970s saw the first-ever decline mainline Christianity. Attendance dropped in churches across the country. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so other religious practices, like evangelical Christianity, filled the gap. Eastern religions gained in popularity too. And finally, there were even radical modes of belief.

The 1970s saw the rise of the New Age movement. Pagan religions like Wicca caught on. Hare Krishnas started appearing in airports across the nation. L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology grew rapidly in the 1970s. Louis Farrakhan took control of the Nation of Islam and built it up into a force in many cities. Jim Jones's Marxist-socialist People's Temple grew into a major institution in California politics. An actual Church of Satan was founded in San Francisco and its leader, Anton LaVey, became minor celebrity through talk show appearances. The Bhagwan Rajneesh's cult set itself up in Oregon in 1981 and literally took control of an entire town there. These were just the most prominent examples. Innumerable smaller cults popped up all across the country.

These groups were scary to outsiders and sometimes for good reason. The 1960s ended with the sensational Manson Family murders, in which the members of a small California cult killed nine people. Six years later one member, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme, attempted to assassinate then-President Gerald Ford. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974 by a small cult calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst alleged the cult forced her to participate an armed bank robbery. In 1978, Jim Jones and 909 of his followers committed mass suicide in Guyana. This followed their murder of a US congressman who traveled to Guyana to investigate the cult's activities. The Bhagwan Rajneesh's cult would be involved in the poisoning of Oregon water and the attempted murder of state officials.

Christian groups, unsurprisingly, feared the cults. But they were not alone. Unlike other paranormal obsessions of the 1970s, like belief in ESP, or Bigfoot, or alien visitors, fear of cults was open to skeptics too. One could be a hardcore atheist and still believe in the existence of bizarre, fringe-y cults, because they did in fact exist. The idea that Satan-worshipping cults existed just outside of view was, for many, an entirely plausible claim. After the Jonestown suicides, people were willing to believe that the cults were capable of anything.

Most cults were either radical offshoots of Christianity or their own unique creation. Anton LaVey may have given Satanism a higher profile, but his group was never a threat to anyone and aside from some disputes with the IRS wasn't involved in anything illegal. The 1970s was nevertheless a decade that saw an upsurge in fears of the occult. It was the decade of demonic-themed films such as Rosemary's Baby, the Exorcist, the Omen, and the Amityville Horror. Two of those even purported to be based on true stories. Million-selling rock bands like Alice Copper, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden began adopting satanic imagery and themes in their song lyrics and album covers. Ouija boards were sold by Parker Brothers, the same people that made board games like Monopoly and Scrabble. The devil, it seemed, was everywhere.

The 1980s also saw the rise of fantasy-oriented tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. A sensationalistic 1982 CBS made-for-TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks portrayed the games as occult-like rituals and implied that they could cause young adults to go insane.

Finally, the early 1980s introduced a crime-stopping innovation that inadvertently contributed to the panic. Dairy companies began putting the images of missing or kidnapped children on the sides of milk cartons along with phone numbers to send tips to authorities. This project did lead to many cases being closed but it also gave the broader public the impression that there was a sudden epidemic in child kidnappings. The statistics hadn't changed. Most children were either runaways or caught up in custody disputes gone bad. The disappearances had simply not gotten much attention previously. Many people weren't aware of this context. To those wondering, "Where have all of the children gone?" the satanic panic offered a ready, if false, answer: "The cults took them for their rituals."

There were attempts to derail the satanic panic early on. A 1981 investigative piece in MacLeans magazine debunked most of the claims of Michelle Remembers. But it wasn't until much later in the decade when the invisible hand of the free market began fixing the situation. Satan Wants You! documents how insurance companies leapt into the fray. Child daycare centers had been getting sued right and left for supposedly engaging in the ritual abuse of their charges. The insurers fought the claims in court, proving, time after time, that there was no actual evidence of ritual satanic abuse. As their court wins piled up year after year, others took notice and said, "Wait, did any of this ever happen?"

The answer was a resounding "no." An extensive 1995 report by the University of California's Psychiatric Department and presented to the National Institute of Justice found that "Hard evidence for satanic ritual abuse, especially involving large cults, was scant to non-existent."

The panic was so widespread in part because it was based on the eternal impulse to protect the young, the innocent and the vulnerable. That impulse to err on the side of extreme caution will always be there. Note for example how Lenore Skenazy's "Free Range Kids" movement got her dubbed "America's worst mom" simply for making the case against overprotectiveness. Or how the Covid pandemic resulted in long school closures despite the fact that children were the most resistant to it, closures that did serious damage to children's socialization and education.

The point is that it isn't always one big smashing victory that changes things. Sometimes it takes an accumulation of grinding out small wins to change the tide. Not the most encouraging thing to say to those of us toiling in the trenches, but still: the truth does win out eventually.