Vox writer Aja Romano on the Satanic Panic, and how it is still playing out.
Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics for Vox. They’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
The following transcript was machine generated, then edited by me. Apologies for any typos I missed.
Fil Corbitt: Can you introduce yourself and say where you're based?
Aja Romano: Hi my name is Aja Romano. I'm a culture writer for Vox, and I'm in Brooklyn.
Fil Corbitt: How do you define the Satanic panic?
Aja Romano: I view the Satanic panic as two different things that are connected. The Satanic panic refers to a specific era during the 1980s and 1990s …And this led to a number of people being in a number of, of, of institutions being unfairly criminalized and persecuted because they were believed to be spreading satanism basically. So there's that. But then Satanic Panic as a belief system also refers to the ongoing use of the idea of Satanism and hysteria around satanism and satanic ritual abuse to continue to spread moral panics today.
Fil Corbitt: That article you wrote for Vox about the Satanic panic specifically in the eighties into the nineties you wrote that kind of the rise in public interest about satanism and the occult kinda happened just a little bit before that in the seventies. What were kind of some of the roots of this fascination that seemed to take hold?
Aja Romano: So I think you had 2 different trajectories converging. And so you had in the late sixties and early seventies, you had a lot of psychosexual material entering the public consciousness. You had things like the Manson murders really putting the idea of killer ritual cults on the map. You had the rise, obviously, of the counterculture. And there was a moral panic surrounding that. You have these drug crazed hippies ruining everything. And at the same time we saw kind of this counter interest in fundamentalist religion rising.
Aja Romano: And so you had all of this kind of bubbling through the seventies and you had specifically, you had these memoirs. So in 1972, you had this book called this memoir that was entirely false called Satan Seller. That's kind of an example of one of those guys who claimed to have found God after undergoing an incredibly traumatic childhood in which he was forcibly inducted into this Satanic cult where he rose through the ranks to murder children and perform all kinds of unspeakable sexual acts. And then he became the high satanic priest. And... it was completely made up. Completely made up, but it was a bestseller. People ate it up. And it sort of gave rise to a number of other copycat types of writings. And this sort of continued throughout the seventies and into the eighties. …that was sort of the zeitgeist at the time.
Fil Corbitt: One of the flashpoints that you mentioned too is the book "Michelle Remembers", which sort of taps into some of that as well. Can you describe what that was and kind of its impact on this whole movement.
Aja Romano: Yeah, Michelle remembers was published in 1980, so it's sort of like the beginning of the actual Satanic panic, I would say. The difference between Michelle Remembers and everything that came before it, is that it had the stamp of authority because it was co-written by a guy who was at the time an an acclaimed psychologist. He was also faking it. Everything he did was, well, bad -- to put it mildly. Like for one thing, the titular Michelle was his wife who was his former patient. And so the psychologist essentially kind of coaxed her into "recovering repressed childhood memories." There were many psychological methods that have since been discredited. But the memories that she "recovered" were all about her being part of a Satanic cult and undergoing what became known as Satanic ritual abuse.
And then Pazder -- Lawrence Pazder, the psychologist -- helped her publish this memoir called Michelle Remembers. It became a best seller and it really mainstreamed this idea that Satanic cults were real, Satanic cults abusing children were real, and that they were doing so during these like high Satanic rites. It codified essentially a lot of the ingredients, kind of a template for how people would then begin to accuse others of enacting Satanic ritual. When I say it was a template: it actually was used as a textbook for police, for law enforcement agencies during the eighties and early nineties. It was a big deal. Not only law enforcement, but other child psychologists and other authorities, teachers... It was presented to people as "this is a guide for how you can recognize if someone has undergone Satanic ritual abuse." But again, all of this was completely false.
The memoir was completely false. Michelle Smith was never in a satanic cult. But the horse was out of the barn by the time people really realized that.
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Fil Corbitt: How did this phenomenon play out in real life?
Aja Romano: To a degree you can say that it's still playing out. And this is where you make the distinction between the actual period that people think of as the era of Satanic Panic and the pattern that it set in motion. That is, people having their suspicions raised and then going off half-cocked and making accusations against other people and having those accusations land.
Aja Romano: When I say having those accusations land, I mean having them found credible within the court system. What you had beginning around 1980, the same year that the book was published was that people who read Michelle Remembers started to accuse locals in their area of being parts of these satanic cults. The first example were social workers in Bakersfield, California. Accusing people who were childcare workers of being part of a clandestine occult sex ring. And so you had law enforcement investigating these claims. So you had the Bakersfield accusations that led to a full blown police investigation. And those. Actually resulted in 26 people at least being sent to jail.
Fil Narration: Actually in this case 36 people. Most of their convictions were later overturned due to lack of evidence.
Aja Romano: There were many people who actually spent decades in prison because of this. And most of those sentences were eventually overturned. And most of those people were eventually exonerated, but not all of them were. Some of them died in prison. Some of them were only exonerated after they died. And I think at least one of them was still in prison as of a year ago. So, I mean, it's really hard to quantify the human toll of all this.
• • •
In many of these cases, analysts, police and psychiatrists who were often not trained at all in questioning children, were bought in to interrogate young kids and in doing so, would ask leading questions. So, though children should be of course listened to, especially when raising concerns about the actions of authority figures, it seems quite clear in retrospect that these kids were encouraged to confirm what the interrogators already believed. The children in one case told pretty fantastical tales about rituals and blood. One said that the teacher in question was able to fly. To some, this was proof of supernatural satanic forces — but to others, it seemed to confirm that the kids were being encouraged to tell creative stories.
• • •
Aja Romano: I think another really good example is the San Antonio Four who were a group of lesbian women. And this didn't happen until 1997, which is very, very late in the era of Satanic panic. We saw these women being tied to accusations of child molestation on absolutely no basis, but because they were all gay essentially local prejudice played out against them. And and they were convicted on no evidence. And they spent 15 years in prison. Ultimately they had their convictions overturned. But again, it took 15 years
Fil Corbitt: That's something I did want to talk about as well is how allegations of satanism and of occultism are often tied in a lot of these cases, specifically to queer people.
Aja Romano: Something that queer people know really well, but often gets overlooked if you're a member of a fairly stable majority community...Like, if you're a queer person you kind of learn to embrace villainy as part of your identity because what other choice do you have in a society that is constantly trying to turn you into a villain, right? So if you see yourself as a villain and you know you're gonna be villainized anyway, then you you embrace villainy, you embrace deviance. I mean, look at the meme, "be gay, do crimes", right? You perform exuberant deviance as part of your identity, and, Ironically, it then gives the the people who want to persecute you more fodder to persecute you when the time comes.
Aja Romano: Which is how we get to this idea of like, you know, "oh, gay people, like gay men are always pedophiles or gay men are always linked to sexual predation" and all of these other stereotypes that are emphatically not true, but they're still used today to to demonize and marginalize queer people.
Aja Romano: One of the pieces that I wrote this year was a round table that I did with my colleagues, Alissa Wilkinson and Emily VanDerWerff, who are like me, from rural areas. And we all grew up reading this famed Christian fantasy author Frank Peretti and we did this round table on Frank Peretti novels of the eighties and why they were so influential. He wrote this book called This Present Darkness, which paved the way for this era of Christian fantasies, including the Left Behind series. And this book was kind of a fictional version of what I just talked about. It basically posits that there's this preacher in this town who realizes that he's facing a vast left-wing, liberal conspiracy that is being essentially propped up In the shadows by a bunch of demons. The way that it presents the fight between good and evil is that the heroic Christians in the book will essentially be faced with liberals who are saying really nice things about like, love and kindness, and they want you to do yoga, but behind them -- like literally physically behind them -- there's a giant hulking demon. It's all a ploy to suck you into the grasp of Satan. And this book sold millions of copies. I read it when I was like 12 and it f***ed me up for like a whole year. It just really took hold of me and I saw demons everywhere. That's how you think when you're 12. But this is really how this panic spreads. It's because even the most innocuous, anodyne, well-intentioned thing can become swept up in this idea that it's all part of this more noxious larger agenda.
Aja Romano: And that's sort of the root, that's the core of what Satanic panic is, you know? This idea that everything they do is suspicious.
Fil Corbitt: These conspiracies, like you said, are basically claiming there are like satanist daycare workers. There's like this shadowy cabal of underground Satan worshipers that exists at your daycare, in your everyday life, in your peaceful suburb. But what it seems to be, in this really weird twist is like... it's this bizaro, made-up, reflection world of what was actually happening in a lot of the Evangelical and Catholic churches in these places. Sexual abuse was happening in these places and it wasn't being done by a shadowy cabal of Satanists, you know, it was being done by like prominent community figures.
Aja Romano: Right. And you know, we recently learned that the Southern Baptist Convention actually had a spreadsheet for years that it compiled of sexual predators who were in the church, who were in the Southern Baptist Convention as leaders... and apparently they had that spreadsheet and it was there and nobody did anything.
Aja Romano: To some degree, a lot of this is just systemic, right? Like in any system where power is gained by playing the game and then maintaining the game, you're gonna have people who benefit from that system because other people are incentivized to be silent, and not rock the boat. And that's exactly how you wind up with -- with the example of the Catholic church -- decades of people being able to prey on victims and have no consequences because they just keep getting moved around because that's the system. And I think when you do try and speak out against a system like that, you become the target of slander. So like what's the quickest way to shut down any conversation about pedophilia in the church? It's to make the real problem all the people out there who are trying to bring the church down. It's to deflect. And a really, really good way to deflect is to spread hysteria about whatever enemy you happen to be using as your deflection point on that particular day There's a ready list of groups who get that target at any given moment.
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Fil Corbitt: A lot of the Satanic panic did focus on heavy metal music and punk and they were playing with these really interesting narrative lines around power. And so I'm wondering, how do you see power playing out here?
Aja Romano: When you think about music in the eighties and where we were in the eighties, you know, you had the rise of suburbia, especially during the era of Reaganomics. Suburbia was the ideal of the American capitalist dream, and it was supposed to represent traditional American values. You're supposed to have your white picket fence and 2.5 kids and it was supposed to be this garden of safety and traditionalism and law-abiding people who knew what the rules were. And so when you think about heavy metal music in the context of that, heavy metal music just kind of blows everything up. And punk rock too.
Aja Romano: Anytime you have a bunch of kids who are coming from these like supposedly stayed middle class backgrounds talking about their disaffectedness and singing about blowing shit up and wanting to take wrecking balls to the power structure, it's gotta be really disturbing to the people who want to preserve that power structure, right? And so heavy metal music itself becomes a really easy target. Especially because punk rock and metal are both subcultures that are about aesthetics as much as they are about the music itself, right? They're about performing your nonconformity essentially.
Aja Romano: Obviously in punk, you have various specific types of hairstyles and dress and codes that show your commitment to the subculture. The same with metal, the same with goth. You have these lifestyles that are about making the music a part of this larger statement of identity and individuality which conflicts directly with the kind of America that we were supposed to have in the eighties, within this very prosperous era of like yuppies moving to the suburbs.
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In the book Teenage Wasteland, author Donna Gaines follows a group of burnouts in suburban New Jersey, watching as their adolescence becomes adulthood, drinking and smoking weed in parking lots and abandoned industrial sites. Called to the town by a highly publicized and tragic suicide pact between 4 young rock fans in 1987, she watches through the following years as relationships and reputations grow and shift in a friend group adjacent to the tragedy. She tries to understand what kids like this were actually going through.
In one passage she writes:
“For kids growing up now…. in a town like mine, the dreams of prior generations are lost. The suburban frontier no longer exists, there is no sure place to move to find a better life. Land is increasingly unavailable, unaffordable, or unuable. Home ownership is becoming unimaginable. (This was published in 1990 by the way) The trend of remaining at home into adulthood drags on, making the dream of independent living seem impossible. You feel stuck in your hometown forever, like it or not.”
“…The world “out there” is shrinking. The possibilities of suburbia are exhausted and your capacity to dream has reached a dead end…”
Aja Romano: To be this upset, something had to have gotten ahold of them, you know? And if it wasn't drugs, then what was it? It must be Satan.
Fil Corbitt: It's so interesting because what got ahold of them is like... the hollowness or the broken promises of the parents themselves or of the society itself.
Aja Romano: If you listen to the lyrics of these songs, that's exactly what they're saying,… There's a real refusal to be self-reflective and to examine the underlying causes that might be creating whatever disaffectedness you're witnessing. And instead the impulse is to go, "oh, this must be due to some X, Y, Z, larger, almost supernatural force."
• • •
Aja defines the Satanic panic as 2 separate but connected things. First, a specific era in the 80s and 90s where moral hysteria spread and court cases about satanic ritual abuse lead to the very real imprisonment of innocent people. Second, the Santanic Panic is a mode of thought, a moral panic, whose framework continues to exist and sway legislation and public opinion to this day. And one of the eternal battle fields of moral panics like this, is (and always has been) music.
In contemporary culture, we see this playing out with artists like Lil Nas X being lambasted on right wing cable television. His music video for Montero (Call me by Your Name), features him riding a stripper pole to hell and giving a cartoonish representation of the devil a lap dance. It’s a pretty funny and interesting use of imagery, but to hear the talking heads say it, it’s just the newest example in a long line of musicians pedaling satanic sexuality with a nefarious agenda…
Aja Romano: It's probably not a coincidence that the greatest blues musician of all time, Robert Johnson, was also considered to have sold his soul to the devil, right? Because what kind of music is blues? It's all about lamenting your oppression, lamenting poverty, lamenting your disenfranchised state as a black person in the south. When you look at people like little NAS X, who he's been so brilliantly parodying a lot of that mentality, that gives him a certain power. Because obviously being queer, a lot of that queer culture is about reclaiming power and turning symbols and codes that have been used to marginalize you and oppress you and be bigoted towards you -- turning those symbols into reclamations of power and control and joy and exuberance. That's a core part of the queer experience. And what better way to do that than through music?
Featuring: Aja Romano
Tags, Topics and Mentions: the satanic panic, revisiting the satanic panic, heavy metal, mental health, teenage wasteland, bakersfield witchhunt, bakersfield satanic ritual abuse, punk music, frank peretti, this present darkness, lil nas x, robert johnson, satan, the catholic church, southern baptist convention, mass hysteria, wrecking ball to the power structure, reaganomics, suburbia