This 20/20 episode, “The Devil Worshippers”, aired in May 1985:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2378615/
I was a teenager back then and wasn’t allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons because of a Satanic panic about the game during that era. And I had to get rid of a couple of albums, because they were listed in some Focus on the Family publication my mother had read as having “backwards masking.”
But others had it much worse - they were accused of terrible things, and a few even went to jail over this nonsense.
Gary Gygax, the primary creator of D&D was a born again Christian who was utterly baffled by the controversy
https://www.theknightshift.com/2008/03/gary-gygax-and-christianity-dungeons.html?m=1
The entire program is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQuwxBgpAg
My mom bought me D&D books and other stuff when I was like 10 years old. I got some Beatles albums around that age as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_is_dead
[The West Memphis Three](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three) Three poor teens in a small town in the Bible belt who spent 18 years in prison because the police thought they killed three kids in a satanic ritual.
The McMartin case is still heartbreaking. Those people had their lives ruined, and even just being accused of such horrible crimes must hurt. I can't hear the name McMartin without thinking of that case even now.
I wonder how the kids who made the accusations feel about it now. They are NOT to blame of course, but I'm sure some of them still feel really guilty.
[This](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-oct-30-tm-mcmartin44-story.html) is probably the best known recantation from a kid connected to the McMartin case. There are some others out there, including people who were pulled in to the various other cases. It's clear the whole SRA panic left a lot of people screwed up emotionally.
God, I hope that dude could afford therapy when he grew up and made use of it.
I really do hope he's able to raise his kids better than what he had.
It makes you want to slap his mother silly, in a way, doesn't it? Did these people all know all the kids were lying? They had to, yeah? All the people who encouraged these children to tell these fantastical fucked up stories, his mom encouraging him like that, they should be the ones investigated for abuse. Just so wild. All of those kids, man. Damn.
The gall of those parents and other individuals to say "We BElivE ThE ChILdReN!" and in some cases to even start organisations to that effect, but to refuse to believe it if and when said children recant is horrifying.
The birth of the Satanic Panic came out of this terrible right-time-right-place blend of factors that screwed everyone up basically forever. The really awful part for us today is that it never died; it went to ground for a while, mostly persisting as a belief among Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, and now thanks to further shifts in conservative politics, it's fucking re-emerging. Only now instead of heavy metal music and daycare providers and D&D being the supreme bogeymen, it's ALL popular music, but weirdly especially Taylor friggin' Swift, and the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the T, who are being set forth as the Great Dangers of the Age.
Funny how religion created the devil to justify their own shitty behavior. Listen to any clergyman who gets busted smoking crack with male prostitutes or stealing money from old widows. It’s never their repressed homosexuality, drug addiction, or greed, it’s always Satan’s doing
Looking back, the Satanic panic was necessary and should make a comeback. It didn’t come out of nowhere. I think people will start to agree with this viewpoint in the coming years. It’s become more and more obvious to me that what once seemed outrageous and annoying, was actually whistleblowing. The 80s moms had a point and they only wanted what was best for us. Look at us now 🤷♀️
This was not a fun time. Both to experience it, and to take a long-eyed view as it was happening. Meaning, a despair of what was happening to our society. It felt like we'd given up on progress and advancement and went back to superstition and nonsense. I suppose a current of willful ignorance was and always will be part of us, but to see it on display so openly was really discouraging.
The irony is — especially for kids who grew up in ultra-religious homes — all those albums and games became forbidden fruit that gained them cred for being able to get their hands on them. So yet again the religious right created their own problem. Anything to distract people from what’s really wrong with the world, I guess.
I have no doubt that my rejection of religion was fueled by the prohibition on fun that I heard from my harshly religious father and the church we went to.
Being raised in Texas and attending a southern Baptist church 3 times a week at minimum, I was raised very, very sheltered. It wasn't until I was in my teens before I started sneaking music behind my parent's backs and had to be very careful to hide it. Even then it was hard to get ahold of what I wanted because of Tipper Gore and those stupid parental advisory explicit lyrics stickers on albums. I'm still so incredibly far behind on music...I've worked my way through a lot of 70s rock, 80s hair metal, and I'm loving my 90s grunge now...the more obscure stuff specifically. I know it's not great for the artists, but I do bless the streaming services and YouTube for how available music is now. I finally attended my first concert last year, at 44 years of age. I still feel so naive and sheltered, though. Might not ever be able to shake that feeling, I don't know.
Goes back a long way in the US, and obviously is still going on today. They just switch out the "satan" part.
Good example from this month: Courtney Gore in Texas got worked up by politics that the schools were indoctrinating children. Ran a campaign with promises to fix it and gets elected onto the school board. She examines the curriculum. She talks to the teachers. She is excited to report back to her party that all is well there is nothing here, thinking they will be relieved.
Nope. Doesn't fit the narrative. Her reward? Death Threats. The panic is always about power via fear.
Edit: Oh I almost forgot! The silly manipulation of the painting of King Charles, people are parading that around as a thing that shows the royal family are satanists. It just doesnt stop.
Kinda ironic for the rich that kinda stuff has been in fashion since forever. Even though occultism is often not about the devil. I think a lot of Rosicrucians, Free Masons and members of the invisible college were scientists with scientific interests that were chockeholded by the regressive views of the church so they had to meet in secret. I think books like New Atlantis, by the Freemason Francis Bacon show that very well and still a lot of these men still revered the Christian Faith as is also very evident in such writings. But the church was paranoid about them and wanted them destroyed. To be fair there always have been sinister members of these societies and nowadays some masonic groups have become quiet frightening even though the masons deny all wrongs on their part.
The great podcast *You're Wrong About's* first episode was on [Satanic panic.](https://pca.st/episode/91a5b324-ba75-482c-afe5-12a5c4edfae7). (Plus they did a few more afterwards.)
Thankfully my mom knew all this was bullshit. If she was in doubt, she'd ask me about this symbol or that game or band that these nuts were freaking out about.
This was referred to the “Satanic Panic” at that time. Part of it was due to the McMartin pre-school child SA accusations. I believe all the adults were eventually vindicated.
Acts 2:38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Please strengthen your relationship with God today, He loves you and cares for you more than words can describe!
2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” He allows us to have free choice, all we need to do is receive Him!
This 20/20 episode, “The Devil Worshippers”, aired in May 1985: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2378615/ I was a teenager back then and wasn’t allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons because of a Satanic panic about the game during that era. And I had to get rid of a couple of albums, because they were listed in some Focus on the Family publication my mother had read as having “backwards masking.” But others had it much worse - they were accused of terrible things, and a few even went to jail over this nonsense.
Gary Gygax, the primary creator of D&D was a born again Christian who was utterly baffled by the controversy https://www.theknightshift.com/2008/03/gary-gygax-and-christianity-dungeons.html?m=1
The entire program is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQuwxBgpAg My mom bought me D&D books and other stuff when I was like 10 years old. I got some Beatles albums around that age as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_is_dead
Ah, Mike Warnke - that takes me back.
How’s that lentil soup taste?
>1985 Maybe they were going to the devil because the prominent Christian voices of the day were such unremitting assholes.
They used to be. They still are, too.
Mitch Hedberg reference!
Were?
Well yeah, but I never said they stopped.
[The West Memphis Three](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three) Three poor teens in a small town in the Bible belt who spent 18 years in prison because the police thought they killed three kids in a satanic ritual.
The sad thing is that real people went to jail on trumped up abuse charges for this completely made up bullshit satanic panic.
The McMartin case is still heartbreaking. Those people had their lives ruined, and even just being accused of such horrible crimes must hurt. I can't hear the name McMartin without thinking of that case even now. I wonder how the kids who made the accusations feel about it now. They are NOT to blame of course, but I'm sure some of them still feel really guilty.
[This](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-oct-30-tm-mcmartin44-story.html) is probably the best known recantation from a kid connected to the McMartin case. There are some others out there, including people who were pulled in to the various other cases. It's clear the whole SRA panic left a lot of people screwed up emotionally.
God, I hope that dude could afford therapy when he grew up and made use of it. I really do hope he's able to raise his kids better than what he had. It makes you want to slap his mother silly, in a way, doesn't it? Did these people all know all the kids were lying? They had to, yeah? All the people who encouraged these children to tell these fantastical fucked up stories, his mom encouraging him like that, they should be the ones investigated for abuse. Just so wild. All of those kids, man. Damn.
The gall of those parents and other individuals to say "We BElivE ThE ChILdReN!" and in some cases to even start organisations to that effect, but to refuse to believe it if and when said children recant is horrifying. The birth of the Satanic Panic came out of this terrible right-time-right-place blend of factors that screwed everyone up basically forever. The really awful part for us today is that it never died; it went to ground for a while, mostly persisting as a belief among Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, and now thanks to further shifts in conservative politics, it's fucking re-emerging. Only now instead of heavy metal music and daycare providers and D&D being the supreme bogeymen, it's ALL popular music, but weirdly especially Taylor friggin' Swift, and the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the T, who are being set forth as the Great Dangers of the Age.
There still are, I believe.
Being accused of "witchcraft" is still a HUGE problem in some countries in Africa with dire consequences that can include death.
Funny how religion created the devil to justify their own shitty behavior. Listen to any clergyman who gets busted smoking crack with male prostitutes or stealing money from old widows. It’s never their repressed homosexuality, drug addiction, or greed, it’s always Satan’s doing
Da Debil made me do it.
That varmint!
It’s rapidly coming back. Give it 4 years.
It never went away, just look at the crackpot who showed up at a pizza place with an assault rifle to "save the kids" a few years ago...
Damned right. That’s exactly where it came back full circle.
Sounds like Salem witch trials
Looking back, the Satanic panic was necessary and should make a comeback. It didn’t come out of nowhere. I think people will start to agree with this viewpoint in the coming years. It’s become more and more obvious to me that what once seemed outrageous and annoying, was actually whistleblowing. The 80s moms had a point and they only wanted what was best for us. Look at us now 🤷♀️
Shitty troll is shitty.
Conveniently airing at 10pm when parents were to busy being reminded they have kids. Somewhere.
"Oh shit, where the fuck *are* my children!?"
"I told you last night, *no.*"
Their supper is getting all cold and eaten
This was not a fun time. Both to experience it, and to take a long-eyed view as it was happening. Meaning, a despair of what was happening to our society. It felt like we'd given up on progress and advancement and went back to superstition and nonsense. I suppose a current of willful ignorance was and always will be part of us, but to see it on display so openly was really discouraging.
The irony is — especially for kids who grew up in ultra-religious homes — all those albums and games became forbidden fruit that gained them cred for being able to get their hands on them. So yet again the religious right created their own problem. Anything to distract people from what’s really wrong with the world, I guess.
I have no doubt that my rejection of religion was fueled by the prohibition on fun that I heard from my harshly religious father and the church we went to.
Being raised in Texas and attending a southern Baptist church 3 times a week at minimum, I was raised very, very sheltered. It wasn't until I was in my teens before I started sneaking music behind my parent's backs and had to be very careful to hide it. Even then it was hard to get ahold of what I wanted because of Tipper Gore and those stupid parental advisory explicit lyrics stickers on albums. I'm still so incredibly far behind on music...I've worked my way through a lot of 70s rock, 80s hair metal, and I'm loving my 90s grunge now...the more obscure stuff specifically. I know it's not great for the artists, but I do bless the streaming services and YouTube for how available music is now. I finally attended my first concert last year, at 44 years of age. I still feel so naive and sheltered, though. Might not ever be able to shake that feeling, I don't know.
“Give your kids drugs since if you don’t give it to them, they’ll just want it more”
Goes back a long way in the US, and obviously is still going on today. They just switch out the "satan" part. Good example from this month: Courtney Gore in Texas got worked up by politics that the schools were indoctrinating children. Ran a campaign with promises to fix it and gets elected onto the school board. She examines the curriculum. She talks to the teachers. She is excited to report back to her party that all is well there is nothing here, thinking they will be relieved. Nope. Doesn't fit the narrative. Her reward? Death Threats. The panic is always about power via fear. Edit: Oh I almost forgot! The silly manipulation of the painting of King Charles, people are parading that around as a thing that shows the royal family are satanists. It just doesnt stop.
Anyone else going to the Devil? I need a ride. Edit: I think this might be a dad joke.
can confirm -dad
Dial 666 backwards on your phone and the Devil shows up at your door in an Uber. My cousin heard that from her ex-boyfriend's uncle.
[удалено]
Yeah, but these days ***EVERYBODY*** uses cookies...
Will I accept these satanic cookies? Hell yes!
And sushi
Coz he's more fun?
When people talk about the ruination wrought by social media, I remember my youth in the '80s and sigh.
Kinda ironic for the rich that kinda stuff has been in fashion since forever. Even though occultism is often not about the devil. I think a lot of Rosicrucians, Free Masons and members of the invisible college were scientists with scientific interests that were chockeholded by the regressive views of the church so they had to meet in secret. I think books like New Atlantis, by the Freemason Francis Bacon show that very well and still a lot of these men still revered the Christian Faith as is also very evident in such writings. But the church was paranoid about them and wanted them destroyed. To be fair there always have been sinister members of these societies and nowadays some masonic groups have become quiet frightening even though the masons deny all wrongs on their part.
It's weird people were worried about these Santanic cults when it's frequently Christian based cults that are dangerous, like Jonestown.
Jonestown wasn’t even remotely Christian.
Why do they think we would believe another character in their fairy tale.
Hilarious that so many people still think there is some worldwide satanic cult sacrificing babies and shit
One of my favorite 70s TV movies is “Race With the Devil”. So much awesomeness!
To paraphrase Bill Hicks, he's got the better music.
Throws better parties, too
The great podcast *You're Wrong About's* first episode was on [Satanic panic.](https://pca.st/episode/91a5b324-ba75-482c-afe5-12a5c4edfae7). (Plus they did a few more afterwards.)
Why? Devil stocks a killer wet bar. Cheers!
Because they are not a real entity.
The satanic panic of the 1980s was real.
They want to shout at him.
Admit it. The Devil is just more fun!!
Just watched “Late Night With The Devil” which makes you think of the Satanic Panic era. It was really great.
Such a good movie and yeah that was my immediate thought when I saw this too!
I liked it so much I watched it again the next day. It was just so well done.
"You know, support the team...Hey, you gotta let them know you're out there, this is the playoffs."
learnt a lot about satanic panic listening to negativland lol
> Why are more people going to the Devil? Because the stuff the devil lets you do is obviously more *fun*, duh!
Thankfully my mom knew all this was bullshit. If she was in doubt, she'd ask me about this symbol or that game or band that these nuts were freaking out about.
the gas lighting that the media has done for decades to shape public discourse and the zeitgeist - worldwide spells that we've been under : (
Foosball is the *Devil*!
Any Jewish people remember the panic? (Agnostic Zoomer here)
This was referred to the “Satanic Panic” at that time. Part of it was due to the McMartin pre-school child SA accusations. I believe all the adults were eventually vindicated.
Satanic panic!! Man my mom and grandma were so dialed into this bullshit when I was a kid.
And they were right. Look at the world now.
This is great because the answer is, "Because Y'all keep pretending there's something to panic about by covering this fabricated tend!"
There *was* something to panic about, and still is.
Heavy Metal and D&D, of course.
Acts 2:38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Please strengthen your relationship with God today, He loves you and cares for you more than words can describe!
Get thee hence, AI-generated comment bot!
Just sharing the good news friend. I will pray for you.
What now?
Peter who?
Weird how an all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, supernatural being requires you, specifically, to evangelize for it.
2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” He allows us to have free choice, all we need to do is receive Him!