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"In the 1980s and early 1990s, psychologists, law enforcement officials, nationally syndicated talk show hosts, and at least one sitting U.S. senator believed Satanists were corrupting our nation’s youth through predatory childcare centers, encrypted rock music, and tabletop gaming systems that could serve as literal gateways to hell." -Megan Goodwin, PhD
Brad welcomes Dr. Megan Goodwin back to the show to talk about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Dr. Goodwin explains how individual reports of abuse at the hands of supposed Satanists led to a national movement to root out the hidden cabals of demonic forces in American society. The problem? They didn't exist. But that didn't stop the FBI from spending millions to investigate, local law enforcement from arresting dozens of innocent people, and talk show hosts and politicians discussing the phenomenon on television and on the Senate floor.
For Goodwin the Satanic Panic is a direct precursor to QAnon. Both movements conjure a sexual abuse ring as their enemy while overlooking the sources and perpetrators of abuse at work in the fabric of everyday American life. They are scapegoat movements created to distract from the startling truth that the abuse in most cases is coming from within trusted sources of the community, rather than from demonic outside forces.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today by somebody who was just here and has just so kindly agreed to come back, and that is Dr. Megan Goodwin.
So, Dr. Goodwin, thanks for being here.
Thank you so much for having me back and for giving me yet another opportunity to just shout into the void about Satan, which is one of my favorite pastimes.
When people are like, why become a scholar of religion?
It's like you get to, you yell into the void about Satan.
I do!
That's an amazing life.
I was just shushed on an airplane for doing exactly that.
Oh my, oh, I saw that tweet.
That's ridiculous.
Well, whatever.
Okay.
Well, I'm not going to shush you.
I'm going to just let you roll.
But before that, let me tell everybody all the amazing stuff you do.
You teach at Northeastern University in Boston.
You are the co-host of Keeping It 101, which we talked about last time is an amazing podcast that introduces people to the study of religion.
You are the director of the Sacred Rights Program, which is a program that helps train scholars for public scholarship, something near and dear to our heart here at Straight White American Jesus, and the author of Abusing Religion, Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions, out from Rutgers University Press, and we talked about it last time, we're gonna talk about it again, so... Great!
Yeah!
Last time we talked about contraceptive nationalism and the Catholicization of our public morality and these kinds of things.
Today we're going to talk about something else, and that is the satanic panic.
And so, let me just ask you, you know, in the book, there's a great chapter on this, folks, if you have not got the book yet, go get it, because in the book you really start us off with Some kind of, some sort of, I don't know what they are, facts or sort of quick little nuggets about the satanic panic.
So, before I even tell people or have you tell people the satanic panic, before we even get into like what is it, when did it take place and what kind of resources were put into investigating it?
Oh my goodness.
So, the Satanic Panic happens in what I like to think of as the long 1980s, both because it's accurate and because it really bothers my historian friends.
So, the book that I focus on gets published in 1980 and, let's see, the FBI releases its report saying, golly, we've looked for a long time and we can't find anything.
In January of 1992.
But we have a cultural and particularly a white feminist investment in this idea of ritual abuse that lingers for another couple years and also hops the pond.
So we see some of this in the UK.
But it's roughly like 1980 to mid-1990s.
And resource-wise, pwah!
Well, the best known satanic ritual abuse Criminal investigation lasted almost a decade and was, at its height, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in US history.
The FBI spent almost a million dollars trying to prove that some sort of global satanic conspiracy was attacking, again, mostly white women and children.
Millions were donated to organizations like Believe the Children, and ultimately we have no evidence that any sort of organized satanic effort to pervert and murder American children ever really existed.
But people are still selling books about it, and you know, QAnon brought it back, so yeah!
We'll get to QAnon.
From what you said and what I've read in the book, we've got basically a kind of 12 or 13 year period of people really investigating sort of the idea of a satanic, a set of satanic rings around the country that are attacking women and children and other things.
We'll get to that in a minute.
We've got millions of dollars spent.
We've got the FBI.
If I'm not wrong, Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera are all, you know, hosting people.
Sally Jessy.
Yes.
Absolutely.
We also, we'll get to this too, but Jesse Helms did get the entire U.S.
Senate to agree not to give tax breaks to anyone who served the forces of evil in the year of someone's lord, 1985.
Nice.
Wow.
Okay.
The forces of evil.
Very colorful.
Yeah.
Or witches, forces of darkness.
Yeah.
It's a whole thing, but it's, it's in the, yeah, it's in the congressional record.
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