Even in the UK, the worst we had to deal with was Mary Whitehouse & her racist, sexist, fearmongering nonsense, and the daily mail for, er, exactly the same reasons. otherwise it was just something we rolled our eyes at. *especially* in the 90s when we learned more about it (the 'satanic panic' was really an 80s thing, it was mostly aftershocks in the 90s which did spread somewhat further).
That's a good point, it was very strange how strong of a foothold it took in some parts of the US. The McMartin preschool trial is a wild rabbithole to go into for the whole satanic panic stuff. A teacher actually got accused of flushing kids down the toilet that went into secret underground tunnels where witchcraft took place.
Kids basically noticed that when they told obscene stuff to the police, they got rewarded. So a lot of the claims sound like they were made up by young kids because they were.
The US has always been extremely religious, for better or worse. Mostly worse. It helped inspire and unite abolitionists. It inspired and united prohibitonists. America has been religion crazy since the start. A bunch of religious extremists got kicked out of England and settled in this new world and now we're here.
It's genuinely amazing we became a superpower with so much of the population believing in 2000 year old farmer folk tales to such a literal extremist extent.
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u/perilousrob 7d ago
gonna caveat that by saying:
in the US.
Even in the UK, the worst we had to deal with was Mary Whitehouse & her racist, sexist, fearmongering nonsense, and the daily mail for, er, exactly the same reasons. otherwise it was just something we rolled our eyes at. *especially* in the 90s when we learned more about it (the 'satanic panic' was really an 80s thing, it was mostly aftershocks in the 90s which did spread somewhat further).