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Remember the days of Satanic Panic? It was a time when America talk shows and Christian zealots attempted to sell the masses a certain paranoia. The idea that cloven-hoofed demons cloaked in human skin were coming. And they were going to rape and butcher their children in the name of the Dark Lord. The Church of Satan was perhaps the most feared enemy of the weak. This was a time before the nation began to shudder at the thought of brown terrorists strapped with explosives and Boeing 767’s coming to threaten our way of life in the United States. Back then, it was all about the “threat” of Satanism.
In the late 80s, television-fried zombies lapped up all of the satanic swill coming from the lips of public figures like Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jesse Raphael. America had seen the ghoulish acts of the Manson Family. It was easy for the media to convince large audiences that millions of Satanists were out there. And that they were scouring the land of the free, using heavy metal music to recruit America teens.
It was the consensus of these primetime socialites that the fiend-followers of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey were coming for them. And that they were going to hook the nation’s youth on drugs and inspire them to praise Satan. One cup of animal blood at a time. Families locked their doors at night for fear that one of these devil-worshipping cults just might happen to make a pit stop in suburbia.
But the Devil Never Came
More than twenty years later, the Church of Satan still has not taken over the world. What’s