ELI5- What caused the satanic panic?
In: Other
Sometimes these things just start feeding on themselves and go big without having a real single cause.
You can try to analyze such popular delusions and mass hysteria and look for circumstances that enabled them to grow as they did, but you might as well try to figure out what factors led to the macarena becoming a worldwide hit
This might be as futile as trying to pinpoint the pebble that started an avalanche.
You can point to the religious population being left rudderless in an increasingly secular world. How people who were only ever exposed to one single culture and religion were confronted with culture and religions from around the world encouraging on their communities. How media stroked these feelings by first bringing out movies and shows that planted ideas in people’s minds and then when things started rolling ended up stoaking fears.
Certainly people who had been told all their lives that even fellow Christians who belonged to sightly different sect were “satanic” were not prepared to handle their kids starting Karate and yoga classes while listening to hard rock and playing Dungeon’s and Dragons. Especially not after having seen The Omen or the Exorcist in cinemas.
The world got a lot weirder for lots of people who couldn’t handle it and they sought refuge in the familiarity of religion and started seeing boogie man every where.
It should also be considered in the context of the tail end of the cold war and coming after the hippie years and into the yuppie era.
It might feel more comforting to believe that the neighbor next door was a monster than to feel helpless about the real threats to your lifestyle out there that you couldn’t do anything about.
You could do somebody about the monster next door and doing something made you feel powerful and important and caused people to look up to you.
In the end it was just another with hunt in a long list of similar events throughout history were people fell prey to some *”Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds*, which nobody is really proof against.
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