Memories of the Satanic Panic
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As I wrote in my review of Mike Cosper’s excellent Devil and the Deep Blue Sea podcast, if you weren’t a church kid growing up during the ’80s and ’90s, then I don’t know if I can fully explain what it was like to believe — without question — that an underground Satanic cabal was kidnapping, torturing, and sacrificing children all over the nation. And yet, that fear permeated the culture and the pews for more than a decade.
Looking back on my own experiences with the Panic, though, I was more fortunate than some.
My childhood church was a very typical midwestern, middle-class, non-denominational church. Even it’s name — Evangelical Bible Church — was about as straightforward as it got. EBC was definitely conservative, both politically and theologically, and overwhelmingly white. In other words, it was like a thousand other churches that opened their doors every Sunday morning in America.
I know many have experienced very real trauma in the churches of their youth, but for whatever reason, I was spared that experience. I can’t speak for all of my youth group peers, but my EBC experience was largely positive, even if I no longer subscribe to some of the politics and theology that I was taught. I loved going to youth group, I respected my pastors, and there were some dear adults who poured their lives into mine in various ways.
Even so, the Satanic Panic’s presence could still be felt in EBC’s halls.
Boycotting Procter & Gamble
Thankfully, I don’t remember Pastor Nyquist ever preaching any conspiracy theories from the pulpit. But one day, we brought home a sheet of paper — likely produced on the church mimeograph — that listed all of the products we now needed to boycott because Procter & Gamble’s president had announced on The Phil Donahue Show that he supported the Church of Satan. (I was especially bummed because that meant I could no longer use Crest toothpaste, which I much preferred to Colgate — but we all had our crosses to bear.)
In hindsight, this was patently ridiculous. No such announcement was ever made, nor was the Procter & Gamble logo rife with Satanic imagery. (Its thirteen stars, for example, were a reference to the original thirteen colonies.) Procter & Gamble’s Satanic connections were just a rumor spread, in part, by Amway distributors desperate to boost their sales. And yet, we never once questioned it, because obviously, the president of a massive American company would go on the country’s biggest daytime talkshow to announce that his company’s profits supported the Church of Satan.
How could that not be true?
Here in 2025, it’s easy to look back and ridicule that sort of thinking. But such was the spirit of that age that we never thought to question any purported “evidence” of Satanic influence. We never exercised an ounce of healthy skepticism, but rather, accepted what we were told as fact and changed our lives accordingly. And why wouldn’t we? We were supposed to be vigilant against Satan’s tricks. And nowhere were his tricks more pervasive than the rebellious sounds of rock n’ roll.
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