I recently finished listening to the podcast series “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (thanks to encouragement from my friend Tim), and it was amazing. The show is about “the Satanic Panic that gripped America in the 1980s and ’90s… and how this wave of panic devastated innocent lives and diverted the church’s attention from the evil lurking in its own pews.“
I had heard a bit about the “Satanic Panic” over the years, but this podcast showed me I was missing a lot. It was a fascinating look into how it occurred, how it disappeared, and how it applies to similar conspiracy theories today (“PizzaGate”, autism from vaccines, overhyped trafficking numbers, etc).
I’ll likely write more about it later, but there were two things that really stood out to me.
The stories from the children
In many of the Satanic Panic stories, children were coerced into statements that weren’t true, and then grew to believe those statements over time. How could that be? I immediately thought of the story of Brian Williams and how he may have been telling the truth, at least the truth as he knew it, even if his story wasn’t accurate.
Backmasking
The other one that jumped out to me was the popular concern during the panic of “Satanic messages when you play a song backward”. The podcast shared a few examples of that, and largely leaned on “if you listen to enough things backward, you can hear whatever you want.”. It reminded me of the famous example of a soccer team chanting “that is embarrassing”, but it sounded similar to a bunch of different phrases. Give it a listen:
It’s the same with listening to a song backward; if you go hunting for a particular phrase, you’ll almost certainly find it.
The podcast is intense and a bit hard to listen to at times (they get rather specific about some of the “Satanic rituals”), but it’s well worth listening to the series.
If you listened to it, what did you think of it?
