(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How Satanic Panic resurfaced in Iowa and Arizona – and why it’s worrying [1] [] Date: 2024-02 When the QAnon conspiracy theory first came to the attention of the American public in 2017, many people saw it merely as a bizarre new ‘cult’. Sharper observers, though, saw something else in the right-wing fervour around a supposed child-trafficking cabal of Democratic politicians and Hollywood ‘elites’, to which it was widely believed Donald Trump would eventually put a stop. The conspiracy, they realised, was a renewed example of good, old-fashioned American Satanic Panic. The right’s Satanic Panic has risen to the fore once again in the past few weeks, this time in a comically literal and banal way. Two American states, Iowa and Arizona, have moved to ban satanic displays – an act that would clearly be unconstitutional. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now Any reasonable reading of the First Amendment to the American constitution and the relevant case law makes clear that if any religious displays are erected on public property, the same property must be open to displays from any religious group. Often, this means that if your local courthouse is going to put up a manger scene during the Christmas season, then it had better be prepared to put up a Menorah for Hannukah as well. But things get more interesting when the Satanic Temple, whose tenets espouse nonbelief in any supernatural entities, moves in to stir the pot. Last December, for example, Iowa’s branch of the group legally placed an appropriately festive Baphomet display at the Iowa capitol. This offended Michael Cassidy, a failed former Republican State House candidate from Mississippi, who beheaded poor Baphomet in an act that he described as “Christian civil disobedience”. Cassidy, who later said “my conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree”, now faces a hate crime charge. Many of Iowa’s right-wing Christians sympathise with him, though. At least some of them, after all, are willing to use the coercive power of the state to dictate that “displays, symbols, or the practice of Satanic worship shall not be allowed on public property, in public schools, on property owned by public schools, or on any property owned by the state or its political subdivisions”. Iowa’s bill still languishes in committee. Arizona’s bill, by contrast, passed out of its committee on a 5-1 vote – five Republicans to one Democrat, specifically, as it’s America’s authoritarian GOP that is currently in the throes of a satanic panic. Now, when someone refers to the Satanic Panic, we assume they’re talking about the 1980s and early 1990s, a period of moral panic over ‘occult’ practices and a supposed vast conspiracy involving the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ of women and children that dovetailed neatly with the era’s Reaganite ‘tough on crime’ politics, bolstered by performative calls to protect ‘the children’. The Satanic Panic of this era saw many Americans, a disproportionate number of them queer, imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit (at least some of which never happened in the first place). At the time, American conservatives (the vast majority of them white) falsely and viciously conflated homosexuality with paedophilia – and often with ‘the demonic’ as well. They scapegoated minorities they could easily ‘other’ in response to their social anxieties about child abuse, among other things, preferring to cry ‘stranger danger’ and point fingers at ‘homos’ than face the fact that most abusers are family members or close family friends. Today, in an era in which widespread sexual abuse has been exposed among Southern Baptists and in other evangelical denominations, American right-wingers are repeating the same pattern. This time, they’re primarily fixating on transgender people and drag queens, baselessly denouncing LGBTQ Americans as ‘groomers’. Now, as then, ‘spiritual warfare’ involving the demonisation of their political opponents and the sexual and gender minorities they wish to oppress is part and parcel of the whole ugly phenomenon. As religious studies scholar and podcast host Megan Goodwin put it, QAnon and the broader right-wing moral panic surrounding it are not new, but “fit into a really clear broad political trajectory for the last 40 years”. As far as that goes, legislating against satanism isn’t new, either. Segregationist Republican senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to a federal appropriations bill that stripped tax exemption from any registered religious organisations promoting satanism or witchcraft in 1985. Embarrassingly, the amendment passed on a voice vote with no opposition. It might seem like an improvement that today’s anti-Satan legislation has been introduced only at a state level and seems unlikely to pass into law. But the point of introducing outrageous legislation isn’t always to pass it. Sometimes, it’s simply to throw fuel on the fire of moral panic and/or to push the envelope on some political matter – in this case the meaning of ‘religious freedom’ which right-wing Christians have been successfully redefining in their favor through the courts in recent years. When one of a country’s two major political parties and its base are caught up in a satanic panic, that’s always a bad sign for the health of the country. And as silly as the legislative efforts to ban satanic displays in Iowa and Arizona may be, there’s nothing funny about the theocratic nature of the American right. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/satanic-panic-iowa-arizona-ban-displays-unconstitutional-lgbtq-christian-right/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/