Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic was an issue that afflicted the tabletop roleplaying community, centering itself on the Dungeons & Dragons fandom, from a period of roughly the end of the 1970s to the start of the 1990s. In a nutshell, it boils down to American moralfags accusing D&D of being a bad influence on their communities and actively persecuting D&D players or anyone who could be mistaken as a D&D player.

Global Context

On the note of "American moralfags", one might be inclined to wonder why there was no analogous (or at least proportionate) moral panic about Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 in the UK, considering that it was miles above anything from contemporary D&D in terms of edgy and grimdark. It likely says something about the culture of the populations in question, or at the very least about the relatively placid nature of the UK's established Church; Catholicism still was barely considered Christian in the early 1900s of the ol' United States.

As more mainstream American Protestant sects began to incorporate liberal elements of Biblical interpretation and American culture as a whole grew more secular (to say nothing of things like the growing acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution), other more tradition-minded sects declared a need to return to the "fundamentals" of Christian faith, based on literal interpretation of the Bible and a general rejection of secular culture. The goal of these 'fundamentalists' was to attain something of a throwback to the atmosphere of the early 19th century frontier, where anyone who fancied himself a preacher or prophet could set up shop - even if what he was preaching had very traction on common sense, with enough charisma they'd gain a following as long as was quick on his feet with often-out-of-context Bible verses.

Following the debacle of the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, they had withdrawn into their own subculture, growing increasingly convinced that America had become godless and corrupt under the influence of the secularists. These sentiments only intensified further in the 60s, when the growing acceptance of extramarital sex and feminism came to be perceived as a threat to "traditional family values". By the 80s, a new generation of charismatic preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham paved the way for these 'fundamentalists' to return to the public sphere. Thus began the rise of what is now known as "the religious right", as the fundamentalists quickly forged ties with like-minded politicians. As Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were among the politicians in question, this meant they had a lot of influence in American society.

Britain, for what it's worth, only ever came as close to the panic in the mid-'80s through the efforts of one Mary Whitehouse's campaign against "video nasties" - and even in that case she was considered more of a joke than a serious political figure.

'Ere We Go

The roots of the whole mess began in 1979, when a troubled teenager named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared for a month after, reputedly, having earlier attempted to commit suicide in the utility tunnels under the campus of Michigan State University. Failing to off himself, he instead hid in a friend's house for a month. During that time, private investigator William Dear, hired by Egbert's parents, speculated to the media that he might have gotten lost during an attempt to use the utility tunnels for a Live Action Roleplaying session. The press, of course, ate this shit up, especially when Egbert went and blew his brains out in 1980.

This incident was later used by hack writers to produce the cheesey 1981 "horror" novels "Hobgoblin" and "Mazes and Monsters", both of which had the basic idea of "roleplayer loses his mind because of roleplaying and ultimately ends up killing or nearly killing himself" - Mazes and Monsters even got a freaking film adaptation a year later.

This controversy was bad enough, but at the time, America was tying itself up in knots over widespread fears about the existence of Satan-worshiping cultists being everywhere, seeking to subvert Good Old Traditional Values and commit murder, rape and torture. The advent of real albeit relatively harmless "Satanic" groups like the Church of Satan as well as other cults that allegedly kidnapped and brainwashed children gave Jerry Falwell's growing Moral Majority movement and other Christian fundamentalists even more fuel for their paranoia. At the same time, therapists and social workers were pushing for greater recognition of child sexual abuse as a serious crime, and in spite of their good intentions they developed a tendency to be overzealous in investigating possible abuse; this was itself exacerbated further by the growing awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder and the assumption that memories "recovered" via hypnosis were perfectly accurate representations of events (as opposed to being artificially albeit unintentionally induced by the therapists and social workers themselves). All these things became a heady brew together, all thanks to one asshole.

Meet Patricia Pulling

When her son Irving killed himself in 1982, Patricia Pulling came out of the woodwork claimed it was because he had been placed under a "D&D curse". Fuckwit that she was, she tried to sue first Irving's principal, and then TSR itself. Naturally, the legal system threw her out on her ear, noting that this made absolutely no sense and that the more logical answer had to do with pre-existing social and psychological problems, such as being bullied at school. But the damage was done in giving her a public appearance to begin with.

Inspired by the two-year legal battle, some fucktards in Canada produced the 1983 film "Skullduggery", which went a step beyond its equivalents from before; a roleplaying game explicitly identified as D&D (Hobgoblin had titled itself after a fictitious Celtic-themed RPG, whilst Mazes & Monsters had used its same-name D&D pastiche) ultimately turned a player into a serial-killing lunatic.

Furthermore, by 1983 Mrs. Pulling was making connection with a bunch of fundy Christian groups, and also with Illinois psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence. Together, they founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons - a collection of religious bigots, bullies, jerks, clueless parents and assorted well-meaning but brainless idiots out to stop the depredation of "evil D&D". When Pulling's case was finally dismissed in 1984, BADD (a name that implies someone on the marketing team was phenomenally self-aware or unaware) went into full attack mode. Incidentally, the infamous Dark Dungeons tract by Jack Chick was written during that same year.

It must be repeated that BADD lost every single attempt at litigation they ever attempted, but the credulous public ate up their bullshit and responded by shitting on D&D players everywhere. Teachers, parents, Christian pastors and even on occasion the police tried to stomp on those who liked to roleplay; they used everything from verbal and emotional harassment to seizing and destroying roleplaying materials, blocking RPG groups from using public spaces to socialize, sabotaging groups by planting false evidence of satanic rituals, and/or possession of drugs and/or pornographic materials before calling the police, tacitly encouraging violence, theft and abuse being directed against gamers, privacy invasion, expulsion from school for continuing to play after a ban had been put in place and harassment/arrest for supposed satanic desecration of graves and churches.

Reactions

Amazingly, during the 80s, the gaming community seemed to actually just take this shit. For a significant portion of the 80s, the prevailing attitude was one of apologetic self-censorship, striving to prove that they were moral people by passive resistance. However, behind the scenes, angry players were going on the attack; writers began publishing investigations into the seedier side of many anti-D&D big names in Dragon Magazine. The academic credentials of Thomas Radecki and Patricia Pulling were debunked. Numerous links were forged with academics and government agencies studying youth suicide and academic publications on gaming were collated and made available to gamers wanting to investigate and/or debunk anti-RPG claims.

Gamers began to coordinate lobbying campaigns by phone, letters, public forums, the burgeoning internet and word of mouth as a means of informing the media, law enforcement, educators and local government about RPGs and their role in youth culture. Links were forged with the Skeptics Society and other secularist organizations who had been independently questioning the existence of "Satanic ritual abuse". Articles were written in Skeptics Society journals and journals of psychology, and law enforcement officers and criminologists, such as Robert Hicks, began to debunk and expose the supernaturalist origins of anti-gaming claims and question their relevance in law enforcement initiatives. Perhaps the greatest blow to B.A.D.D, Patricia Pulling’s and Thomas Radecki’s credibility was the publication of Michael Stackpole’s “Pulling Report” in 1989, which severely criticized the ethics and methodology of anti-RPG campaigners, provided conclusive evidence that the suicide rate was lower amongst roleplayers, and was widely distributed amongst law enforcement, educational bodies, game manufacturers, gamers and government agencies.

The cultural zeitgeist changed: Thanks to years of work by D&D's defenders and other skeptics, the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" phenomenon being exposed as equal parts mass hysteria and con artistry, and the recurring failure of its attackers to actually win any legal battles or otherwise fail to avoid being debunked, people grew out of it. People tried to keep the fire of it going - for example, in 1988, authorities chose to focus on Chris Pritchard's being a D&D player as the "reason" for his murdering his stepfather, rather than his long history of mutual antagonism and his heavy drug & alcohol use - but years of moral hysteria with no actual payoff, combined with a steady stream of actual intelligence and growing information access revealing that most of the supposed witnesses giving "testimony" to the abuse were remembering things that never actually happened and couldn't have possibly happened as described (such as accounts of people flying or mass human sacrifices in an area where such activity would never have gone unnoticed), had robbed BADD and its fellow shitheads of any significant standing from anyone beyond fundamentalists and the paranoid. When, in 1989, an absolute fuck by the name of William Schnoebelen published a pair of articles that claimed D&D was a New Age Satanist front to steal people away from Christianity, most people looked at how he claimed D&D could actually summon real fiends and work real magic (and the fact he was being bankrolled by Jack Chick) and dismissed him for the mindless screwhead he was.

Not That BADD

Ironically, the Satanic Panic had some rather positive effects on the RPG world:

• First and foremost, it was instrumental in forging a shared sense of community amongst roleplayers of all types; they might still bicker and argue over internal minutia, but now they'll come together in the face of an outside threat. Prior to the Panic, RPGers had just been hobbyists; coming together for support under the Panic's suffocating blanket made them a culture in their own right.
• Secondly, it established roots between roleplayers and alternative religious subcultures. Though the sentiment is waning now, during the late 80s and the 90s, the roleplaying community became extremely critical of Christianity, if not outright hostile. The years in which the most public face of all Christian churches and doctrines had been of violent bigots eager to oppress people for their "sin" of enjoying the innocent pasttime of roleplaying had bred a strong resentment of Christianity into the RPG community despite the fact that one of the game's two co-inventors, Gary Gygax, was Christian himself. The only good things to come out of this are an increase in fact-checking among all sides involved and a willingness to branch out in story elements, which led to the rise of games franchises like Call of Cthulhu in the 80s and White Wolf in the 90's.

The Satanic Panic in the Modern Era

There are still some lingering attempts to tap into this long-dead phenomena - in 2013, several news articles claimed that in Israel, playing D&D was actually frowned upon by the Israeli Defence Force. Almost immediately, reporters who'd done actual research reported that this was complete bullshit; D&D is hugely popular in Israel, to the point that a good DM can actually get paid money for being willing to run peoples' games. This situation in the IDF was probably confined to the certain type of Jewish fundamentalist who objects to pictures of women being published in newspapers. Fundamentalists, who by their very nature assume that any form of media not exclusively about praising Jesus must be a tool of the devil, still sometimes make the same old complaints under the pretense that "the Satanists are powerful enough to hide the evidence" in-between bouts of attacking other boogeymen of the day, but nobody listens outside of their own echo chambers for the most part. While the panic has never truly stopped since its inception, the major driving forces have long since subsided in the eyes of the public.

On an amusing note, Thomas Radecki would later be arrested in 2013 and sentenced for 11-22 years in prison for over-prescribing addictive opioids through a crooked rehab program, dealing in proceeds of unlawful activity, and trading said opioids to 13 different female patients in exchange for sex. Figures that the loudest moral guardians always have a few skeletons in their closets.

This was the Satanic Panic. Good fucking riddance, but it's a shame that history keeps repeating itself.