by Sean Goodman
The “Satanic Panic,” a movement of religious extremism that began around 1980 and ended in the mid-1990s, was part of a wider period of sweeping moral panic among the American far-Right in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. During that time, American news media outlets and law enforcement agencies received an increasing number of reports about clandestine cults that were purportedly abusing children in rituals dedicated to Satan. This was a bizarre historical phenomenon that courts, journalists, and politicians were struggling to understand. In 1980, the eccentric psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder first described this movement as part of “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” in a book that he co-wrote with former patient Michelle Smith, entitled Michelle Remembers.In it, Smith, “unlocked” a childhood memory of being abused at the hands of her mother and a local clandestine Satanic cult. Over the years, the Satanic Panic has attracted the attention of scholars of religion and politics, including Jeffrey S. Victor who links many of the political effects of the Satanic Panic to the publication of Michelle Remembers. Indeed, Smith’s account captivated audiences as a national best-seller, even attracting an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Smith’s description of her abuse and Pazder’s commentary on it echoed earlier depictions of Satanic cult practices by one evangelical Christian figure who emerged out of the popular culture of the extreme Religious Right: Jack Chick. Jack Chick became recognizable by distributing small, 24-page comic books called Chick Tracts, today housed at the Yale University Archives. His depictions of the occult quickly became one of the widest-read publications among religious extremists in the United States. And, yet his life and influence remain under-studied by historians. This think-piece explores some of the ways in which Chick Publications laid the political foundations for the Satanic Panic by shaping the public’s imagination of the occult and its specific influence on certain trends of popular culture behind the American evangelical Right in the 1980s and 1990s.
Between the 1960s and 1970s, there were many depictions of Satan and the occult throughout the broader, secular segment of American pop culture. Arguably the most iconic portrayal of Satan in the public’s imagination was Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 and published The Satanic Bible in 1969. Even the biggest rock and roll acts of the late 1960s, such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, incorporated occult imagery in their album covers and songs. The Beatles portrayed infamous occultist Aleister Crowley on the cover of their 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Rolling Stones came out with their hit single “Sympathy for the Devil” a year later. The most notable depiction of the occult in film was Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby, which tells the story of a young actress whose life is unknowingly influenced by the workings of a Satanic cult. Following the success of Rosemary’s Baby was the adaption of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 possession story The Exorcist in 1973. Although Americans recognized Satan and the occult as depicted in numerous mediums, the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969 and the Jonestown Massacre in 1978 radically changed how the far-Right publicly perceived the occult, witchcraft, and Satan.
In 1971, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian. In response to political, cultural, and religious progressivism, conservative Christians mobilized to create their own schools, businesses, and media outlets. This mobilization, according to Keviin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, formed the base for the modern “Religious Right” in the United States. Although the Religious Right comprised itself of both Catholics and Protestants, evangelical Christianity, in particular, experienced a noticeable revival. Bruce Schulman further suggests that this revival occurred primarily through a surge in popular culture, including evangelical newspapers, music, and rising “televangelist” stars Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker. Arguably the most prominent development of this revival was the emergence of Christian bookstores, which provided fertile ground for religious book sales, for example, reaching an annual growth rate of 10.8 percent between 1972 and 1980.[i] This multi-media evangelism created a different type of Christian imagination, through its active depictions of the occult, that separated itself from a sinful, secular America.
As an evangelical Christian, Jack Chick decided to create small and easily distributable comic pamphlets that acted as both social-political commentary and tools for evangelization. Much of this was influenced by conversations with Christian missionary Bob Hammond. Hammond, who had recently returned to the United States from China, told Chick that while in China, he saw Chinese communists win the public’s support by distributing illustrated books with their anti-capitalist, pro-communist message. Chick was inspired. Chick made his first evangelical comic in 1961 and officially established Chick Publications in 1966. Since then, Chick Publications has produced hundreds of tractsthat follow a similar moral narrative in which a nonbeliever converts to Christianity and, as a result, must respond with an immediate call to action.
The Chick Tract Collections at Yale’s Divinity School holds a near-complete collection of Chick Tracts from 1961 to 2015. On some level, these tracts contain a lack of self-awareness that range from comical to terrifying—and even outright offensive. In many cases, the tracts attack progressive ideas surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. The 1971 tract The Poor Revolutionist attacks the anti-war movement and the New Left, while the 1972 tract The Gay Blade specifically targets homosexuality. Chick links both moral-political narratives to an earlier, 1970 tract titled Bewitched? In it, Satan boasts that the television show Bewitched “paved the way for all our occult and vampire programming viewed by millions today!” As he continues to celebrate the rise in sales of Ouija boards (praising spiritism in tandem with hallucinogenic drugs for the sales) he stands next to a poster celebrating the increase in “Anarchy, Pornography, and Homosexuality.” Chick’s attempt to connect the New Left and homosexuality to Satanism tied in to wider developments within the Religious Right which emphasized the importance of preserving U.S. hegemony and the nuclear family at all costs. Today, Chick publications are classified as a “general hate” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Chick Publications also produced more standard comic books, such as his 1974 comic book and literal “cult” classic, The Broken Cross. Part of Chick’s The Crusader Series, the comic follows two devout Christians, James Carter and Timothy Clark. The story begins with a fourteen-year-old runaway who is picked up by a young couple as she hitchhikes to Los Angeles while two men hide in the back of the van waiting to kidnap her. The next frame shows a ritual sacrifice in practice. About a dozen people in black robes and pointed hoods are situated around a stone slab where the runaway lays, next to a wall decorated with an upside down cross. Afterwards, James and Timothy stumble onto the crime scene, and try to alert local leaders. Yet, they receive cold responses from the police, the local pastor, and the library. After these rejections, the two men conclude that every civil institution must be corrupted, as though a centuries-old “satanic system” has since been “thrust into the political system” that still exists into the present day.This political depiction of occultism, ritual sacrifice, and civil institutions in The Broken Cross quickly became a recurring theme throughout the Satanic Panic.
Part of Jack Chick’s reputation and legacy are linked to his virulent anti-Catholicism. In 1979, Jack Chick met Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Catholic Jesuit from Spain. Soon after meeting Rivera, Chick focused on producing vicious anti-Catholic messaging in his tracts and comic books. That same year, Chick published Alberto, a standard comic book about Rivera’s reasons for leaving the Roman Catholic faith. In 1980, Chick published the tract My Name. . . In the Vatican? and in 1981 Are Roman Catholics Christian? The two publications accuse the Roman Catholic Church of being the ultimate anti-Christian institution involved in various evil conspiracies, including the Holocaust and the creation of Islam. Soon after these publications, main-stream Christian bookstores began to remove his work from their shelves. Despite this, Chick Publications claims to have sold over 500 million copies worldwide.
Beyond Chick’s anti-Catholic rhetoric, there is yet another link to Chick and the politics behind the Satanic Panic. In 1992 the former doctor-turned-Christian evangelist Rebecca Brown wrote Prepare for War, a spiritual manual for Christians as a way to overcome how Satan influences everyday life in the United States. In the 1980s, Brown worked for Jack Chick and had two books published under his publishing house. In chapter fourteen of her book, she instructs parents on how to know if their child has been a victim of ritual abuse, and what political actions to take. In the same year of the book’s publication, an FBI report pertaining to child abuse notes how Prepare for War had been treated as a serious reference guide in local law enforcement agencies throughout the country.[ii]
While secular American pop culture, sensational crime narratives, and figures like Anton LaVey provided a template for what Satan and the occult looked like in the imagination of so many Americans, Jack Chick specifically worked in an evangelical Christian milieu that was populated by other influential writers. In 1970, the pre-millennial dispensationalist Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. In it, Lindsey makes the case that God interacted with his followers in different ages throughout history and that Jesus would return to Earth before the Soviet Union initiates World War Three. Lindsey continued his unique brand of anxiety-laden rhetoric in his 1972 book Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. This book focuses on contemporary secular cultural practices and the increasing popularity of new-age spiritualism in the United States. In particular, Lindsey asserts that a spiritual conflict is brewing in an unseen world, and he taps into the public’s image of Satanic ritual and fears of the occult that ‘hide behind intellectualism.’ By the end of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth became the most popular nonfiction book of the decade with over 12 million copies in circulation.[iii] More than 28 million copies were sold by 1990, and over 35 million by 1999. Another book series, Left Behind,continued Lindsey’s premillennial dispensationalism and dominated bookstores in the 1990s, selling over 80 million copies worldwide. Satan was not only a symbol that channeled anxieties surrounding government corruption, an unstable economy, declining global U.S. influence, a changing American demographic, and political violence. To the extreme Religious Right, Satan was a real entity that threatened moral values and social life at large. By portraying Satan as a legitimate threat and building off imagery already recognized by the American public, evangelical figures like Jack Chick shaped a new image of Satan and the occult ready to be adopted into the American consciousness by 1980.
There remains surprisingly little historiography on the Satanic Panic. While the movement cooled by the mid-1990s, its legacy has been surprisingly long-lasting. Today, fears of ritual abuse and the occult form the backbone of several conspiracies in contemporary culture. More work can be done to historically untangle the intricate relationship between the politics of the Satanic Panic with other twenteith-century right-wing extremism including racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia in the United States.
[i] See Roy Thompson Jr. “Small Business News and Views,” The Sylva Herald and Ruralite. (December 3, 1981).
[ii] See Kenneth Lanning. “Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse.” National Center for the Analysis of Violence Crime. January 1992.
[iii] See “Paperback Talk” New York Times (March 15, 1981).
Sean Goodman received his M.A. in U.S. History from Boston College in 2024, where he researched far-Right extremism and the Satanic Panic. He is currently teaching English in Armenia and has a forthcoming essay in the Critical Muslim.
Cover Image: Peter Paul Rubens, “The archangel Michael defeats Satan and the rebellious angels (Revelations 12:7-9),” via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
