And, again, this is an incredibly simplistic take that, frankly, smells of motivated reasoning based on your personal distaste for organized religion. The Wiki

And, again, this is an incredibly simplistic take that, frankly, smells of motivated reasoning based on your personal distaste for organized religion. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic) on the topic does a nice job of laying out the foundations of the panic: > The underpinnings for the contemporary moral panic were found in a rise of five factors in the years leading up to the 1980s: the establishment of fundamentalist Christianity and the founding and political activism of the religious organization which was named the Moral Majority; the rise of the anti-cult movement which accused abusive cults of kidnapping and brainwashing children and teens; the appearance of the Church of Satan and other explicitly Satanist groups which added a kernel of truth to the existence of Satanic cults; the development of the social work or child protection field, and its struggle to have child sexual abuse recognized as a social problem and a serious crime; and the popularization of post-traumatic stress disorder, repressed memory, and the corresponding survivor movement.[16] It was a deeply multifaceted phenomenon. To assume it was just a bunch of nefarious church leaders deliberately stoking a hoax in order to gain power is deeply reductive and once again misleading about both the causes of, and solutions for, these types of moral panics. There's some excellent books and podcasts about the topic that dig into the hoax, including a fantastic CBC series about the Martensville panic which is worth listening to if only to get a better understanding of what people went through at the time. This is important! Recognizing the many and varied root causes that lead to phenomena like the satanic panic help us better understand modern movements like QAnon, and critically, how to deal with them, both at the individual and at the broader societal level.