Remembering the Satanic Panic
For the Dungeons and Dragons Club, Dunbarton High School, Past and Present
Coming to social and political awareness during the late 70s and early 80s, I've spent much of my life watching the rise of the religious right. One of the most enduring themes in my conscious life as an adult has been an intellectual disgust and deep ethical revulsion at the many ongoing attempts at religious intrusion into the public and private life of my society. The first prolonged conflict to emerge in my awareness of this theme was of course the push to exert dominion over women's bodies by banning safe abortions, the latest episode of which is playing out now in real time. Other issues, still ongoing, include opposition to same-sex marriage and the current spate of bills in multiple states aimed at restricting the recognition and rights of trans people. Still others include the ever-present and increasingly vocal tide of Christian nationalism. For now, though, I'd like to take a fond and even nostalgic look back at a social phenomenon of my youth known as the Satanic Panic, and the effect that this had on a group of high school students in a suburb of Toronto in the fall of 1982.
For those who weren't around, the Satanic Panic emerged largely from the religious reaction to elements of the popular culture of the 70s and 80s: hard rock and heavy metal, for example, and the lyrical and stage theatrics of bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin; obsession with “discovering” supposed satanic lyrics in massively popular songs (at least when played backward with the intention of finding them)—and the fact that some bands, once they caught on, added such elements just for shits and giggles; the popularity of Anton Lavey's Satanic Bible (and never mind that anyone actually familiar with the Church of Satan knows that they're a secular organization: my private name for them is the Church of Irony); and of course, that most diabolic of all role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons (cue the demonic laughter). It was an entertaining time. There were stories of black masses involving child sacrifices (of course), torture (duh), and wild sexual escapades (I should hope so); testimonials of “former satanists” before their adoring and open-pocketed congregations; and even maps (I held one) identifying the locations of active infernal covens in a neighbourhood near you.
And in the midst of this carnival of righteous knee-quaking, a group of students at Dunbarton High School in Pickering, Ontario decided to start a D&D club. Now, when you are setting up a club in a high school, there are certain procedures you need to go through: an application to be filled out, a faculty sponsor to be sought, a president to be chosen, that kind of thing. In our case, it all went smoothly, and that should have been the end of it. That would have been the end of it had a letter not appeared in our little local paper, urging the school board administration to refuse our request. The letter had been written by a local nun, Sister Mary Something-or-Other (naturally), and it hit upon the usual talking points circulating at the time: the association of D&D with teen suicide, the charge of unhealthy escapism, and of course the fact that the game involves encounters with demons and devils and other infernal beasties and gives players the option of visiting the various planes of Hell and the Abyss in their imaginations.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have little patience with superstition, less when it's used as a pretext to interfere in public life, and less still when it interferes with my own. So when our faculty sponsor Mr. Anderson met with us for what should have been our inaugural get-together and instead showed us Sister Mary's letter and explained that the board was considering turning down our application, I was unimpressed. They were, he said, holding off their decision until we'd had a chance to respond in writing. And for reasons I don't recall—probably the fact that I was in a journalism class and involved in the yearbook—it was agreed that, after a collective brainstorming session, I would draft the response. I don't remember exactly what I wrote: it was almost 40 years ago. But I think there was something about collective problem solving, something about the value of imagination to human experience, and rather a lot about the long history of bugaboos that the religious right has dredged out of its collective nether region over the years regarding this, that, and the other thing that is supposedly corrupting the youth and leading us all straight to Hell or at least to a collapse of civilization as we know it, be it comic books in the 50s, rock and roll in the 50s and 60s, or heavy metal in the 70s. Regarding the link to suicide, this had already been debunked by that point as would have been obvious to anyone with the intellectual wherewithal to actually look it up. Basically, I did my best to illustrate that this was nothing more than religiously motivated fear mongering aimed at controlling other people. And to our collective satisfaction, the administration agreed.
But the details don't really matter. What matters to me now, looking back across half my expected lifetime, is that this episode serves as a landmark in the development of my own character—a moment where I chose to stand, in a very small way, against a religious authority trying to restrict how my friends and I could use our time and our minds. It was a nameless and forgotten episode in what is now the decades-long struggle against a religious right determined to impose its narrow reading of its particular mythology on the fabric of North American society in ways that intrude upon the lives of those not beholden to the mythology in question. This impulse must always be resisted, be it in the small struggles of a group of high school students against some wimpled busybody over a game, or against the efforts of a dwindling demographic to impose their will upon the bodies and identities of a society now numerically on the verge of leaving them behind. Superficially, these may seem to be different issues, but at their root they are closely related: they are small scale and large scale questions, respectively, of whether we will allow some parochial narrative to become the the de facto narrative of our society, or whether we will continue to live in a civilization based around principles of pluralism and the separation of church and state.
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As a coda to this little entry, I might note that, toward the end of the year when we were putting together the “Activities” section of the yearbook, I did a write-up for our group recounting much of what I've just said. The piece culminated with a line addressed to Sister Mary: “ Well, sis, we're still here.” Our faculty mentor Mrs. Johnson thought that was too cheeky and wouldn't let me run it, so we ended up printing something generic. As it turns out though, having just gone online and checked the clubs for my alma mater, the group is still up and running, so now, after all these years, I'd like to indulge my inner seventeen-year-old smart-ass one last time in closing:
Well, sis. They're still there. (1)
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Footnote 1. On a slightly embarrassing note, I've also just checked the relevant yearbook page and noticed that, while I am in the group shot second from the right in the middle row, my name does not appear in the caption. Quite the omission, considering I did the layout for that spread. Oh well.