QAnon Has at Least Once Critical Difference From the Satanic Panic
This is about self-identity, not religious belief
This is about self-identity, not religious belief
Listen to QAnon and the Satanic Panic on Apple Podcasts
A look into the attitude that makes these two phenomena similar and an explanation of why they're radically different.podcasts.apple.com
I think of QAnon as an umbrella, a lifestyle more than a strict set of beliefs. As with the over-broad term “Christianity,” multiple QAnon followers have multiple interpretations about the hows and whys of specific conspiracies. It was one of the things I first noticed researching my book Sherry Shriner’s online cult.
NPR recently ran a story presenting similarities between the current madness and the Satanic Panic from the previous century. The story suggests a lineage of mass-hysteria and makes something of a case for QAnon being the latest in that line, a mass-hysteria that will fade.
God, I hope they’re right, but I have some concerns.
Origin Stories
The story dates QAnon at around 2017, which is fair I guess, but Sherry Shriner and a ton of people like her have been singing this song since the turn of the century.
While we don’t have a super-firm date on QAnon, the Truther movement it encompasses was born on September 12, 2001. That’s a hard date. The child-trafficking aspect, as the NPR story points out, is much older than that and even more nefarious.
If you’re not familiar, the Satanic Panic was a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s wherein people became convinced the country was being overrun with satanic cults who abused children and participated in ritual murder. Innocent people went to jail over suspicion they’d committed crimes as cultists.
The Washington Post ran a story a while back that suggested pervasive child abuse among members of the religious right was an engine that kept this trafficking story running.
The number of people I spoke to or read about in my research who had “shadowy figures” sneaking into their room at night haunts me. Some people need a spectral evil other because the alternative is too much to countenance.
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The critical difference between the Satanic Panic and QAnon is the confluence of religious and political disillusion. The lies we tell ourselves about elected officials committed to the public good keep crumbling, and the idea that professional religious leaders know any more about heaven than the average six-year-old just doesn’t pass the smell test anymore.
“Regular” people fight this in the normal sensible way. We advocate for political change and insist that, in the end, we’re all praying to the same, basically good diety. We believe this on almost no evidence as politicians and preachers line their pockets while we squabble.
Conspiracy folks don’t have that capacity for self-deceit. They’re from a good-and-evil, black-and-white reality. When a person with that attitude discovers that both America and Religion are lying to them, they need it to be for a bigger reason than weakness in small, petty, avaricious men.
Just as with a shadow lurking in the late-night quiet of a child’s room, horror is so much easier to face when it is inhuman and unknown.
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QAnon is not just a dangerous fad. In the coming year or so it may become a laughable if tragic label, but the ideas behind it are too tenacious to fade as the Satanic Panic did.
The difference is that whether people believed the country was being overrun by Satanists was a matter of opinion. That is, people who believed in it didn’t have a lot of skin in the game.
They were predominantly Christian and so Satanic cults already were part of their culture. For them, something they believed could still be different from who they were.
Primal thinking is so attractive
That’s not the case with our increasingly tribal culture. Who you are is very much what you believe, and when you’re tied into that worldview there’s no good way out. Think of it this way: People don’t believe (for example) in the 9/11 conspiracy. They are Truthers. That’s how they identify.
More than that, it is how we identify them so we can identify ourselves in opposition. We question other people’s beliefs and the reason for them, but we seem less interested in questioning our own.
The result is an entire culture committed to tearing down wrong-thinking in the world. We don’t wonder why we believe the things we do, only why other people insist on being wrong. That doesn’t make for a healthy dynamic.
The trickiest thing in writing about cults, or religion for that matter, is how people so often focus on the content of people’s beliefs rather than the reasons they came to have them.
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In the case of QAnon, we aren’t talking so much about a commitment to proving (say) that 9/11 was an inside job or that pedophiles are loose in Washington so much as being part of something bigger than oneself, of having a mission, a defining purpose. This isn’t something that can be dismantled by facts.
Putting it in terms of mainstream religion, there is absolutely zero evidence that there’s an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful god who takes any interest at all in human affairs. Either god lets children get raped or can’t do anything to stop it. This might not mean that there’s no god, but it is a fact we have to actively ignore or make excuses for if we’re going to continue claiming that god is omnipotent and omnipresent.
In politics, people we have an affinity for always do their best against the evil, irrational opposition. Ours are never the slimy money-grubbers and dissemblers.
The Satanic Panic was a semi-predictable mass-hysteria that is always going to bubble up in a religious state. As lots of people have pointed out, it is almost a kind of wave or cycle that is part and parcel of religious fanaticism touching the mainstream.
QAnon is deeper. It’s a reaction to an unconscious realization that our power structures have failed, that there is no safety in community. They are not wrong, many just don’t have the wherewithal to deal with something so complex so they look for easy answers. They also are not alone in that.
For “regular” people the easy answer is to attack the QAnon movement, to rain down facts on dissenters to prove that they’re stupid for their beliefs. The result is two opposing sides accusing one another of ignoring the evidence while making the fight not about how we should live together but rather why people are stupider than us.
I spoke about this on the ViceTv documentary series, The Devil You Know Season 2. I think it might be the most salient thing I’ve said about conspiracy theory culture, so I’ll end with it:
“I think we all have to ask ourselves how we’ve been implicated…by fake news culture. I think we have to ask ourselves, what do we do to perpetuate it? I worry that we don’t ask ourselves often enough, how are we at fault? How are we the problem?
“Sherry Shriner is like a lump in our breast. She isn’t reflective of what we are like. But, she’s an indication of how awful we can be. The fact that any of these conspiracy people get the kind of traction they get is a symptom that we’re not paying attention to. And the symptom is that we don’t have people in charge that we can trust.
“Conspiracy theorists, in that light, are more, like, just an early warning bell. There are bad things coming and we need to deal with it. You know, I don’t love our odds, but you know, before we just dismiss this as crazy people killing crazy people, they are an alarm bell going off, and we ignore it at our own peril.”
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.