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.