An Evangelical Christian journalist named Mike Cosper has just produced “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” a six-part podcast about the Satanic panic that gripped the Evangelical community between 1981 and 1993. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I did hear an interview with Cosper and it feeds into a bunch of stuff that’s been on my mind since Donald Trump took office in January.

(Side note: Cosper previously produced “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a podcast about an Evangelical megachurch whose pastor, Mark Driscoll, turned out to be a power-hungry sociopath. That podcast is worth a listen, although Cosper didn’t really address the factors innate in Evangelicalism that tend to enable the Driscolls of the world. He kind of treated it as a one-off instead of a sadly familiar story of charismatic religious leaders going off the rails and taking their followers along for the ride. So, grain of salt regarding Cosper’s new podcast.)

For those unfamiliar, many Americans were convinced that there was a widespread, secret, well-connected Satanic movement that was subjecting children to all kinds of unspeakable abuse. Cosper says the FBI received 12,000 complaints and conducted 11,000 investigations — and never found a single actionable case of Satanic activity. But in the process, many a life was ruined by baseless allegations.

When I was about two minutes into the interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds exactly like QAnon!” Well, QAnon but really the whole range of conservative moral panics fueling Trumpism, including the rage-induced policies targeting LGBTQ+ people. It is exactly the same thing. And the current panic is just as groundless as the Satanic panic of two generations ago.

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