Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

The Satanic Panic never really took off outside the United States. A historian in Norway found that until Rivera’s 1988 NBC special was covered in the Norwegian press, there had been no public references to satanic ritual abuse. According to The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic, published in 2004 by a U.S. social psychologist specializing in trauma and mental illness, the few international prosecutions in the 1980s and ’90s were generally “closed in a matter of months,” which “made it difficult for the kind of improvised news that romped around in the shadows of the [U.S.] daycare cases … from getting a running start.” The British cases, she writes, had “no chanting orgiastic Satanists … just ghosts, some of them pink, one eyed spirits; there was no cannibalizing of the flesh of dead babies, nor any drinking of their blood”—indeed, “there was no abuse … none of the rape, sodomy and torture that rendered the American master narrative so utterly appealing.” And in no other developed country, of course, are so many citizens evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. America is exceptional.