The Quasi-Religious Aspect of the Modern Transmovement

I know that many of the readers of this blog have very different attitudes towards the trans issue and so may find the following essay offensive. It is certainly not my intention to insult or offend anyone, but merely to examine a distinct sociological aspect of the mass trans movement as it has emerged over the last decade or so. This has taken it far beyond the issue of the appropriate treatment of adults and children suffering distress or confusion about their biological sex. If this was simply the case now, I believe that it would have been quietly and amicably resolved a few years ago, and would be of no more interest than the question of suitable treatment for other people suffering distressing psychological and mental health conditions.

But the medical question has been co-opted by radical postmodern political activists and has been transformed and broadened as part of today’s identity politics. The ideologues behind this movement see it as part of a broader agenda to radically transform western society, and the mass movement that has emerged from this is bitterly intolerant of its critics and detractors. It has thus taken on the sociological character of a religion, and in some aspects particularly resembles historic heretical sects and cults as explained below.

Mutilating the Flesh for the Spirit: Trans Ideology as Quasi-Religion

According to the ideologues, adherents and activists of trans ideology and practice, trans identity, and the social and medical transitioning of troubled and psychologically confused individuals from their birth to the opposite sex is entirely rational and scientific, based on a scientifically recognised and confirmed medical condition. Its gender critical detractors, however, such as Barry Wall of the EDI Jester channel on YouTube and his many followers, are harshly sceptical of this ideology. For them, stripped of its scientific trappings, the trans movement is ‘a flesh-sacrificing cult’ with its basis in the Cartesian dualist separation of mind and body. A recent commenter, furiousfemale996 on one of the Jester’s posts, ‘Queering Classrooms – LGB Alliance Responds’ recommended that if the trans ideology is taught in schools, it should not be taught as a sexual identity like homosexuality in PSHE, but instead taught in RE as a religious cult: ‘They need to teach all kids how to recognise the signs of a cult.’

In fact, sociologists of religion such as Clifford Geertz have formulated the concept of quasi-religions to describe secular ideologies and movements that perform some of the sociological functions of religion, and the trans ideology certainly conforms in many respects to such a classification. Indeed, the concept of religion itself is notoriously difficult to define. While most people would automatically regard religion as the worship of supernatural beings, these are absent in some religions. The Latin term ‘religio’, from which the modern English ‘religion’ is derived, means literally ‘to tie together’ and may originally have meant something like filial piety to the Romans. Many cultures do not recognise a religious sphere as distinct from the secular as the two are so bound up together in their way of life. Snorri Sturluson, the 13^th century writer of the collection of Viking myths, the Edda, described Viking paganism as ‘an old law’. Some sociologists of religion eschew discussions of the supernatural and define it as about ‘matters of ultimate concern’. Another academic definition simply states that it divides the world into the important and valuable and less important and valuable. There are also secular religions, such as Humanism and its predecessor, the Ethical Church Movement of the 19^th century, that developed as rationalist, scientific alternatives to supernatural religion. The sociological description of these as quasi-religions, rather than simply religions, is important as many atheists take considerable offence to their movements being described as a religion. The ‘quasi’ element in the term serves to differentiate these movements from supernatural religion proper, while emphasising that they still perform some of the socialogical functions of religious belief and worship.

The secular movements identified as quasi-religious include nationalism, Humanism and the totalitarian political ideologies of Nazism and Communism, the latter because their doctrines of the Thousand Year Reich or the age of true communism have strong similarities to millennial, apocalyptic Christianity. Religions commonly have a set of core doctrines, rituals and ethics so that their adherents form a distinct ideological and moral community.

The core beliefs of the trans ideology may be simply described thus:

Everyone has a unique gender identity distinct from their biological sex. For trans people, this gender identity is opposite to that of the sex they were born as. This gender identity represents their authentic sex, and must be recognised and protected through progressive legislation. As members of the opposite sex trapped in the wrong bodies, they also require medical and surgical intervention to transform their bodies into those of the identified sex. At the same time, following the ideas of postmodern feminist Judith Butler and her text, Gender Trouble and the doctrines of Queer Theory, sex itself is a matter of social performance following socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, sex is reduced to a matter of fashion and stereotypical gender roles and activities, distinct from the biological, embodied reality. This has led to nonsensical statements from politicians like Keir Starmer that only one per cent of women have penises, or circular definitions of womanhood such as ‘a woman is anyone who identifies as one.’ At the same time, the trans community and its supporters draw a clear moral distinction between themselves and their critics. The trans community has appropriated the general gay rights movement, presenting itself as an integral part of the general gay and bisexual community, which is conceived as uniquely loving. An LGBTQ+ cartoon to promote gay and trans acceptance among children reviewed and critiqued by the ‘femalist’ pro-woman activist, Kelly Jay Kean-Minshull, presents this community as animals in a parade. One of them has the mastectomy scars from ‘top surgery’, the polite euphemism for double mastectomies performed on trans identifying girls and women. The voiceover, singing a version of ‘The animals went in two by two, hurrah’, declares that they love each other so proudly.

Trans people are also presented as uniquely virtuous and persecuted. Outside the realm of the blessed elect are the gender critical fallen, creatures of absolute hate, prejudice, and malignity. As Maria MacLachlan of the Peak Trans vlog on YouTube and other gender critical feminists have discussed and demonstrated, these activists accuse feminists like MacLachlan of being Nazis, planning a ‘trans holocaust’, who must be physically fought, beaten and killed. See her video ‘Awful Argument 8: Terfs Are Rightwing’. MacLachlan has herself been physically assaulted by a trans activist, and has documented similar attacks on gender critical feminists in videos such as ‘Another day, another trans activist bully, another feminist assaulted’. In America, gun-toting goons in black bloc have appeared as stewards for trans rallies. This may be considered as a political paramilitary uniform, which would be banned over on this side of the Atlantic under legislation designed to suppress genuine Fascists like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. As I write this, the government is deeply concerned with the issues of political and religious extremism and is busy formulating a definition of such that would allow the proscription of dangerous anti-democratic groups. A definition of extremism and terrorism could fairly include the violent, paramilitary wing of trans activism but due to the identification of trans with pro-gay liberalism and its advocacy from the left, is unlikely to do so.

Rather than being rational and scientific, the core doctrines of the trans movement resemble supernatural religion, and particularly Platonic Gnosticism. The distinction between a gendered mind separate from the body does indeed bear a marked kinship to Cartesian mind-body dualism, with the twist that the ghost in the body’s machine has its own gender. It also resembles Gnosticism in that primacy is given to the disembodied gendered mind with the body given much less regard. In Platonism, the ancient Greek philosophy derived from the great philosopher, the human soul comes from the realm of the spirit among the stars. In Gnosticism this realm is the creation of a good god, as opposed to that of matter, in which these spirits are entrapped. Matter is the creation of the evil god, and the flesh body a prison from which the Gnostic believer hoped he would be freed on death to ascend to the higher realms through belief in the Gnostic cult’s salvific message.

The trans cult eschews this supernatural, post-mortem doctrine in favour of a this-world practice in which the trans person has their flesh altered and mutilated so that they may ‘live their authentic lives’. At the same time, ideas of femininity and masculinity divorced from their biological reality, also resemble Plato’s transcendent forms. These are the patterns for the material world and its objects, which are their expressions. Thus, for example, there is the transcendent idea of a dog, or a man or woman, beyond the individual dogs, men, and women of material reality. In Queer Theory, this transcendent idea of gender is superior to biological reality. The idea of that sex alone, divorced from the reality of the physical body, is considered authentic. The biological sex is considered false, almost a product of mara, the realm of illusion in Hinduism, when it contradicts the inner conception of the sex of the trans person. The rhetoric that trans people must be accepted as their preferred sex or altered to conform to it to live their authentic lives comes partly from the contemporary emphasis for authenticity in popular culture. Rap musicians, for example, frequently talk about ‘keepin’ it real’. But it also seems to derive from Kierkegaardian existentialism and its stress on an authentic faith and life.

Gender mutilation is also a part of many cultures and religions, ranging from FGM, male circumcision to castration. Male circumcision is an important rite of passage among the Dowayo people, studied by the anthropologist, writer and broadcaster Dr Nigel Barley. In his book The Innocent Anthropologist Barley states that the Dowayos regarded circumcision as removing the biological elements that prevent boys from being real men. In a passage discussing how widespread the practice is amongst cultures throughout the globe, he states that in some societies the testicles may be hacked off. As the Jester has stated, there have been religions that practised castration, such as the Christian Skoptzi, as well as the Galli, the priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. They castrated themselves and dressed as women. Some shamans were also transvestites. The trans ideology resembles these castration cults, especially with WPATH’s embrace of the Eunuch Archives and eunuch as a gender identity.

But Queer Theory goes beyond individual transformation to call for radical social change. Some members of the movement have called for the destruction of the bourgeois heterosexual family, such as a recent trans person, Samantha Hudson, promoting Doritos in their Spanish advertising campaign. Internet trans activist Jeffrey Marsh has also suggested to the confused and distressed young people watching his YouTube channel that they should break with their biological parents if they refuse to accept their imaginary gender identity. This is particularly pernicious, as Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh, the hosts of the gender critical Queens’ Speech podcast, have made clear. Many young gay people have suffered from being disowned and rejected by their families unable to accept their sexuality. This has caused them no little upset and distress, and is clearly not something to be blithely recommended to naïve children. But radical trans activism goes much further. The mathematician and fierce critic of postmodern woke nonsense, James Lindsay, in one of his anti-woke New Discourses podcasts has critically analysed a piece published in an American educational journal by two LGBTQ+ activists, one of whom is a drag queen. For them, drag queen story hour is not just about promoting literacy and toleration towards gay and trans people amongst young children. It is about creating an alternative, queer identity among children and youngsters in order to turn them into radical social activists. This queer identity is deliberately made unstable in order to alienate them from bourgeois society. Instead of their biological family, the children are to be turned instead to the trans and queer community as their real family. This again resembles the radical cults and ideologies that seek a radical transformation of society, including Nazism and Marxism, which attacks the family in The Communist Manifesto.

The trans movement also resembles radical cults in its separation of the trans individual from the outside world. The trans community is presented as uniquely loving and accepting, in contrast to the normal world outside the movement. Members of the trans community may encourage youngsters undergoing a crisis of gender identity to flee their homes to live and reside with them. It is exactly the same as the way religious cults have sought to separate their believers from their friends, family and community outside them. It also resembles ‘lovebombing’, a strategy also used by cults to capture new converts. In the initial phase of proselytization these cults impress upon their new members how the cult loves and values them. As the person is drawn into the cult, the attitude hardens until they may be subjected to harsh punishment inflicted for breaches of the cult’s discipline or morality. Questioning the cult’s doctrines and seeking to leave are particularly harshly dealt with. Detransitioners, former trans people who have regretted their decision and sought to revert to their previous birth sex, are shunned and excluded from their former trans colleagues, and may even be abused and vilified like heretics and apostates.

Whatever its scientific trappings, it is clear from this analysis that the trans movement counts in many respects as a secular quasi-religion. Even the claims of a scientific basis do not disqualify this identification. Since the rise of science, many new religious movements have claimed a scientific basis for their doctrines. One of the small press Spiritualist magazines published in Bristol in the 1990s proudly declared that it was ‘in support of psychic science’.

The designation of a movement as a religion or quasi-religion is not a comment on its moral content or nature, even though many people in today’s sceptical, secular society consider religion as intrinsically irrational and malign. Much bloodshed and oppression has been inspired by religion, but at their best religions have also inspired tremendous altruism and social advance. The French historian of science, Jean Gimpel, in his The Medieval Machine, described how Christian religious belief resulted in scientific breakthroughs and advances in the 14^th century. Several of the mathematical treatises from India and the Islamic world collected by Henrietta Midonick in her Treasury of Ancient Mathematics: 1 begin with a dedication to Brahma, in the case of Hindu India, and Allah for Islam. And while Humanism is a quasi-religion, it is very far from violent and oppressive movements such as Fascism and Communism.

What the designation of quasi-religion for the trans movement does mean is that its claims to scientific objectivity needs to be scrupulously and critically examined and rejected. At the same time, as Mr Wall’s commenters have suggested, it should be taught in RE rather than PSHE. Britain is now a multicultural, multifaith society. Regardless of what one feels about their truth content, most of the traditional religions since the Enlightenment are benign, offering their believers hope and comfort in a transcendent realm away from the trials and sufferings of the flesh as well as stressing the importance of altruism and moral conduct. Others, particularly some of the most notorious New Religious Movements that emerged in the ‘69s and ‘70s, are much more malign. School students should be taught that intolerance, repression, and cult-like behaviour are not confined to supernatural religions. They are also to be found in the secular realm amongst ideologies and movements that would angrily reject any claims of a religious or quasi-religious basis. Yet they are there, and children should be given the skills and reasonable scepticism to identify them as such and so avoid them.  And this needs to include the trans movement as a grave threat to young minds and bodies.

Further Reading

Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2^nd Edition (London: Routledge 1963).

Smith, John E., Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke: MacMillan 1994).

Thurlow Richard, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918 -1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987)

Wilson, Bryan, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982)

Israel, the Nazis and the Condemnation of Racial Intermarriage

A little while ago I wrote a piece about how the Raelians’ original design for their embassy in Jerusalem was becoming increasingly accurate as a symbol of the increasingly fascistic nature of the Israeli state and its persecution of the Palestinians. The Raelians are a new religious movement, a sect that believes its leader and founder, Rael, real name Claude Vorilhon, was contacted and given a message for humanity by space aliens. These extraterrestrials, according to Rael, are the Elohim, one of the names for the Lord in the book of Genesis in the Bible. According to Rael, these aliens are due to return to Earth, where they will bring about a new age of peace and prosperity. Under their guidance, only certified geniuses will be allowed to rule, and all the menial work will be done by a specially genetically engineered slave race. The Holy City was chosen as the site of their embassy because that’s where Rael and his followers expect the Elohim to land and establish their centre of power on Earth.The society’s belief in ‘geniocracy’ – rule by the intelligent – has left it open to accusations of fascism. An accusation that probably wasn’t helped when they chose this as the design for their embassy in Jerusalem.

Yes, you’re seeing this correctly: it is a swastika in a Magen Dawid, a Star of David. And no, I don’t know why they chose this design. I suspect it’s because Rael, like a number of other new religious movements and occult sects since the 19th century, may have been impressed and drawn on eastern spirituality. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the swastika is a symbol of good. It also used to be like that over here before the rise of the Nazis. I think there’s even a town of Swastika in Canada, or there was.

Obviously, this didn’t go down at all well with the Israelis, who were justifiably and understandably outraged. The Raelians were forced to change their design, which is now a nice swirly galaxy in the Star of David instead.

But the symbol nevertheless suits the Israeli state, as it becomes more racist and Fascistic. And that Fascism has become blatant with Netanyahu’s new choice of coalition partners. A few days ago, the dedicated Jewish anti-Fascist and anti-Zionist, Tony Greenstein, blogged about how Netanyahu had made the Otzma Yehudit merge with another far right party, Jewish Home, which represents the settlers, so that they could join his wretched Likud in a governing coalition. Otzma Yehudit’s name means ‘Jewish Power’ in Hebrew, and they are Jewish Nazi party. It’s led by Michael Ben Ari, who takes his ideology from Meir Kahane’s wretched Kach, which was outlawed as a terrorist group. Kahane and his followers demanded the following

– Revocation of non-Jewish citizenship.

– Expulsion of non-Jews from Jerusalem and eventually Israel.

– The eventual imposition of slavery on Arabs and other non-Jews.

– Prohibition of contact between Jews and Arabs, including sexual relations.

– Segregated beaches.

– Prohibition of non-Jews living in Jewish neighborhoods.

– Forced dissolution of all intermarriages.

In 1988 Kach was banned by the Israeli Supreme Court when it looked like gaining four to eight seats in the Knesset.

Greenstein notes that not only did this come straight out of the Nazis’ vile Nuremberg Laws, but it also did little more than codify existing Israeli legislation.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2019-02-24T12:39:00Z&max-results=7

Since 1948 successive Israeli governments have tried to forbid intermarriage between Arabs and Israelis. Mixed marriages are not recognised by Orthodox Judaism, the religion of the Israeli state. Which is one of the factors contributing to the outrage a little while ago when a couple of Israeli celebrities, who were respectively Jewish and Palestinian, got married, with the Jewish partner converting to Islam. Greenstein has also revealed on his blog that a number of municipalities in Israel are so keen to stop relationships between Jews and Arabs, that they are running courses in conjunction with the local police and religious organisations to discourage Jewish women from going out with Palestinian men.

The Nazis were also concerned to prevent intermarriage between Germans and those of what they considered to be inferior races, such as Poles and other Slavs. They were most fervently against gentile and Jewish Germans intermarrying. And the Jews also weren’t alone in being forced to wear identifying marks, in their case the Star of David. The Nazis developed a system of badges for the prisoners in the concentration camp, which identified the offence for which they were incarcerated. Gay men notoriously wore a pink triangle. The Gypsies, I think, were forced to wear a brown one. Red triangles were worn by socialists, Communists, Anarchists, other political dissidents and Freemasons.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

There were also identification badges for ‘Jewish race defilers’. Men had to wear this

While women were identified by this badge

Clearly this represents the Nazis’ criminalisation of racial intermixing and the shaming of those, whose only crime was that they were Jewish married or in a relationship with a non-Jewish German. I also wonder if it was also foisted on non-Germans, who were incarcerated because of their marriage to a Jew.

But the Israelis are also attempting to discourage intermarriage between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and if Otzma Yehudit get their way, such liaisons will be criminalised. In which case I wonder if those convicted of such crimes will also have to wear similar vile symbols. 

Newt Gingrich Wants to Introduce Thought Crime for Muslims

Here’s another video from The Young Turks, discussing another step in the downward path of American politics towards authoritarianism and repression. After the horrific terror attack in Nice on Friday, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representative under George Bush senior and Clinton, and Trump’s possible Vice President, has finally decided that the First Amendment shouldn’t apply to Muslims. He made a speech declaring that Muslims, who believe in sharia law should not be allowed into the country. Those who do, madrassas that teach it, and Muslims, who look up jihadist websites, should be expelled.

John Iadarola, Bill Mankiewicz and Jimmy Dore talk about how undemocratic this is. They point out that this is thought-crime, like the absolute control by the state of people’s opinions and ideas in Orwell’s 1984. Gingrich also stated that this should apply not only to Muslims, but to people with Muslim backgrounds. They also point out he want to criminalise people, who go to hardline Islamic websites no matter how much time they spend there. Cenk Uygur, one of the other anchors, is from a Turkish Muslim background, and they have all looked at hardline Islamist websites while doing research for news stories. Therefore, Cenk and they would be expelled under Gingrich’s legislation. They also point out that America is should be in no danger of having a theocratic government, as the Constitution stipulates that America is a secular state. Furthermore, that looseness with which that part of the legislation is framed would permit anyone, to have someone they disliked deported simply by hacking into their computer or sending them a link on their email. If someone wanted to get rid of a noisy neighbour, they could rickroll them with a link to an Islamist website, and whoa! The next thing that person’s on the plane.

Muslims themselves constitute less than three per cent of the American population. They also point out that if you ask immigrating Muslims if they believe in sharia government, they will deny it simply to get in, even if they do believe it. Furthermore, he points out that many American Christians also want a Christian theocratic government. They also state that a Muslim spokesman for one of the American thinktanks has stated that there are too many people, who know nothing about Islam, telling Muslims what their faith should be. Dore compares the Islamic sharia to Roman Catholic canon law, the body of religious law that governs the Roman Catholic church and its believers faith and practice. He claims that canon law in effect sanctions the abuse of children, because the church claimed that all the priests guilty of the crime would be punished according to canon law, when they were let off. Dore also wonders how many Muslims know about sharia law, considering very few Roman Catholics in practice know about canon law. The Turks also cite an unnamed atheist, who said that he considered American Muslims westernised, and so not the threat that the Right believes they are.

After coming out with this very hardline attack on American Muslims’ civil rights, Gingrich gave another interview backtracking somewhat, and claiming that he had a been misrepresented in the media storm that followed. He then claimed that devout Muslims, who were loyal to America, should have their rights absolutely protected, along with those of their children and other relatives.

Here’s the video.

In fairness to those, who do fear the imposition of sharia law, there have been instances in recent American history where a cult has tried to take over a community and turn it into a theocracy. The last time this occurred was in the 70’s and 80s, when one of the Indian gurus tried to take over a town in Oregon and turn it into a theocracy, ruled by his cult and followers. It failed, because the traditional townspeople resisted and invoked the Constitution. This was, however, one of the New Religious Movements based on Hinduism, rather than Islam, and I haven’t heard of Muslims, or mainstream Hindus either, for that matter, trying to anything like that.

The German counter-terrorism legislation did provide for the immigration authorities to question Muslim migrants if they believed in theocratic government. This is because the German system has government as the Basic Law as its fundamental article of state. This was introduced as part of the denazification programme after the War, and bans any party or organisation that does not recognise democracy. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the National Democrats, a Neo-Nazi outfit, and then in the 1990s to ban an Anarchist review and a range of Anarchist organisations. However, a few years ago, the Week reported that the Germans were considering removing questions about support for sharia government from the immigration forms, because Muslim immigrants would lie about their support. Quite simply, it didn’t stop terrorists entering the country. I also think they were going to drop it because the question was itself anti-democratic, and they were afraid that heavy-handed policing tactics like this were alienating German Muslims, and driving them towards the Islamists.

As for the question of Roman Catholic canon law and Islamic sharia law, this has been an issue in parts of Canada. I think there was a movement up there in certain provinces, which recognised Roman Catholic canon law and Jewish Beth Din courts as legally recognised authorities governing the faith and practice of those religious communities. This became intensely controversial when a Canadian Muslim wanted sharia law and courts also recognised. He was challenged by a number of organisations, including associations of female former Muslims, who were deeply concerned about the treatment of women under Islamic religious law. I don’t know, but I think the situation may have ended with the Canadian government repealing the legislation granting secular legal authority to all religious courts, regardless of which religion, they belonged to.

I have to say that Gingrich’s comments simply look to me like another embittered, racist Republican trying to compete with Trump, whom The Turks point out is the master of stupid racism. They point out that the Republicans now appear to be a stupid, cartoonish party, and that the only thing they have going for them is that they are competing against Shrillary. All this is true, but displays of prejudice like Gingrich’s and Trump’s are serving to chip away further at the American traditions of free speech and tolerance. They are acting as an endorsement to the increasing racism, and there is a real danger that such intolerance will turn more Muslims towards militant, intolerant forms of Islam as a response to the hostility shown to them by mainstream society.

Poverty, Class Conflict and the Satanism Scare

It was Halloween on Friday, and the Beeb has been marking the season with a series of spooky programmes. For the past few weeks BBC 4 has been running a programme Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour, on the rise of Victorian Gothic architecture, art and literature, presented by the excellent Andrew Graham-Dixon. On Friday night itself, BBC 4 also screened a programme on Goth pop music, covering ’80s and ’90s stars of the genre such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and the other musical limners of the miserable, the uncanny and the undead. Yesterday, Strictly Come Dancing also presented a suitably Halloween-themed edition, with the celebs and their professional partners tripping the light fantastic dressed as ghosts, ghouls, zombies and witches. And tonight on BBC 4 again, the science broadcaster, Dr Alice Roberts, will be presenting a programme on the origins of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Roberts is professor for the public engagement with science at Birmingham University. A medical doctor, she was a regular member of Channel 4’s Time Team, examining the human remains excavated by the Team. She is, however, credited in the programme as ‘anatomist’. This is indeed what she was, a professor of anatomy at Bristol Uni before taking up her post in Birmingham’s great institution. It’s a suitable career description, considering the origins of the book’s monster in the charnel houses, and the book’s scientific basis in the dissecting rooms of the early 19th century. And so in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d write a suitably spooky piece for this blog.

The 1990s Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare

Some years ago I wrote a piece, ‘Satanism and Class Conflict’, for the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia. Not only did Magonia critically examine the ‘modern myth of things seen in the sky’, to use C.G. Jung’s description, it also examined other forms of contemporary paranormal experience, vision and belief. This included the Satanism scare, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to disrupt and ruin the lives of many innocent children and adults. This was the belief that there are multigenerational sects of Satanists, responsible for sexually abusing and killing children in occult rituals. The F.B.I. investigated such claims and found that there was little evidence for such cults in America. In Britain the scare finally collapsed with the publication of the government’s Fontaine report, which also concluded that such a vast, occult organisation did not, in fact, exist. This was not before tens, perhaps hundreds of children had been taken into care, and parents, teachers, nursery teachers and religious ministers had been accused and sometimes jailed, often on the flimsiest evidence. Some of the testimony which provided the basis for prosecution was the product of false memories. These were confabulated memories created either through regression hypnosis or when the person remembering them was in a state of psychological shock and under considerable pressure. The F.B.I. had briefly experimented with hypnosis in the 1950s as a tool for recovering consciously forgotten memories, which they believed nevertheless existed subconsciously, from crime witnesses. They abandoned it because the process led to the creation of false memories. These could be produced from the unconscious promptings of the hypnotist and interrogator, who may not have been consciously trying to direct the witnesses’ testimony. In the case of the Satanism Scare, some of the questioning of the witnesses and victims was frankly farcical, consisting of leading questions from investigators who already believed they knew the answer. These included evangelical Christians and radical feminists, though much of the investigation that finally discredited the Scare was also done by Christian evangelicals. Many professional law enforcement officials were furious at the way these investigations were conducted. I remember reading that the Yorkshire police force were extremely angry after the case against one notorious paedophile collapsed. The man had been responsible for abusing something like twenty or thirty children. There was no religious or cultic dimension to the crimes. The abuser was a simple paedophile, and the evil he did was entirely human, not supernatural. Unfortunately, the Satanism hunters became involved in the questioning of a seven-year old victim, who then changed his testimony to state that he was abused as part of Satanic worship. As a result the trial collapsed, and the paedo escaped justice.

Religious and Ideological Reasons for the Scare

The immediate causes of the Satanic Child Abuse panic, and the related fears of terrible Satanic cults abusing and sacrificing children and animals were the fears of some Christian groups to the rise in secularism and atheism in the contemporary West, and the emergence of New Religious Movements, including modern pagan revivals like Wicca. Some feminists came to believe in these Satanic conspiracies through the work of social workers and child support agencies, which discovered that sexual abuse was far more prevalent than previously believed. This has led to some grossly inflated and frankly unbelievable claims of the scale of sexual abuse, such as that 1/3 of all girls have been sexually assaulted by their fathers.

Poverty and Economic Origins

Fuelling the anxiety were more secular, economic fears. The communities which experienced such panics were often poor, with a poorly-educated population, threatened with economic decline, joblessness and the failure of their businesses. Faced with these stresses, some in these communities began to look for scapegoats in illusory Satanic conspiracies. There was a paper in the academic modern folklore journal, Contemporary Legend, tracing the origins of one such Satanism scare in Louisiana in the 1990s. The paper described the state’s folk as ‘conservative and hard-working’. Louisiana was an oil-producing state, and it used the income from the oil industry to subsidise its citizens’ housing. Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s the state’s oil economy collapsed. As a result, house prices and mortgages shot up far beyond what many Louisianans could afford. Many were forced to pack up and leave, and it was not unusual for the banks to receive the keys to certain properties they had mortgaged posted to them and the homes themselves left vacant by their former occupants. In this atmosphere of real economic fear and anxiety, some of the state’s people were left vulnerable to fears of a Satanic threat to their communities. Thus, when dismembered animal carcasses appeared, they were blamed on the activities of Satanists, and the scare escalated from there.

The Satanism Scare and Conspiracy Theory

The sociologist Jeffrey S. Victor, in his book on the Satanism Scare, Satanic Panic, also notes that society’s need to find a scapegoat to persecute, whether Satanists in the 1990s or Jews in Nazi Germany, occurs during economic depressions when there is a widening gulf between rich and poor. This was certainly the case in post-Thatcher Britain and America. In many of the rumours, the Satanists abusing and killing the unfortunate children and animals were wealthy businessmen. These in turn were connected to fears of the occult orientation of particular companies. Proctor and Gamble, for example, were rumoured to be Satanists, based on no more than the design of their company’s logo, which shows a moon and thirteen stars. They attempted to counteract this by redesigning their symbol, and through a very aggressive legal campaign against those repeating the accusation. The Satanism scare was also part of a wider set of fears about the malign nature of the American government itself. George Bush snr notoriously referred to the world after Gulf War I: Desert Storm, as a ‘new world order’, echoing the words of Adolf Hitler, who also referred to Nazism as his ‘new order’. It also connected to conspiracist fears and theories about the origins of the American Revolution. The back of the dollar bill shows an eye in the pyramid, the symbol of the Freemasons, along with the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saeculorum’ – New World Order. This has been seen as evidence that not only were the American Revolutionaries Freemasons, but that the Masons have been secretly manipulating the country and its leaders ever since for their own malign purposes. When Bush launched the First Gulf War, this was seen by some as part of the global ambitions and schemes of the ruling Masonic elite. I can remember reading a piece in the small press magazine, Enigma, claiming that the Gulf War was caused by a malign secret alliance of Freemasons and Satanists.

Fears of the Underclass in the Blairite ‘Jago’

At the other social extreme, the Magonians themselves noted several times in their articles that the Satanism Scare represented a return of Victorian social fears about the working classes and the emergence of the contemporary underclass. Just as the Victorian upper and middle classes viewed the lower orders with suspicion as ignorant, superstitious, vice-ridden and potentially seditious, so the underclass have been cast as malign, feckless, immoral and a threat to good social order but the guardians of contemporary respectable morality, like the Daily Mail. You can recognise a kinship between the Edwardian novel, In the Jago, written by a radical journalist about the Peaky Blinder street gangs terrorising the slums of London about the time of the First World War, and modern journalists describing the horrors of contemporary sink estates. Unfortunately, there is a difference between In the Jago and modern treatments of the underclass. In the Jago viewed the street gangs and their members as the products of the human misery created through the poverty and desperation of the slums and contemporary Edwardian society. With the notable exception of Owen Davies’ Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class, most contemporary journalists seem content simply to declare that the poverty and despair faced by today’s poor is simply their fault. At its very worst, this attitude has produced the garish freak show of Jeremy Kyle, in which a succession of the extremely dysfunctional poor and maleducated appear to accuse each other of stealing each others partners.

Real ‘Pseudo-Satanic’ Crime

The type of occult crime described by the Satan hunters doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, there are occult-tinged crimes that sociologists like Victor have described as ‘pseudo-Satanic’. These are perpetrated by sick and twisted individuals, either from their view of the world or simply to add an extra thrill to their abuse of children or animals. Some of these are maladjusted teens, sometimes from repressively religious families, who have come to believe that they themselves are evil and that evil is stronger than good. You can add to this category the extreme elements of the vampire subculture. At one level, it’s simply a subculture of otherwise well-balanced young people, who like dressing up as vampires and enjoy horror literature, like the kids who go to the Goth weekend at Whitby. Others have become convinced that they really are vampires, and have created an entire parallel society like that in Anne Rice’s novels. And a minority have committed murder, based on their conviction that they are indeed members of the undead.

Satanism Scare as 1990s Phenomenon

Looking back, it seems such fears of Satanic conspiracies, whether global or local, are a distinctly 1990’s phenomenon. Valerie Sinason and some of the others responsible for the Scare in Britain are continuing their work, unrepentant about the immense harm they have done, and occasionally drawing the attention of Private Eye. Yet despite the renewed war in the Middle East and the massive escalation of poverty and the gap between rich and poor under Blair/Brown and then – and especially – Cameron, there hasn’t been renewed panic about Satanists. Some of this may be due to the decline in organised religion in Britain and America. It may also be due to the increased acceptance of alternative religions, at least amongst young people. The Mind, Body and Spirit sections of bookshops include books on Wicca and Western witchcraft, and the religion has been presented sympathetically in a series of fantasy film and TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also in the 1990s. There was some hysteria amongst some, mostly American Fundamentalist Christians, about the supposed occult content of Harry Potter, but this mostly seems to have died down. The Pope even thanked J.K. Rowling for her books’ role in stimulating children’s imaginations.

9/11 and Modern Conspiracy Fears

Some of the reasons why the Satanism Scare has not emerged again may be due to the real fears created by 9/11 and George W. Bush’s Neo-Con global campaign. Right-wing American fears that their government is still engaged in a malign programme of oppression, manipulation and exploitation of its own people, and expanding this to subjugate the other peoples of the world, is still very much present. It is the origin and raison d’etre of the ‘Truther’ campaign in America, and Alex Cox’s Infowars broadcasts. This is mostly secular, but it does take in some of the earlier fears about America’s supposedly Satanic elite. Part of this is based on the footage of the ‘sacrifice of dull care’, performed by America’s super-rich as part of their weekend of networking during the summer at Bohemian Grove. And rather than looking for the subversive activities of Satanists, much of the religious and cultural politics over the last decade has been taken up with the emergence of the New Atheism and its extremely aggressive attack on religious faith.

Threat of Radical Islamism, Immigration and UKIP

There has been the all too real threat of attack by radicalised Western Muslims, such as those responsible for the Boston bombing in America and the 7/7 bombing in the UK. This has served partly to direct Western fears of a terrible and subversive ‘other’ outwards, towards a global threat from militant, radical Islamism, and within to Britain’s Muslim minority. Finally, fear of a subversive threat from outside British society has also been concentrated on the continuing debate and controversy about immigration, and the rise of UKIP. Farage has regularly declared his party to be secular, non-sectarian and non-racist, but its major donors are all former Tories, and UKIP politicians have made a series of racist statements and comments while standing on an anti-immigration platform.

Real Need Now to Attack Poverty Caused by Cameron and Tories

Even if the Satanism Scare has largely vanished, there is always the possibility that it may revive, or the place of imaginary Satanists in causing abuse and destruction may be taken by another minority group. The material poverty and economic insecurity that created the pre-conditions of fear and anxiety that fuelled these fears is still very much present, and under Cameron getting worse. This needs to be tackled, and tackled now. Not by looking for Satanic conspiracies that don’t exist, and fearing your neighbour, but by fearing what the government will inflict next on the very poorest and most desperate in British society. It’s time to stop it.