The Devil Made Me Do It: Part I

Part one of recollections and remembrances of walking the skeptic’s path.

Picture it: the early 1980s, somewhere deep in the leafy suburbs of the northeastern United States. I was a kid going to church semi-regularly with my Catholic parents. This also happened to be the peak years of what became known as the “Satanic Panic.” At the time, fear-mongering Christians seized upon heavy metal music, horror movies, roleplaying games, and any and all manner of subversive youth culture favorites as the motive for what they saw as rampant deviancy and criminality. They claimed that satanists were operating in secret enclaves all across America, offering blood sacrifices to their All Mighty Lord Satan. You know, the standard stuff heathens do.

For a young boy who was simultaneously fascinated by and terrified of heavy metal, hopelessly hooked on comic books, and taking his first big leaps into the wonderful worlds of horror (in print and on film), it was a hell of a time to be alive. Thankfully, like many Gen X kids, I had fairly permissive parents, plus I lived in a relatively sane part of the country. Also, it didn’t hurt that while my folks were raised Catholic—both coming from traditional Italian families—neither one seemed all that enamored with churchgoing as the eighties progressed. I tend to think my father never cared for organized religion anyway, and just went along out of some vague obligation to my mother and to his Catholic upbringing. My mother basically stopped going to church by the time I was in high school, but she a did hold onto some of her Catholic convictions. Still, neither of my parents were remotely orthodox. We never spent any time talking about the Bible in my house.

I could read and watch whatever I wanted, basically. Back issues of 1970s Marvel horror comics like Tomb of Dracula and Son of Satan, plus Warren’s Vampirella, among others, were early favorites, along with seminal slasher movies like Halloween (1978, Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), many of which I saw thanks to my friend’s older brother, a teenager with a prodigious comic book collection who also happened to be a font of horror knowledge. Like me, he was an artist, and the walls of his room were plastered with not only posters but also his illustrations of various characters from his favorite comics. And besides Marvel and DC stuff, he was also reading many of the great independent comics of that era, like Nexus, Whisper, and Badger. He was a shining example of the kind of cool teenager I wanted to be, so why wouldn’t his excellent taste influence me more than anything I was hearing the priest drone on about on Sundays?

From my earliest memories of the Catholic Church and religious education programs, all I remember feeling is total disengagement. Going to church was a time for me to sit next to my parents and daydream about how awesome Batman was, how terrifying the Tall Man from Phantasm was, and how sinfully hot Elvira was. When I was a little older, the only thing that made religious ed classes remotely tolerable was that all of my chucklehead friends were just as bored as I was, which led to epic bouts of goofing off and getting yelled at by furious nuns. I practically came fully formed into the world as a skeptic. I would hear the priest’s sermon (called a “homily” in Catholicism) and, in my head, poke holes through it until it was Swiss cheese. It all felt so arbitrary. So conservative. So judgmental. So absurd. I caught on very early that organized religion was often about little more than scaring practitioners into maintaining their faith and supporting the church—financially, or otherwise. That is, when it wasn’t about rampant hypocrisy.

So, with my bullshit detector going off every time a holy person opened their mouth to speak, I gravitated more towards the forbidden stuff. That’s where the Satanic Panic came in handy. I watched salacious news coverage of supposed satanic ritual murders, talk shows with indignant hosts goading comically evil “satanists” onstage, and of course every example of satanic possession I could find at the movies. If the Devil was in it, or was just name-checked in the title, I was all over it.

As we now realize, the Satanic Panic damaged the lives of a lot of good people. From everyone duped by the bestselling book of lies Michelle Remembers, to the children, parents, and daycare providers at the McMartin Preschool, the hysteria of the Satanic Panic destroyed lives. Religious zealots and charlatans alike seized upon this hysteria to further cement their power over flocks of easily mislead parishioners. For further reading on just how insane things got during the Satanic Panic years, I highly recommend seeking out a copy of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. It’s required reading on the subject.

One aspect of this moment in time that has always stood out to me is how supposedly upstanding Christians claimed their pound of flesh with such extreme prejudice. This bolstered my innate skepticism and cynicism towards organized religion, and towards those who plead fealty to rules and doctrines that were at one time in history simply made up out of thin air by random men (it’s almost always men). When I discovered those sweet seventies movies like The Devils (1971) and Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), it was love at first sight. These films take a flamethrower to religious idolatry and pull back the curtain on blind faith, revealing the hypocrisy and outright lies upon which much of it is founded.

When I got a little older and stories of Catholic priests sexually abusing children—children who were encouraged to see their priests as extensions of their own families—the bottom completely dropped out. No longer was I just a skeptic of organized religion. No, I became resolute in my opinion that it brings more harm than good to the world.

I never needed a church to tell me what my faith should be. I just organically found my own: faith in humanity (which is tested, big time, every day), faith in the cosmos, faith in something bigger than us. I know nothing for certain, but I hope that after we depart this earth we will find peace together among the stars. So I’m all for faith—I’m just not into faith in corrupt institutions of power. Believe what you believe, but let others believe differently, and don’t cling for dear life to doctrines decreed ages ago by mere mortals—fallible human beings, just like us.

In a future post, join me for Part II of “The Devil Made Me Do It,” where I’ll discuss some subversive cinema and a convent’s worth of naughty nuns.

Special thanks to our Gal Friday Yvette. She’s been prodding us to finish and post this ever since she spent an afternoon digging through mounds of half-finished posts, crawling through the wreckage of the results of an attention-deficit-plagued brain. Speaking of crawling around in a sexy French maid’s outfit, we greatly appreciate that visual Yvette, as do the large crowds of random employees and strangers that gather ‘round to watch every time you do it. Merci.