Like, love, or loathe her, we must admit that the young Christine O'Donnell was probably lying when she appeared on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect in 1999 and claimed to have picnicked with a beau atop a blood-splattered Satanic altar. We may excuse her – She was young! Idealistic! Overcome by toxic hairspray fumes! – but surely we can't believe her.
In the partisan rush to paint O'Donnell as either a brave spiritual warrior or a jabbering twitcake, the punditry has shown a profound disinterest in seriously examining her claim. (More disinterest, as well as a silly conflating of O'Donnell's Satanic fling with the notably un-Satanic religion of Wicca, may be found here, here, and here.) Too bad. O'Donnell's bizarre claim was pure Satanic Panic stuff, hoary by the early 90s and ludicrous to even the moderately sane by 1999, when the last of the professional Satanic Panickers were getting in one last knicker-twisting over Marilyn Manson before scuttling off to the unemployment office. (Or Fox News.) I have on my desk a book by one of them: Bob Larsen's Satanism: The Seduction of America's Youth. Sitting on my bookshelves at home are Larsen's Book of Cults and Jerry Johnston's At The Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism In North America. Hogwash, all – there was never a sizable Satanic cult in the United States, and its closest approximation was mostly innocuous. Yet the literature of the Satanic Panic deserves attention, and, at the very least, a full-throated denunciation from those otherwise inclined to take Ms. O'Donnell at her word. This is a literature depicting young people in a particular version of America; one in which the apocalypse is imminent, and in which thousands of children are sacrificed to the devil every year. Where are the bodies? In the barn of an Okie farmer, or better – hidden by police officers who are Satanists themselves. Such an America must occasionally claim its own sacrifices to propitiate its hysterical appetites. Last time out, these were legion. Lives were ruined, families destroyed. Not by the dark arts, but by the fear of them.
I don't expect Christine O'Donnell to have thought about this, or to have realized what noxious brew she stirred with her remarks. How could she, or any other 90s witch-baiter, have any idea what an actual witchcraft prosecution looks like? A vivacious young woman fresh from the world of Bible study and campfire singalongs, flushed with zeal and the headrush of incipient celebrity – what could she have known of prisons and pyres? My inclination is to excuse her.
But there is no excusing the media who refuse to call a fib a fib. As Tommy Christopher adroitly put it at Mediaite, “[...] it seems (O'Donnell's) detractors and her supporters are equally invested in the truth of her claim, and are loath to point out the rather obvious problems with her story.” If Christopher is correct, it's bad news for everybody. If we, as a culture, are inclined to judge reports of Satanic witchcraft by their political implications rather than their veracity, it is certain we'll hear more of them before long.