Podcasts/Sacred Tension-Dangerous Games

Dangerous_Games SUMMARY KEYWORDS game, people, dragons, moral panic, satanists, dungeons, satanic panic, book, world, claims, religion, memories, cults, called, children, played, christian, satanic, story, 80s SPEAKERS Joseph Laycock, Stephen Bradford Long

Stephen Bradford Long 00:00 This is sacred tension, the podcast about the spiritual discipline of asking questions, and my name is Steven Bradford long. Today I'm speaking with Joseph Lai Kok. He is the author of several books which explore the intersection of fascinating weirdness and society. The book we are discussing today is called dangerous games with the moral panic over role playing game says about play religion and imagined worlds. If you grew up in evangelical culture, you might remember dire warnings about games like Dungeons and Dragons that they open portals to demonic realms that they cause unsuspecting children to lose their grip on reality or that they are a ploy by a global network of Satanists to ensnare children. You might also remember whispers about satanic cults abusing children, a widespread conspiracy theory that has come to be known as the Satanic Panic. While these theories have retreated from the main line, they're still popular in certain Christian circles and children are still exposed to them. Now as an adult, I'm exploring all these claims about the world that I took for granted growing up Joseph Laycock studies, these claims, and I found his insights absolutely fascinating. I hope you enjoy this discussion, especially if like me, you grew up surrounded by claims of supernatural threat and satanic abuse. And let's not forget that no matter how absurd these claims seem, there were still people out there who believed them. So with that, I give you Joseph Laycock. So I'm here with Joseph Laycock. Thank you, Joseph, for joining me.

Joseph Laycock 02:12 It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah.

Stephen Bradford Long 02:13 So, let's just start out with some of your bio and, and your field of study.

Joseph Laycock 02:19 Sure. I am an assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University. And I study American religious history, and new religious movements, which are groups that other people sometimes referred to as cults. And I'm an co editor for the Journal Novo religio, which studies those movements.

Stephen Bradford Long 02:40 Awesome. Well, so I, I first came across you through your lecture that you gave for the Satanic Temple up in Salem, and I watched your lecture there on YouTube, about Satanic Panic, and Dungeons and Dragons. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm fascinated by moral panic, and more specifically, the Satanic Panic. I think it's a fascinating and really important part of history. And so let's just start by defining some terms. What are role playing games? And what is moral panic? And what is the Satanic Panic?

Joseph Laycock 03:21 Okay? So role playing games are simply games where you play the role of another person. So if you've ever been on the schoolyard when you were a kid, and we were playing cops and robbers, that's a role playing game, right? You're a cop and your friend is a robber. But when people talk about role playing games, they usually mean much more sophisticated games played by adolescents and adults. And they these games may have much more sophisticated rules to kind of determine the outcome of specific events in the game. So for example, if you've played cops and robbers and you point your index finger at someone, you said, I got you, they might say, No, you didn't, right, I dodged the bullet. So when adults do this, they might say, well, we're gonna roll this die. And if my die reaches a certain number than I did hit you, and that's, that's what we're gonna say is fair, but it's basically the same thing and pretend to be another person. moral panic is a sociological term, which refers to a condition when something is perceived to be a threat to society, to the various sort of nature of our society and our traditions. So there are many examples of this sort of classic one would be the Salem witch trials, right? Everyone can agree nowadays that these people who were hanged in Salem were not actually witches, that there should not have happened. And there are various theories and explanations to sort of why it happened. But we can all agree that this was a panic, this community did something that they wouldn't normally do. And they were quite ashamed of their actions when it was over. Right? More Recent examples of moral panic might include the Red Scare in the 1950s. Right when various people were accused of being communists, there were actually communists, unlike witches in the way that the Puritans imagine them in the sandwich trials. But most of the people that were accused of this were not engaged in anything very dangerous or may have not been communist at all. Finally, the term Satanic Panic refers to a movement that began in the early 1980s and sort of petered out in the 1990s. And this was basically based on a conspiracy theory, that there are powerful organized groups of criminal Satanists, who live in America and throughout the world, that they conduct 1000s of human sacrifices every year, they abduct people in them, that they get away with this because the FBI and the media and the police all are actually Satanists themselves. And another part of this conspiracy began that they engage in the torture and sexual abuse of children. And that these practices are basically so traumatic that children cannot remember that it happened to them when it's over. So this is relatively common and conspiracy theories were it were actually scholars who study conspiracy theories, notice the bigger the conspiracy is, the less evidence actually matters. So if so, if you're alleging a group of 1000s, of Satanists operating at all levels of government who can erase the memories of their actions, you really don't need evidence at that point, it really does become a matter of faith. But this was this was important in the 1980s. Because this led to numerous cases where people would undergo hypnosis or something, and they would recover these memories, these alleged memories of their parents being Satanists and abusing them. There were numerous cases of innocent people whose lives were destroyed because they were accused of this the most famous was in McMartin preschool trial, where a family who owned a small preschool was accused of having dungeons underneath their preschool where they tortured people. This trial went on for seven years, and at the time was the most expensive trial in American history. I live in Austin, Texas, we have a couple of the Keller's who had a daycare in the 80s they were in prison for 20 years, before people realize that these things didn't really happen that they were falsely accused of, of being Satanists. So this was a this was a big deal in American history. And we do have a tendency to forget it.

Stephen Bradford Long 07:41 Yeah, this was a very costly thing. And so I was raised in kind of the Evangelical, charismatic subculture. And this was in the late 90s, early, mid 2000s, when I was, you know, a kid and middle school, high school. And, you know, these claims they became, they were mainline for about, you know, two or three decades, but then I think by maybe the 2000s, they had died down. But in the evangelical world, they never really went away and I was surrounded by them. And so just the atmosphere I was in was kind of I would hear these whispers on the edges about you know, satanic cults. And, you know, there'd be the occasional article and charisma magazine and and there would be, you know, churches would have the EK the occasional testimony, or member, former satanic member who or abuse victim of a satanic cult. And so I remember this growing up kind of the the the evangelical aftermath, where after it retreated back underground back into the evangelical world. And it is a really costly thing. It was costly to me psychologically, because it created this really dark world, it created this really terrifying world. But beyond that, it was incredibly costly for people's lives, their livelihood, there are people who are unjustly put in prison for decades, this was a very, very costly thing that happened.

Joseph Laycock 09:17 That's right. And you're right, that it has not gone away. If you look at the pizza gate scandal, that happened only a few years ago, thank goodness, nobody was hurt. But it was kind of by luck that no one was was killed. And it was the same kind of claim, right, that there was a subterranean area where Satanists were torturing children, just like we saw in the 80s.

Stephen Bradford Long 09:38 Yeah. Now as an adult, I feel like I'm going back and investigating all of these things that I that I was told were true as a child and so things like demon possession, Satanism, the Satanic Panic, these are all things that are now really fascinating to me as an adult, and I think because of that, I'm I I'm seeing how in this modern in our current environment with social media, and the whole echo chamber thing and fake news thing, how this is kind of a morality play for, you know, the Satanic Panic can can stand as a very real warning for us today with the existence of fake news and just how easily moral panics can be created.

Joseph Laycock 10:28 Absolutely. You know, we don't talk about this much. But paradoxically, the panic can sort of make you feel good, right? Yes, if you accept these, right, you are the sole person with with the power to kind of fight these dark forces and secret knowledge feels good. That's right. Everyone else doesn't know how the world really works. But but you do because you have this, this conspiratorial lens of seeing the world.

Stephen Bradford Long 10:52 Yeah, that's why I think this topic is important is I think we live in an age that is ripe for moral panics. And so if we don't know about these periods of history, and if we don't know, the psychology behind it, then we're just helpless against moral panic. And so hopefully, we can get more into like the psychology and causes of moral panic and, and the connection between Dungeons and Dragons and moral panic. But you So you started your book, you have this really great book called dangerous games. And to my shame, I'm not done with it yet. I'm about halfway through. And you start the book with a really interesting story about a bully. Can you retell that story? And why that story was meaningful for you and why you started your your study with that story?

Joseph Laycock 11:38 Sure. So I went to an Episcopalian Middle School. And we, we we played lots of Dungeons and Dragons, just like if he's watched this show a stranger things, right. It can be a big part of your life when you're in middle school. And I was talking about this with a friend and an older students said, You guys worship gods from books, right. And this is so sad. And so this didn't this claim didn't really make any sense to me, right? Because we didn't worship gods from books. Catholic, I think my friend was probably secular. So this didn't really make any sense. We tried to argue with him a little bit. But this is sort of a middle school argument. So there's always kind of the threat of violence, and it kind of petered out. But it took me a while to think about sort of why this was such a strange claim, right? That this was a game and had nothing really to do with religion or worship, although there were, there's a whole world in the game and religion as part of that world. That we certainly didn't worship anything from the game because we hadn't made it up. But I think the most significant thing was that this was a school where we were taught to worship a God that we knew primarily through a book, right? So there was a certain irony to it. And in fact, you know, we were kind of taught that Catholics were bad because their relationship with God wasn't based enough on a book, right? That they had these traditions, and that was bad book was really the best way to know your guide. So that kind of frustrating conversation were really wasn't until I had a PhD in religious studies that I could kind of articulate what was so frustrating. And, and ironic about that. And that kind of became the genesis for, for this book.

Stephen Bradford Long 13:22 That's fascinating. So and of course, this is the question that your book tries to answer. What was it about role playing games that freaked out the world? And the religious right, in particular, so much?

Joseph Laycock 13:39 Yeah, it's very strange. If you think about all of the things that a conservative Evangelical, who's politically active could get involved in this children's game is would seem to be pretty low on the list.

Stephen Bradford Long 13:53 Yes, exactly. I mean, especially when you consider, you know, kind of the legacy of Christian fantasy like JRR Tolkien and Madeline Longo and CS Lewis and George MacDonald, who kind of created the genre in some ways. And so yeah, it is very confusing,

Joseph Laycock 14:09 right. And so as I began to look more into this, you know, so I was confused that they cared at all, I was confused that there was this condemnation of the imagination itself, right, that the claim was that there was something blasphemous about a game or you pretend to live in another world or be another person, because reality is what God gave you. And so using your imagination to think about a different reality is sort of inherently sinful and rebellious. And this was odd to me because as you said, there is a great tradition in Christianity of the imagination being a resource, right? Absolutely. Being being something that can help you understand God. And finally, I found it very odd that, especially in the 70s and 80s, Dungeons and Dragons, have a lot of Christian elements in it because the games to creators were were pretty serious Christians, that was an important part of their life, even though they didn't talk about it in the game. But good and evil are powerful forces in this game, there is a priest class that uses basically old Old Testament miracles. Right, so many food and water raising the dead speaking in tongues, right? A lot of the monsters are taken from Christian tradition. And what I found was very odd is in critiquing these these games, a lot of these Christian critics saw these Christian elements, and paradoxically saw that as the evidence that this was a satanic, evil, anti Christian game. And so they were weirdly alienated from their own tradition. And I think one of the biggest examples of this was a former game designer went on the 700 Club, and, you know, began talking about this book of monsters you can put in the game, and one of them was a powerful demon named Moloch Moloch. This is a lesser known sort of Canaanite god, this is from the Bible. Yeah, the Israelites fight every once in a while, you know, it shows up maybe a dozen times in the Bible. And, and the 700 Club had never heard of this character. And then they were shocked and horrified right, that this is a real biblical character must prove this is a real satanic game. So this game, and it was sort of giving a Bible lesson to the 700 Club. And I found this very, very strange and very ironic. So these were kind of the questions that I had in my mind when I began looking into the history of this, this concern over these games.

Stephen Bradford Long 16:40 That's fascinating. Yeah. And you, you know, you brought up Christian, how it's rooted in Christianity. And one of the things that strikes me about Dungeons and Dragons is just how black and white the morality is. And it's very similar to Tolkien in that, in that sense, where, and you bring this up in your book, how good and evil in Dungeons and Dragons and and Tolkien are not just seen as like these external forces, but a foundational essence of who these characters are. And that's a very kind of fundamentalist Christian view, or traditional Christian view of the world.

Joseph Laycock 17:17 Absolutely. And in fact, there was sort of a later generation of gamers who began to say, well, maybe good and evil don't really work this way. Right? Maybe it's more kind of socially constructed, and we should alter things to look at the look at the world that way. But the the founders of these games absolutely had that sort of Tolkien view of good and evil that these are not, these are not social niceties. These are kind of the essence of the universe.

Stephen Bradford Long 17:41 And somehow the religious right found that threatening somehow the religious right saw that as proof that it's actually demonic.

Joseph Laycock 17:48 That's right. Yeah. So that was the sort of irony of this right, that the very things that you would think might make it a positive, wholesome game were seen as the things that made it evil and evidence that this is some kind of subversive religion or some some attempt to indoctrinate children into something evil,

Stephen Bradford Long 18:04 right. And this fear really swept the United States that that Dungeons and Dragons is the is a Satanic cult. So talk about what launched that fear. Talk about how that started and kind of give us a bit of a history of the moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons.

Joseph Laycock 18:23 Sure. So as I mentioned earlier, moral panics happen from time to time. And they often have a similar pattern and how they play out but the focus of them is always different. And so in the 1970s, Americans weren't really that scared of Satanists. We were scared of cults though. All right. So this was an era of the Harry Krishna 's and the children of God and the Moonies and there were all these sort of new religious groups that people were worried about. And there were accusations that these groups converted people from Mind Control, right by getting your student to you send your kid off to college, and they meet some Harry Krishna and he begins chanting, and then they use Mind Control on him. Right. And so that was initially the lens through which this was seen, right that the the person who sort of is the judge of the game and adjudicates everyone's actions, is called a dungeon master. And in the 70s, people heard that name and thought, this has something to do with with cult mentality and with with mind control. So in 1979, a college student disappeared from a campus he was known to have played Dungeons and Dragons. And his family was very wealthy and hired a private detective. And so this sort of became a media circus and William deer, the detective they hired, put her to a press conference and had this theory that the students play too much Dungeons and Dragons and basically had a kind of psychotic break and was now wandering about believing that they were some kind of medieval hero, medieval world. And this this theory turned out not to To be true, right. And eventually the student called his family from Louisiana and said, I want to come home. And then they sent the private detective to collect him. So his disappearance had nothing to do with with this game he had played. But the story was out there and it was all over the media. And there were headlines like, you know, genius child, embroiled in cult game and things like this. It was great for the sales of Dungeons and Dragons. Right. And then this was adapted into a novel and then finally into a made for TV movie starring Tom Hanks called mazes and monsters. And so audiences could actually see Tom Hanks in this fugue state where he's wandering around New York, and he sees a subway and he thinks it's a dragon and this sort of thing. So this helped Americans to imagine what it would be like to have some kind of mental illness brought on by this game. But as far as we know, this is basically never really happened. This is only something Yeah. And that exists in urban legends. And then in the 80s, was when the panic shifted from cults by the 80s, we basically realized the hairy Christians are not going to take over America, right? They're just this sort of unusual group of Hindus. But the panic has shifted to Satanists. Right. And so the narrative changed to this is a game that is sort of invented by Satanists to kind of help subtly indoctrinate our children into these satanic and occult practices. This was a decade where the word occult began to be used a lot. And no one was ever really clear about what a cult meant. It just sort of meant bad and evil, and satanic.

Stephen Bradford Long 21:45 And it still means that it still means that and evangelical circles.

Joseph Laycock 21:49 That's right. And it's very tricky, right. So we would normally think of you know, your daily horoscope has nothing to do with, you know, sacrificing humans or something like this. But there it's all a cult, right, it's, so it all gets sort of lumped together in a single ubiquitous, evil category. And so there was another high profile case, involving a woman named Pat poling in Virginia and her son committed suicide. And she came up with his narrative that he had played Dungeons and Dragons as part of his honors, English class, and that this was the cause of his suicide, and actually said that the game had basically programmed him to kill his own family, that was her claim. And that the person had resisted this programming the only way he could by taking his own life. And so it really hadn't been a suicide at all, he had sort of heroically saved his family from this satanic game. And she found an organization called bothered about Dungeons and Dragons are bad.

Stephen Bradford Long 22:53 That is my favorite acronym. By the way.

Joseph Laycock 22:56 This was just deliberately imitating right Mothers Against Drunk Driving, right and similar with acronym, but bad, was very aggressive and did a lot in the 80s to promote the idea that this was a satanic game. Pat pulling became a full time a cult crime investigator. And there was an interview with her where she said, I think that, you know, something like 10% of the population of virginia beach are Satanists and reporter said, so there's more Satanists, and there are Methodists in Virginia Beach, right. And so she put out these crazy claims and just sort of see if they stick. And I think the most disturbing thing that she did was she made a document for law enforcement that would be sent out to police departments about how to interrogate adolescents who played Dungeons and Dragons to find out about what other criminal and satanic activities they're involved in. And I was able to obtain a copy of this document during my research. And the police were supposed to sort of take these kids aside who play this totally legal game that you buy toys r us and ask them questions like, you know, do you perform human sacrifices and things like that? So that's getting out of hand in the 80s. That was kind of the peak of the panic. Paradoxically, it was also the peak of Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of people remember this as a phenomenon of the 80s.

Stephen Bradford Long 24:21 Hmm, awesome. And then and then you also talk about a third phase, which had to do with the concept of the last generations super predators. Columbine in the 90s.

Joseph Laycock 24:34 Yeah, so So by the 90s, the Satanic Panic, it kind of died down a little bit, as you mentioned, it was still going strong in evangelical circles, but you wouldn't see talk shows like Geraldo talking about, yeah, your your child at daycare might be being you know, ritually sacrificed as we speak. In 1988. There was famously this horror, all those special were things like that were suggested. So in the 90s, two things happen. You have a new The generation of games that are much darker have moved away from these kinds of Christian Tolkien esque roots like Dungeons and Dragons. And particularly, you have a company called White Wolf that is making games inspired by Anne Rice's vampire novels where the characters are actually playing vampires and monsters. And these are darker games, they're more realistic. They're not set in a fantasy world, they're set on earth, there are elements of sort of actual kind of occult lore in them. Petaling had died by this point, but I'm sure she would have just been terrified these games, right? She would have swallowed, right? But so so you have these darker games, and then at the same time, you have this anxiety about the dangers of adolescence. So beginning in 1996, crime rates begin to plummet all over America. And yet there is this discourse of super predators, right? A super predator is an adolescent, who is who has a gun and lives in the inner city, and is supposedly basically doesn't have a conscience. That was the claims that were made. And there was this book called body count, which basically said that this is a generation born in conditions of moral poverty. I think what they really meant by moral poverty was just poverty. Right? People in this neighborhood don't know, right from wrong, basically. But this was this was really scary to people. And so there was this kind of narrative of our teenagers are going to kill us, right? Not because they've been brainwashed by a call to they worship Satan, but they're just sort of inherently soulless. And things like Columbine seem to confirm this for people. And so in the wake of Columbine, there was an attempt to kind of revive these claims, right, that, you know, because Columbine didn't have a good explanation. And so, one kind of go to explanation was, well, maybe it was these games, maybe that's what they were involved in. And there were a number of other high profile cases in the 90s, involving usually young men who were maybe playing his vampire game and, you know, committed a murder or did some other kind of serious crime that wasn't really didn't seem to have an obvious motive. So that became kind of a third wave of this panic, right from being about cults to being about Satanists, to finally just being about bad teenagers, teenagers that scare us.

Stephen Bradford Long 27:22 I think what fascinates me the most about this whole period of history is the religious right, and how Christian people responded to Dungeons and Dragons and the moral panic, you have some fascinating insights about what Dungeons and Dragons what their accusations about Dungeons and Dragons actually says about religious fundamentalists who are so afraid of it, and that they might have actually been involved in some really intense project. And could you talk about that some, because I think this is really the most fascinating part of your book. And, and your talk that you gave at the Satanic Temple, is what this phenomenon says about fundamentalist religion in the United States.

Joseph Laycock 28:07 Right. And I want to be clear that I think the overwhelming majority of people in the 80s were just told by their pastor or someone that they trust that this is a dangerous game, and that you shouldn't be involved with it. Right? And that I can't really blame them. Right. But if you sort of trace this back, right, who is putting these ideas out there? What is the kind of patient zero of these claims? It tends to be people that are a little bit unhinged. It's if you look at sort of who is the very first person to come out and say, the manufacturers of this game are Satanists and are trying to indoctrinate children into Satanism. You tend to find people who have serious mental problems. One of them John Todd actually ended up being committed and died in a mental institution. What was his story? John's HOD basically began going to churches and saying that he had been born in this powerful family of witches that controls the world that are from Salem, Massachusetts, of course, right of course, and that he had defected because he watched the movie, the Cross and the Switchblade. What some of your audience may know that fab salutely

Stephen Bradford Long 29:19 Yeah, my my dad read me the book when I was a kid. Yeah,

Joseph Laycock 29:23 yeah. So John Todd said, I saw this movie and this made me realize I shouldn't try to take over the world for Satan the way my family trained me to, and I'm going to be Christian, and he would go to churches and he would send collecting funds for my work converting witches to Christianity. And people would give him money for this right and somebody pointed out at one point and said, all of your stories about witches and your family it sounds a lot like the TV soap opera dark shadows.

Stephen Bradford Long 29:56 Yeah, which which was a soap opera about vampires.

Joseph Laycock 29:59 That's right. Okay, there was recently this Johnny Depp movie A couple years ago. Right. And his response to that was, well, the satanists control Hollywood and they stole my diaries. And they use that as the basis for the show. So actually, the copying goes the other way. But but that's some things like that are very interesting, because it shows who is really confusing fantasy and reality, right? Who exactly who is actually watching a TV show and claiming that that's their real life. And then the irony of this is periodically, John's how we get frustrated when Christians would call him out on this. And then he actually was involved with the kind of Neo pagan community and would occasionally go back to the Neo pagan community. At one point, he was involved in owning a store that sold pagan supplies and books, and he would just sort of keep going back and forth and playing both sides of the field. And then he would get in trouble for various sexual misconduct, sexually harassing women and things like this. And sometimes he would go to the pagans and say, can you believe those Christians are accusing me of you know, sexually molesting a minor? It's helped me out, the pagans would say we you're not, you're not one of us, right? Leave us leave us alone. And eventually, he had this kind of full, psychotic break. So he was he was a dangerous individual another. Another figure like that is Rebecca Brown.

Stephen Bradford Long 31:19 Yes. And I've read several of her books. And I'm actually planning on doing like a book club series on some of her books.

Joseph Laycock 31:28 So she's a really fascinating character, right, because she was a medical doctor. And her license was revoked. Because at the hospital where she worked, she began saying that she could discern demons in some patients. And that's why they weren't getting better and doing exorcisms in the hospital and had a woman living with her who had been a patient that she was giving incredible doses of painkillers to and was apparently giving painkillers to herself. And this is all in the New York Times, because her medical license was was revoked. And so she quit medicine and sort of reinvented herself as this as this kind of religious conspiracy theorists. In her book, she said the purpose of Dungeon dragons, the reason it was invented, was specifically to recruit this army of children, for Satan, but not just any children, they wanted the smartest children, right. And this is why they made this kind of nerdy game that will appeal to kids who are good with computers and things. So this can all be used in you know, in the Antichrist army, right when that when the time comes.

Stephen Bradford Long 32:33 And this is kind of creating that narrative of the brilliant victim that you talk about several times is that is this paradox that the that the victims of Dungeons and Dragons, the victims of the satanists, and colts and whatnot, they are brilliant, but because they're so smart, because they're brilliant, they're super vulnerable. That's right.

Joseph Laycock 32:53 And this is well known of all moral panics, right, is that there's always a victim, there's always someone at risk. And that is usually a child or sometimes a woman. But it's always sort of, we have to do this to protect this precious vulnerable member of society, right, we can go all the way back to, you know, even to the days of ancient Rome, where Christians were accused of killing babies, right? That was why Christians were so terrible as they hurt innocent little babies. So this is a pattern and here we see it sort of, as you said, right, that, paradoxically, these kids are so smart and so precious, that they are completely at the mercy of this game, right.

Stephen Bradford Long 33:33 And so what I am getting from all of this, from kind of this, this history that you're laying out, is that really, for lack of a better term, deranged, and delusional people can wield a lot of power, and that ideas have a life of their own. And so the idea is that, that these delusional people give birth to and to kind of the social pool can can propagate and, and take on a life of their own. And the end result is that people who are completely sane, like people in my own life in my in growing up, they were deeply religious, but they were very sane. I mean, they weren't mentally ill ended up believing the things that these people who struggled with mental illness said were true. And I think that that just points to kind of the fragility of the human mind. I think that kind of points to the fragility of what of what we are capable of believing in the face of absurdity in the face of zero evidence. And I think that that's a really important thing to meditate

Joseph Laycock 34:39 on. That's right. And we have to remember this was before Snopes, right. This was before yes, you could you could kind of check your sources easily on the internet. And I think most people's as you said, this was just they were told by their pastor, this was a kind of dangerous game. And there were pieces in mainstream media, and most of the people who have those concerns had never heard of John Todd or Rebecca Moore, right? They had no idea kind of what was going on at the root of these claims. It was just, it was just well known in their community that this was so.

Stephen Bradford Long 35:09 Yes, exactly. And so you draw some really really interesting parallels between role playing games and religion before we get into this subject because most of my listeners, you know, I do have some some atheists and agnostics and, and whatnot, who listen, but mostly my my audience is from a Christian background. And so before we get into this, it's important to clarify when you compare Dungeons and Dragons to religion, when you compare fantasy, or shared fantasy to religion, are you seeing that as a denigration of religion in any way? No,

Joseph Laycock 35:46 of course not. And certainly not as a denigration of Christianity. One thing people have to understand isn't the academic study of religion. We don't have a clear definition of what a religion is, or is not sure. We all know what Christianity is, right. But the idea that Christianity belongs to some larger category called religion, alongside other things, and we're not sure what those other things are. It's debated right. And I have I have college students all the time, who are evangelical Christians, who would say, Well, I'm not religious, right? I just have relationship with Jesus. Right, right. And so that's, that's playing with this category as well. And I actually can't tell those students that they're wrong, because a lot of Religious Studies is simply arguing about what should this category mean, it's a socially constructed category. So a lot of this, this work in religious studies involves making comparisons, right? What can you compare to? Something like Christianity that we all agree on is a religion? And what kind of shakes out of those comparisons? So for example, there's a lot of work on, say sports and religion is an event like the Super Bowl, similar to a religious ritual in some ways, right, in terms of it brings communities together, it gets people very excited. There's a legal version of this to you know, the Supreme Court has had to decide well, as a Santa Claus display a religious thing or not, right? Obviously, there's, it seems religious, but maybe legally, it isn't. So that's what I'm thinking about. My goal was not here to say that religion or Christianity is some sort of mass delusion or imaginary and the way that Dungeons and Dragons is imaginary. But when I do that comparative work, you know, a couple of things that kind of shake out, you know, one of the big kind of hallmarks of religious traditions is the sacred stories, right? Yes. And when we're looking at other people's religion, we usually call those myths, right?

Stephen Bradford Long 37:43 And I have no problem calling my Christian faith, an inner guiding myth, you know, that that to me makes complete sense. I guess, you know, you could call me a non theistic Christian, those inner guiding myths are one of those things that really sustain me and is deeply meaningful to me.

Joseph Laycock 38:00 Right. And it's unfortunate in our society, that myth has come to mean a story that isn't true. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. Because what it really means is a story that you live by a story that is true in a particular way. So we all agree, there was never any person named Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and his wings melted need died. Probably the ancient Greeks who told that story didn't believe that story was true. But it's a story to live by right to tell someone remember it risks to tell them right you were you were engaged in something dangerous and prideful, and you must be careful. So I do think that Dungeons and Dragons does serve that function in common with with religion. For some people, it creates these stories that are uniquely meaningful, and that help them to think about their own situation in new ways, right. So there was a magazine called Dragon magazine that was produced by the people who made Dungeons and Dragons. And one thing I did to research this book as I went through all these letters to the editor, and someone wrote in and said, You know, I came from a rough backgrounds, and now I am in the military, and I served in Iraq, and I'm the leader of my squad. And I learned all this from playing Dungeons and Dragons, right? I learned about teamwork, I learned about believing in myself and determination, all these other great qualities from sitting around with my friends imagining that we were on this, this adventure, and you could kind of take that letter and cross outs, Dungeon and Dragons and put in the Bible or my church, right? And it would read very similarly. I can imagine someone saying, you know, if Jesus is brave enough to die on the cross, then I can be, you know, brave enough to serve my country and the army or something like this. So there's a similar kind of function there in terms of having stories and having these kinds of subtly life changing experiences where there is a kind of family resemblance sometimes between religious traditions and a game like Dungeons and Dragons,

Stephen Bradford Long 39:54 and both allow kind of this sacred space. Do you use this fantastic term a, like an adjacent world or kind of this, this place that you can retreat into of timelessness and myth, this sacred canopy that is set apart that you can retreat into and make greater sense of the profane now you know, the profane life and you can make greater sense of it and then you return to that normal life everyday life with a maybe a bit more insight and perspective and, and how both Dungeons and Dragons and religion provide that. And, you know, for me, I'm a big gamer. Games provide that video games kind of provide that where and people find that confusing when I say that, because they think it's just mindless entertainment. But certain aspects of the strategy in the story have really helped me navigate my own life. I'm also a big reader. I love fantasy and science fiction and fiction in general, and horror, especially and kind of entering into those worlds. It isn't escapism for me, it allows me kind of this alternate reality, this alternate dimension, which allows me to return to the real world and be wiser and more competent,

Joseph Laycock 41:24 right? Yeah, in Buddhism, they talk about enlightenment, and we are like tadpoles, and our destiny is to become a frog. But the tadpole cannot imagine what it's like to be a frog, it can't imagine a world without water, right. And so when the enlightened person the frog comes back and tries to explain it, the tadpoles don't don't understand. And I think that kind of having this immersive alternate reality through a novel or role playing game, or a computer game sort of creates that that space where you're able to see things in a different way for the first time, right, you're able to kind of get a sense of, oh, I am a water creature, actually. And that's not the only that's not the kind of the only way to exist. So I do think it has an important function, I think you're right, that that's more than just a escapism, it's actually kind of expanding the way that you think about things expanding the way that you see the world.

Stephen Bradford Long 42:17 And, you know, I'm a pickup alien. And so I love the liturgy, as well. And I find that the liturgy, the shared liturgy, and the Eucharist kind of has that that same element is it's that it's entering this profound, beautiful, sacred space. And then I somehow leave that space and in some way psychologically transformed. And so that there's that similarity, and not saying it's the exact same thing, not saying that religion is a role playing game, and that a role playing game is religion, but but simply that they're very, very similar in this respect. And I think the the really fascinating insight that you offer in your book, that element is what made it so frightening to a lot of the moral claim makers in the religious movement. They're shut down, over role playing games, their total demonization of role playing games was kind of this shoring up against doubt. Because if role playing games kind of look like a religion, then what does that say about my religion?

Joseph Laycock 43:29 That's, that's right. And a kind of smoking gun of that was another interview with with at polling where they just asked her, Why do you think children can't understand that these games are just games? Why would you assume that they know they don't, they don't know it's not real. And she said, Well, the kids believe in God, and there's no evidence of God. And so it was kind of putting it on the table, right? That everything seems imaginary to her at least some of the time, right. And so she seemed to have put religion and these games in the same category, maybe even without consciously realizing it. And so I you have to remember in the 80s, it was not only touched on dragons, but it was almost every form of children's culture was, was being suspected of this kind of satanic conspiracy, including things like the Carebears. Or this Bill Cosby movie called Ghost Dad, right? So it was literally everything that was kind of imaginary named children was was regarded with great suspicion. And I found this very odd because, again, traditionally, Christianity has has embraced the imagination, right as a way of kind of bridging the gap between our world and God. So I wonder kind of why this was happening. And I do think that this was a moment when there was a lot of concern about controlling children making sure that they sort of emulated their parents and I think on some level, there was a realization that the imagination gives Is this kind of radical freedom or radical agency? And that that has to be that has to be checked that has to be reined in. Because otherwise, we just don't know what will happen,

Stephen Bradford Long 45:09 right? Because like when a kid plays Dungeons and Dragons, or a video game or reads a book or whatever, they they really inhabit a completely different world. And so, you know, you have a group of kids in the living room playing Dungeons and Dragons, and they're not there at all. They're in this invisible interior world that the parents can't access. And I can imagine how to a fundamentalist parent or just to a deeply religious parent, that would be very frightening that they are suddenly in this world that they the parent cannot access.

Joseph Laycock 45:42 That's right. So it's, it's kind of perfect for a moral panic, right? Because, you know, with with things like the McMartin preschool trial, they had to answer questions like, Well, if the, if your child was being tortured at daycare by Satanists, how come every time you showed up to pick up your kid, the kid was right there and was clean and hadn't been tortured? But if but if the claim is that all of this evil stuff can happen purely in the imagination, even while your kids are sitting in your living room, and you're watching them right, then the standard of evidence is very different that this is something something dangerous, huh?

Stephen Bradford Long 46:14 So there's, there's one more thing that I want to touch on before we wrap up, because I think it is incredibly important. And that's the subject of the book, Sibyl and hypnotic regressive therapy, and just how deeply damaging regressive hypnotic therapy is. And you know, we can't really have a conversation about the Satanic Panic without talking about that. And so if you could talk about that some that would be great.

Joseph Laycock 46:42 Sure. So I mean, most people know through pop culture, this idea of multiple personality disorder, it used to be referred to as schizophrenia, we now understand schizophrenia is something different, it doesn't have to do with with other personalities, and the current medical designation as dissociative identity disorder. And I want to just put my credentials on the table. I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not trained in kind of diagnosing these conditions. But I, you know, there's a history to this, and I can study the history. And there's a debate about is it actually medically possible for someone to have a split personality, or is this basically a kind of social role that they are sort of taught to engage in by therapists and by by their culture, right? That wouldn't mean that this, this is not real, when someone appears to have a different personality. But it would just mean that this is not sort of naturally occurring, it's not something wrong with their brain or their brain chemistry, that sort of they live in a culture that tells them this is this is how you behave if you have a multi personality, and it sort of manifests itself. So this became very popular in America through the media, there was a book called three faces of Eve. And then a little later, this book, Sybil, which was based on an actual case, and then adapted into into a film. And one of the behaviors associated with this, this mental condition is that you have dissociative amnesia. So you wake up somewhere else, and you have no memory of how you got there, or what you've been doing, because this other personality has taken over. And again, there's a lot of debate about to what extent are these sorts of stories really possible? So in 1981, a book came out called Michelle remembers, and this was written by a woman who was seeing a psychiatrist for postpartum depression and said, I feel like I want to tell you something, but I don't know what. And the psychiatrist was Catholic and was very interested in kind of demonology and things like this. And notice she had a rash. And he said, I think this rash is something that wants to kind of express itself and I'm going to hypnotize you. And through hours and hours of hypnosis, they uncovered the story where her parents in the 50s had been Satanists, and they had tortured her and the therapist, the patient later got married. And so I My theory is that she was kind of infatuated with her psychiatrist and would basically say anything to keep the sessions going and to kind of keep his attention. But Michel remembers became a best seller. And this started this cottage industry and people kind of undergoing hypnotic regression, and recovering these lost memories. And at its worst, some of these psychiatrists that they were very involved in these kinds of satanic conspiracy theories would say, you have another personality that you don't know about that goes and commits torture and other crimes for this satanic cult. And you are actually torturing your own child to bring them into the cults and you don't even know that you're doing this. So you can imagine, oh, my god, hold that by a medical professional, right, the kind of horror that that would inflict on someone, of course, and so you mentioned the Satanic Temple. I'm not a member of the Satanic Temple. I'm actually researching them. But they asked me to come and speak on this, they have a group called the gray faction. And that group is specifically a kind of watchdog group that sort of looks for therapists who still tell patients, these kinds of stories that they have repressed memories or involved in government mind control programs are things like this, because it does get very dangerous very quickly, when people with medical licenses tell these kinds of stories.

Stephen Bradford Long 50:24 And it gets very, it gets deeply traumatizing really quickly. Because, you know, I think what needs to be communicated to people who are new to this concept is, these memories feel very real, these memories feel as real as your memory of yesterday morning, I mean, you know, what science shows is that our memories are actually very malleable and very plastic and can be created. And they feel especially especially at the bidding of an authority figure like a therapist or a pastor or whomever, these memories feel incredibly real. And suddenly walking around with the memory of torturing your child, or the memory of being abused as a child by horrifically by Satanist. And, and having a memory that doesn't exist, that that doesn't reflect reality. And yet, you are still suffering the traumatic consequences of it, it's a very, it is very real abuse to put people through this. And so this, this played a big part. And in the Satanic Panic, it plays a big part in the alien abduction community. And it continues to play a big part in the charismatic and evangelical worlds where people go through prayer met what's called prayer ministry, and it can be a very similar situation where you go in and look for memories that cause certain emotional wounds and, and you can walk away with a lot of added baggage and so that it's a it's an important thing to be mindful of.

Joseph Laycock 51:57 That's right. And the irony is that it is the person who is nominally the the healer, who is creating these horrible memories of these horrible experiences. It's not the satanists.

Stephen Bradford Long 52:08 Yes, exactly. And so it's kind of this projection. It's kind of this weird, you know, unskillful, wears swapping of the roles. Oh, we're, we're getting close to the end of this show. But before we go, if people want to learn more about this subject, what would you suggest people to read?

Joseph Laycock 52:27 Oh, wow, we're in a real renaissance right now of books on kind of the history of role playing games, there is a book called playing the world, if you really want the most thorough kind of history of this. There are also a lot of much more lighter books of Dyson min is a good one on kind of the history of role playing games. There is even now a graphic novel about Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, and you can read in comic book form, about his life and how he ended up creating this game. In the 70s. For the kind of history of Satanic Panic, there's, there's quite a lot out there. There's a book that's just called Satanic Panic. There is. David Frankfurter wrote a very good book, sort of analyzing why people tell these kinds of stories from Satanists in the 80s all the way back to Roman accusations about Christians. That book is called evil incarnate. So there's, there's a lot of good stuff out there, and you just sort of have to know where to begin where to where to look.

Stephen Bradford Long 53:36 Okay, awesome. And so, and also your book dangerous games is fantastic. And I really recommend it to anyone who's interested. So if people want to get in touch with you or find you, where can people find you?

Joseph Laycock 53:48 You can Google me, I have a website. It'll come up in a Google search. It should be the first thing there. And you can also find me on the faculty page for the philosophy department at Texas State University.

Stephen Bradford Long 54:00 Wonderful. All right. Well, that's our show. Thank you, Joseph, so much for joining me.

Joseph Laycock 54:06 It's a pleasure to be here.

Stephen Bradford Long 54:07 Yeah. I've really really enjoyed this conversation. It's been a great discussion. The music for the show is by the jelly rocks. The artwork is by Justin Caleb Bryant, if you enjoy my work and want to support it, please go to S Bradford long.com where you can read my dozens of articles about faith, doubt, religion, sexuality, LGBT issues. And you can also become a patron there if you want to support my work every little bit helps. I'm kind of working an insane schedule, doing the podcast and working a full time job and being a yoga teacher. So I'm kind of looking like a meth addict right now. But it's worth it. I love every bit of it. And if you want to support me in my work, that would be wonderful. Also, I have a little favor to ask of you. If you enjoy the podcast, go to iTunes or wherever you you'd listen and give me a nice review and that would really help me extend my reach. Special thanks to my team who helps me stay sane and keep the show going. Carson green and Justin Bryant. And that is our show. We will see you next week.