Save the children! Premised on the unquestioned innocence of young people and the evil incarnate in everything from dancing and reading comic books to playing Doom and Dungeons & Dragons, this invocation has been remarkably prevalent in American culture as a means to enact a broader political agenda. Most recently, QAnon, now using #SavetheChildren, leveraged fears of a pizza parlor pedophilia ring and Hollywood elites extracting adrenochrome from children’s blood to marshal support for extreme political causes and the re-election of Donald Trump. Their promotion of these conspiracy theories culminated in QAnon followers carrying out the Capitol insurrection to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

This roundtable will discuss how QAnon is connected to a history of movements claiming to protect vulnerable children from demonic forces as a means to their political ends. Emily Johnson, Assistant Professor of History; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and African American Studies at Ball State University, will contextualize Q-Anon’s Satanic fantasies in a much longer history of Satanic panics. In particular, she will examine the ways in which contemporary moral panics about Satanism draw on earlier antisemitic and anti-Catholic tropes in ways that are both unsubtle and largely unacknowledged by believers and observers. By examining these conspiracy theories over time, she will offer insight into the changing ways in which Americans, particularly those on the far right, have defined the outer boundaries of American freedom and belonging. K. Scott Culpepper, Professor of History at Dordt University, will look specifically at how conservative evangelical music and media were utilized to groom Christian youth for cultural and political engagement. Through the use of spiritual warfare imagery, evangelicals’ admonitions to combat the rising tide of darkness eventually morphed into more overtly political calls to translate spiritual activism into strategies for gaining political power. Kyle Riismandel, Senior University Lecturer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, will connect the right wing beliefs and activities of QAnon to the bipartisan consensus of the culture wars. In that era, the view that popular culture products endangered children and caused teen social problems and that parents, not government, must be empowered to protect them came to be widely accepted paving the way for QAnon to leverage their potent mix of anti-government fervor and family values. Together with Chair Andrew Hartman, Professor of History at Illinois State University, the roundtable will make sense of how QAnon’s outrageous claim that there is a secret cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles controlling the media and the government has become so persuasive for so many in contemporary America by contextualizing it in the broader history of Satanic panics and fears for the livelihoods of children in the United States.

This roundtable is being submitted in conjunction with a second roundtable, organized by Rachel Hope Cleves, that focuses religious history and the roots of QAnon. Ideally, we hope the two panels could be scheduled sequentially, following chronological logic, with the religion panel first and the Satanic panic panel second.