The Devil’s Workshop: Imperiled Children, Race, and Coalition Building During the Satanic Panic in the 1980s United States

he 1980 election of Ronald Reagan shifted the political focus from the 1960s civil rights and Great Society liberalism to a hawkish, neoliberal, free-market economy, which emphasized “family values”—values that Reagan and his Moral Majority portrayed as jeopardized. Throughout Reagan’s presidency, American parents, politicians, clergy, experts, and reporters became convinced a demonic societal rot threatened the lives of the nation’s children. During the “Satanic Panic,” as it has often been called, parents organized grassroots efforts to enact policies to protect their children from role-playing games and rock music—both suspected sites of satanic activity.

This paper aims to expand our knowledge of the moral panic that emerged in the United States in the late twentieth century through centering race, gender, and childhood. My paper will analyze the strategies of two mothers and grassroots organizers determined to protect children from an external satanic threat–Tipper Gore from the Parent Music Resource Center (PMRC) and Patricia Pulling from Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.).

Prior scholarship has emphasized that this moral panic stemmed from conservative religious activism and anti-feminism. My research aims to expand upon these assumptions to offer new insights on the understated role of race and the notion of “imperiled childhood.”

By emphasizing race and childhood, this paper pushes past the political “backlash” theories and probes how middle-class parents (mostly mothers) formed grassroots organizations to “protect the children.” This paper argues they used their platforms to make intelligent, middle-class boys and sexually pure girls—coded white—the symbols of American childhood at risk. By projecting imperiled childhood as white, Gore and Pulling animated white Americans’ racial fears and stoked fears to whiteness itself, galvanizing people from all political and religious persuasions.