It can be hard to believe, but there really was a time back in the 1980s when people thought that tabletop roleplaying games (amongst other forms of media) were "satanic". Generally that's called the time of the Satanic Panic, but that only prompts further questions. What does it mean to be "satanic", and what's a "panic"? By now there's been a lot written about it. Newspaper articles have been dug up so there are official dates for when the Satanic Panic started, there are names of victims and prosecutors. It's interesting and useful data, but none of it resonates with me because from my perspective there was no Satanic Panic. For me, as a kid growing up in an evangelical household in the USA, the Satanic Panic was everyday life.
As an introverted kid in the 1980s, adults told me that I couldn't play D&D with my friends. It wasn't just D&D, though. I couldn't watch Scooby-Doo, I couldn't play with He-Man action figures, and certainly couldn't listen to rock music. There were a few explicitly stated reasons for these restrictions:
It all makes sense, as long as you believe that in order to be seen as "good" you must not engage in common activities, and that there really is a spiritual entity hunting for good Christians to corrupt. As with many religious cautionary tales, even these assumptions prompt further questions. What does it mean for Satan to "corrupt" a Christian? As a Christian, how do you guard yourself against Satan? What exactly is the nature of spiritual corruption? Why can't the Christian god protect people from this?
This is a timeless debate and it could go on forever and never get resolved. The questions are as easy to deflect as their answers, but it's not the questions Christians feared. What I think they subconsciously reviled the most was the notion to ask questions about the "rules" of faith and the unseen forces that must exist for faith to be of value. When you start worldbuilding for games or fiction, you run the risk of noticing how a rational mind can formulate neat and logical systems. When D&D books defined how gods and faith might work, and how a transactional relationship between an actual god that exists and its followers would look like, I think Christianity and other realworld religions accidentally started looking pretty threadbare. Religion started to look a lot like it had been invented by human brains that did not, and could not, understand how the world actually worked. The creation myth looked a lot like something written by someone with no concept of carbon dating, and strict religious laws sometimes seemed awkwardly arbitrary, as if they'd been invented with no concept that they'd need to last for thousands of years. Logical systems, even though they were fictional, made the "reality" of modern religion look frankly primitive.
That's what people should have been worried about, if they wanted to worry about something. But that's not what they were worried about, and that's the really sad thing about the Satanic Panic. Actually, people weren't afraid of anything specific. They were just irrationally afraid.
We may call it the "Satanic Panic" but insofar as the concept of Satan can't withstand rational thought, few people were actually afraid of a real entity called Satan. They were just afraid, as they still are today, of whatever there is to be afraid of. It doesn't have to be as well-defined as a monster or trap or other threat in D&D, with a proscribed method of defence or a saving throw with a specific attribute. In fact, it's best when it's not well-defined. If you apply too much definition and certainty to it, the fear mostly or entirely goes away.
But that requires work, and focus. It's easier to just be afraid that your child is going to "fall in with the wrong crowd" and start doing bad things. You can think of it as Satanic corruption, or just as bad behaviour, or a little bit of both depending on your mood. If D&D is the gateway to bad behaviour, then D&D may as well be called Satanic, and anyway at the best of times it's certainly not something your kid is doing in Sunday School so it must not be Christian.
It wouldn't have taken that much time or effort for people to sit down with a D&D rulebook and read what it was actually encouraging players to do. As early Tolkien nerds (back before it was cool!) and self-proclaimed Trekkies, my parents were prime targets for a game about adventuring in a fantasy world. But they couldn't be bothered to investigate it to make up their own mind about it, and so they decided it was Satanic, I guess because that's what their evangelical magazines told them. Ironically, they both play D&D today whenever they get the chance. Time heals all wounds, I guess, even the daemonic ones.
My relief from the confusing non-rules of religious aversion to D&D came when I expressed my concerns about the game to my friend Jason, who invited me to play D&D at school during lunch. He was obviously offended that I thought he might be conjuring demons. He said so, sincerely enough that I, for the first time, recognised my own disrespect. I had implicitly accused friends of worshiping demons. I saw these people every day at school. I knew them well enough to sometimes go to their houses after school to play. Wasn't it self-evident that they hadn't been possessed by demons?
Well, yes it was. So I started playing D&D over lunch at school. That's not to say that we really played D&D. We were no more than 11 years old, and we had no idea how the game was supposed to work. But Jason knew how to build characters (or at least he knew how to roll for attributes, because that's mostly what I remember.) So we did that, and then we talked about the characters we'd built, and looked through the monster manual and discussed who would win in a fight.
That didn't last long, because as usual I moved to another state within 2 years. But for a while I'd experienced D&D and I hadn't been possessed by demons or corrupted by Satan, or whatever the fear was.
I was able to move on to Joe Dever's Lone Wolf and Combat Heroes books, and that was for a long time my roleplaying experience. It wasn't Satanic because it wasn't D&D and it didn't involve other kids who could be, after all, a bad influence. They were just books, and no harm could come from those.
Panic on a social scale is obviously still a phenomenon today, and it isn't going anywhere. There are people who don't have the luxury or the inclination to think critically about something, and so as panic spreads through a population they get quickly caught up in it. It's hard not to get caught up in it.
I don't want to sympathise, or even empathise particularly, with the people who panicked about Satanism in the 80s, or people who panic about vaccines or fluoride in the water, or whatever else, today. It causes tension, and it effects relationships and one's own mental health. Even if you don't panic about something, everyone else is, and possibly they'll start to panic that you're not.
I don't think the Satanic Panic was a rational event, and although it seems easy to define in retrospect, it was actually a lot of general fear about, well, whatever there was to be afraid of. I guess the moral of the story is that it's up to each of us as individuals to use our brains, and to tackle the hard job of thinking rationally. It's also up to us, as game enthusiasts, to acknowledge that not everyone has signed up for that quest, and to deal with those people with compassion. Can tabletop RPGs teach people about rationalism and empathy? I think so, actually, although I do think it's a slow process, and it's all too easy to take lessons you learn from a tabletop RPG and relegate them to something you only do at the gaming table. It's easy to be compassionate toward an NPC who needs your help in exchange for XP. It's a lot harder to be unreasonably compassionate to someone in real life.