Power Rangers and the Satanic Panic
When conspiracies come to church
Thunder outside. Thunder inside. My father’s voice reverberated in my body like a thunderclap. Someone had gifted my brother a Power Rangers baseball cap, and my father was about to make an example of it.
He threw the offending hat down on the rough concrete porch. Lightning cracked through the sky and landed on our porch as my father set the hat on fire.
The problem with synthetic materials is that they don’t burn neatly. The fabric scorched and smoked, while the plastic writhed and twisted. Eventually, the hat melted into an undignified puddle as the rain pelted the ground.
The innocent porch bore the scorch marks of my father’s anger for quite a while. Looking back, I can acknowledge the comedy of a kid’s hat that defied my father’s desire for it to burn impressively, but the terror it inspired in my child’s body was no laughing matter.
I mentioned the melting Power Rangers hat to some friends recently and was surprised to find that they also had similar stories from their fundamentalist Christian childhoods. What is up with this penchant for burning “secular” things in conservative Christian circles?
I asked my friend Heather Griffin if she had run across this in her research into charismatic Christianity, and she identified the burning obsession as part of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the paranoia, though we didn’t know it by that name. We’d hear rumors that Disney movies had satanic messages if they were played backwards. Smurfs were demonic because they were…blue?
I started digging and realized that Phil Phillips published The Truth About the Power Rangers in 1995. Were parents in my childhood cult passing around these books?
I’m particularly curious about the way that the Satanic Panic and other conspiracy theories are attractive to people in religious fundamentalist contexts, since we’re in the middle of full-blown conspiracies about Tylenol, vaccines, and autism.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 170 conspiracy studies found that “the strongest correlates of conspiratorial ideation pertained to (a) perceiving danger and threat, (b) relying on intuition and having odd beliefs and experiences, and (c) being antagonistic and acting superior.” In the context of this journal article, “odd beliefs” refer to types of psychological conditions, not the odd belief that pineapple is delicious on pizza.
Heather did a fascinating podcast episode with Jon, a Canadian autistic researcher who hosts Christianity on the Spectrum. While it’s irresponsible for me to offer a diagnosis, a significant amount of my childhood memories do involve traits that fall within typical religious scrupulosity (OCD) and autistic (ASD-1) profiles.
It’s possible that each one of my friends who shared similar “burning experiences” was dealing with neurodivergent parents or church leaders, but I think it’s more likely that religious fundamentalism inculcates its members with a sense of superiority and perceived danger.
This invitation to Detox for the Modern Mom from my childhood pastor’s wife highlights the conspiracy-pushing language:
“We need to be detoxed because the culture around us is constantly bombarding us. Even within Christan circles, if you are online, if you participate in blogs, you have to have such care and such a good foundation in the word of what biblical motherhood is all about, because you need to have your filter up all the time. It’s on the billboards we pass, it’s in the TV shows we might watch, it’s in the songs you hear as you’re strolling through Walmart. There are things that we need to guard against that are impacting our perspective on motherhood.”
When everything outside your church or group is dangerous, conspiracy theories become commonplace. If you’re convinced that you have found The Truth about God, it’s easier to imagine that other people are blind and ignorant. When you’re cruel and people respond with anger, it’s more comforting to tell yourself that you’re being persecuted for the Gospel.
In my experience, the people who are secretly manipulating things behind closed doors aren’t working for Mattel or Big Pharma. It’s the bishops who are quietly calling all their friends to tell them “the real story” about survivors who dare to speak out publicly. It’s not an attack of Satan when people call you out for not reporting child sexual abuse.
Sometimes persecution really does happen. Sometimes you’re just an asshat.
I think of this comic all the time. I marinated in those membership classes during my brief time on staff, and it was basically this.
Oh, I lived through all of that. Power Rangers, Teletubbies, Smurfs, Pokémon, D&D, “Hotel California,” … the list of cultural artifacts and expressions that supposedly led to demonic possession was endless. All while “shepherds” were abusing their flocks.