Adolescent Satanism: A Research Note on Exploratory Survey Data

Abstract

This research note presents and sets in context findings from a threewave questionnaire survey of a purposive sample of 1,182 high school sophomores and juniors conducted in a midwestern metropolitan area during 1989-1990. Students 'friends ' reported involvements in Satanic activity are related to other anti- and prosocial behaviors and to the students ' own religious activities and rock music preferences and activities. Purported Satanic involvement is shown to be an extreme form of deviance, most probably connected to other antisocial activities as a legitimation rather than a motivation. No evidence is found for Satanism as an organized movement. Kindled by a Geraldo Rivera television special, "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," broadcast in October of 1988, the attention of a broad sector of the American public became inflamed by the prospect of organized Satanism in its midst. This interest has been maintained in the ensuing years by mass media news coverage of purported Satanic "cults" and Satanically inspired antisocial activities. The purpose of this research note is to explore the incidence with which high school students claim to have had contact through their friends with Satanic activity and how this purported activity relates to other deviant activities and demographic variables. "Satanism" is a label applied to a variety of groups that are diffuse in character, but are said to claim a focus upon worship of and service to that power to whom Christians refer as Satan or the Devil. Of these, Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, founded in 1966, is the most visible to adolescents. LaVey's The Satanic Bible (with its sequel, The Satanic Ritual), published for mass distribution by Avon, a general paperback publisher, serves as a core text for fledgling participants. This may be supplemented by various dictionaries of the occult. It is The Satanic Bible, however, that provides the first critical indicator of the thrust of contemporary Satanic expression, for The Satanic Bible is obviously conceived vis-a-vis the Christian or Holy Bible. The Satanic Bible is not sacred scripture in any traditional sense. It lacks both the historicity and the inspirationist claims of the Old and New Testaments, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad-Gita, or even the Book of Mormon. It is thus conceived as an anti-Bible directly in reference to and with assumptions about the Christian Bible. When we observe young "Satanists" who do go public in high schools, we see them regularly carry The Satanic Bible in the same way as fundamentalist teens carry The Living Bible, pocket testaments, or KJVs, as particular biblical tastes dictate-and as persons from an earlier generation will remember copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Even with the recent collection on The Satanism Scare by Richardson and his colleagues (1991), social scientific literature on Satanism is relatively limited. The major documentary work is Bainbridge's Satan's Power (1978). Because of his