ABSTRACT
The contemporary campaign against satanism began gaining force roughly ten years ago. By the late 1980s, warnings about the Satanic menace could be found on television talks shows and the networks' prime-time offerings, and in dozens of books and countless articles in magazines and newspapers. Police officers and social workers could learn about occult or ritual crimes at professional seminars, presentations that described a huge, powerful, secret conspiracy, a blood cult centered around rituals of sexual abuse and human sacrifice. This chapter uses satanism as a convenient example of the limitations of strict constructionism. It shows that strict constructionism places unreasonable constraints on sociologists who hope to understand social problems. The chapter discusses the contents of Ibarra and Kitsuse's chapter "Vernacular Constituents of Moral Discourse," which offers a new reclarification of the authors' thoughts on the constructionist perspective.
