ABSTRACT

It was the “dead day” for Spring Quarter 1988, the day after classes ended and the day before finals began. I was proofing the final that I was to give the next day when the phone rang. It was a local Methodist minister, calling to ask if I would come talk to his church’s youth group about the Satanism at Winnersville High School.1 A bit flustered, my mind caught up in the final I was examining, I asked him to tell me more – what, for instance, had he heard about Satanism at the school? He didn’t know a lot of details, just kids talking. I wondered how he’d come to call me, since I had been on the faculty for barely a year. “The campus public relations office has a list,” he said. “You’re the expert on cults, they told me.” That was news to me (I later learned that my name and expertise in new religious movements had been added by my department head to this list). So we talked for a while and I promised to call him back in a week or so, after I had done some research. A bit puzzled by the conversation, I turned back to my final, only to be interrupted about ten minutes later by the phone. Expecting it to be a worried student, I was surprised to learn that it was an employee at a local bookstore, who was a student in one of my husband’s college classes. The young man said that my husband had mentioned that I studied alternative religions, and he wanted me to know that his store had been selling about thirty copies a month of The Satanic Bible (LaVey 1969) for the last few months. Intrigued, I also wondered at this point if someone might be playing a practical joke on me. Those thoughts vanished, however, when twenty-five minutes later, a second minister called, begging me to talk to his youth group.