When the Devil Came to Texas: Satanic Panic and the Making of Modern Conservatism

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, America appeared to be throes of a crisis in which the Devil and his minions seemed to have infiltrated all levels of American society. At the same time, reliably blue Texas was marching steadily to the right and was on its way to becoming the steadfast red state it is today. Was there a connection between Texas’ turn to red and the Satanic Panic? In this dissertation, I argue that the same anxieties stirred up by the Satanic Panic were the same ones the New Right was trying to vanquish. Centering the Devil reveals that there was more at play in the rise of modern conservatism, and that the making of modern conservatism was not a top-down phenomenon; rather, modern conservatism emerged in the ways in which the Satanic Panic was reported on in unorthodox spaces such as rural and college newsrooms, a surfacing often obscured by traditional narratives of both conservatism and the Satanic Panic. By placing the Satanic Panic in the context of an emerging new conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, this dissertation brings to light new connections between Texas, conservatism, and the Devil.